Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Owen's Comprehensive Pinewood Derby Car Speed Strategy
February 19, 2014

It happens every year in cub scouts - the dreaded pinewood derby race.  As a parent with virtually no woodworking experience outside of junior-high wood shop, any competence at making a non-catastrophic - much less competitive - pinewood derby car is non-existent.

Let's get this paragraph out of the way: The race is not by the boys.  This is the reality.  The dads build and race their cars.  No cub scout should be using the power tools that are required to build these cars.  The parts that are left for them to be involved in are sanding, painting, and car design.  Without supervision and direct guidance, the kids will likely hate their results when compared to the cars produced by other kids' dads.

What programming language should I learn?
February 10, 2014
programming language

Hear me out. I'm a UX designer by trade; while not a developer, I do understand software and technology very well. I spend a lot of time testing and tinkering with ideas by trying to hack them together the best I can. My goal is to build a small but real feeling version of my idea to understand and test if there's actually value. I continually hit the wall or spend hours getting caught up on something trivial (I understand this is part of the learning process). Like for most people, time is an issue for me and I'm really looking for something to help me prototype quickly. I consider Ruby and Python too big for that (am I wrong)? What should I focus on, a Javascript framework, just jQuery, something like Haskell, etc.? 

First, it's admirable to want to learn something new.  Programming is a tough discipline to master.  In spite of every startup CEO telling you they themselves coded their launch project, and that you should just learn to code it all yourself, this is not a practical approach.  The statistic we don't have is how many of those startups continue to be a success without having their code re-written by competent programmers.

New Year Self Remodel
January 01, 2014
new year habit

Today is the first day of a new year. In years past, I've set aside the whole concept of resolutions. Resolutions are stupid. To me, it implies that making significant changes in life can only happen one time of the year, as if there's some magic about the new year that allows these changes to effortlessly happen. We all know that's not true. What it might be is more drawing a line in the sand, and saying this day is the day I start, and having some hard line to observe rather than some random date along the way.

The trick with the new year "resolution" (a word that I will no longer use here), is that things like "eating better" and particularly things like "waking up with the alarm" are really hard to do on the day that follows staying up partying to late hours. We've still got guests in our house as I write this, and Berta is off work making pancakes and sausage for breakfast, and I've already slept in until 10am, and it's looking like I've already tread off the path I've set myself for the new year before even locating the trailhead!

Developer Portfolio
December 16, 2013
development design portfolio lament

You see portfolio sites all over the web from web designers showcasing the sites that they've designed.  And now and then you see web developers posting a portfolio including a few sites they've managed the HTML coding for.  But you never see a portfolio of a developer showing the site architecture that they've rocked.

Here's a weird paradox:  I want to showcase the work I've done for clients.  The work I do is primarily writing site-specific code to enable a certain unique feature on a site, or assembling the parts to produce that feature.  But often I can't realistically use a screenshot of the site to characterize that work, since the screenshot is of the graphic design, which is something I had nothing to do with.