Drewidia

For those who don’t know, I’m leaving my job on July 11 to work full time on my own projects before I move to Bloomington August 20 to start grad school.

That’s just a little over a month to get everything done that I want; professionally, academically and extracurricular… ly. I’ve created this Quittin’ list of everything I wanted to accomplish before the move. Each major workthread (professonal, personal and academic) will be completed more or less concurrently.

Major Professional Goals After Quitting

• Get PayOwe Facebook app up and running (3 days)
• Finalize PayOwe and get it beta-ready (6 days not including the Facebook component)
• Get secret Craigslist project completed (4 days)
• Redesign Drewidia (2 days)
• Redesign Inkitecture Blog (1 day)
• Begin iPhone App for PayOwe (4 days)
• Start on secret Flex finance project (8 days)

Major Personal Goals

• Complete a century (100-mile) ride on my bike (daily Chicago trail training, targeting August 19 for all-day ride)
• Give up coffee UPDATED: Okay, realism; drink less coffee. Maybe only on Sunday’s.
• Work out at Quad’s Gym daily (starting July 11)

Major Academic Goals

• Refresh understanding of Flex, Flash (12 days including secret finance project)
• Read required HCI/Informatics books (2 days)

Of all of these, I have the greatest doubt of completing a century on my bike. I’m going to give myself all day to complete the century when I think I’m ready. My friend Dave tells me this is a difficult thing to do less from an endurance reason, but moreso from a logistical reason (tremendous amount of calories and water on the day of). We will see. Indeed, we will see.

I was perusing Brad Gessler’s conden.se blog today when I came across this article – How to Hire a Rails Developer . Lots of swearing aside, Brad brings up an important question that every developer, rails or not, should ask themselves: “Why did you choose Rails?”

Rails is a technology de jour. They all come and go; even Rails will not escape this fate. Be sure to ask your developer, “Why Rails?” In fact, if you are looking for a Rails guy and you’re starting a project from scratch, you should probably also be asking yourself that question!

When you ask your developer this question, don’t accept the answer, “because it is so easy!” or “It makes me more productive!”. Why is it easy? How does it make you more productive?

At Condense, we chose Rails because unlike most of today’s web frameworks, environments and testing are a forethought; not some shit that is tacked on to a framework after it was shipped. This paid off at a TECHCocktail when our internet connection was down and we had to copy our application to an iPod, move it onto another machine, and fire it up.

Without automated tests, we’d just be dead. There is no way in hell we would be able to deploy new features with confidence. For Rails, it was really the thought of the workflow around all of the development that had us at “hello”. Automated tests have proven so important and valuable to us at Condense that we consider them a competitive advantage.

So Why Do I Use Rails?

My answer is much less technical than Brad’s. I don’t really have automated testing or systems environments in mind. I like rails because I can quickly get my ideas to prototype.

Professionally, I work with Java most of the day on highly enterprise-y applications. Java is at the other end of the webapp spectrum when it comes to doing stuff fast. Yes, it can handle the load better and yes, it’s more mature but when it comes to taking an idea sketched on a cocktail napkin and creating a prototype all in the same night Java can’t stand up.

PHP does a good job of bridging the gap between scalability and speed-to-market. There’s an ongoing PHP-is-better-no-Rails-is-better debate going on within the nerd community. One major argument is that the same MVC framework and LISP-like functions Rails uses can be applied to PHP with some simple framework/library modifications. As well, many developers argue they can prototype just as quickly in PHP as Rails.

Glad to hear PHP works well for you, but PHP feels like a chore to me. It takes me time and energy to load in those libraries, make sure the config is set up correctly, test, debug, blah. When I want a new rails app I do this:

 > rails newApp 

What matters to me is getting my from napkin-to-prototype quickly. I have a full-time job (~50 hrs/wk), I travel every week and am expected to also have some semblance of a social life. I don’t have time to mess around with configuration, libraries, JARs and other odds-and-ends involved with more production-worthy languages.

At the heart of it all, I am a business technologist, not a computer scientist. Handling scale is all well and good but it doesn’t mean squat if the project cannot be produced quickly. Rails empowers the business-minded developer with the flexibility to develop, test and deploy web applications without the cognitive friction involved with setup and configuration.

As of late I have been asked the same basic question with a fairly consistent regularity, “What have you been up to?” and “I never see you any more, are you married?” and “Why don’t we have any grandchildren yet?”.

The answer to most of those questions can be answered with PayOwe.com . PayOwe is a way for people to keep track of their everyday, friend-to-friend loans and debts. It works through Twitter, the online social networking site.

How it works: Essentially, you send a message through Twitter with the amount someone owes you and why (“Bob owes me $4 for lunch”). This debt is received by @PayOwe and added to the database. An balance sheet of accumulated debts can then be viewed/managed through PayOwe.com. If the person who owes you also uses Twitter, it will show up on their balance sheet as well (pending their approval). This allows both parties to control the state of the debt which I guess makes PayOwe a social networking site.

PayOwe is the first offering from Inkitecture , which is Jay, Kunal and myself. Jay came up with the original idea for PayOwe and it’s underlying architecture to be based off of Twitter and Jabber messaging. We’ve found Twitter + Jabber messaging to be an excellent means of sending/receiving messages.

The site is in it’s alpha phase right now, and we’d greatly appreciate any feedback on the site. Please check it out and let us know what you think -> info at payowe dot calm.

For your reading pleasure; Patrick Kroupa's opus "Voices in My Head - MindVox: The Overture".

No one has been able to condense the 20-some years of early hackerdom like Kroupa (Lord Digital). He and Bruce Fancher created MindVox, one of the first and best ISP's in NYC circa 1992-96. 'Voices' acted as a press release of sorts catapulting MindVox into the mainstream consciousness.

I've read this thing more times than I can count. Granted I never learned to count past 29 (base-10) or 11011 (base-2), but it holds a special place in my heart. It's a stubbornly real account of the cyber landscape of the 80's and 90's, those involved, and their reasons for being involved.

My favorite part:

       Of course one of the problems with "standing on the edge" of any-
       thing,  is  the  trail that led up to it.  You are there for some
       reason, or usually a very complex series of  reasons,  that  have
       shaped  your  life up until that point in time, and caused you to
       become disenchanted with -- or feel limited by -- whatever situa-
       tion  you  are  locked into in the consensual reality that we all
       physically inhabit at present.  In other words, the "real  world"
       isn't making you happy, and you want outta there.

       Led by a an oddball contingent of misfits,  dropouts,  acidheads,
       phreaks,  hackers,  hippies, scientists, students, guys who could
       say "do0d, got any new wares?" with a straight  face  and  really
       mean  it -- and quite often -- people who managed to combine many
       of these attributes; the 1980's saw the rise of the first empires
       and kingdoms of Cyberspace.

       As romantic and wonderful as this seems, and was . . . a  lot  of
       the people involved had been brutalized by life, and much of this
       new reality was borne out of a tidal wave of pain  and  dissatis-
       faction.  When I first became an active participant in this elec-
       tronic nervous system that was just beginning to  experience  its
       awakening;  I  was  a little over ten years old.  My early under-
       standings of what this "place" was, were shaped by a  handful  of
       people  whose  skills  I admired and sought to emulate, yet whose
       lives I felt great pity and sadness for.

Alright, so I see some point(s) to second life:

1. The ability to create a virtual world, mostly in an architectural form, that others can explore
2. The ability to chat with like-minded individuals in said virtual worlds
3. A medium to inexpensively market to a captive audience

The first point is a fair one. The user is empowered with the flexibility to create buildings, vehicles, clothing and accessories of all shapes and sizes. Character customization offers a great deal independence in comparison to other life-simulators like The Sims. But let’s be real, here: it’s essentially playing with Barbies in a more flexible and ‘adult’ way.

The second point is what irks me a bit. From a social networking perspective, SecondLife is essentially a scaled-down version of IRC. In SecondLife, one can ‘Teleport’ to different ‘Places’ (essentially islands) pertaining to a particular theme or interest (e.g., “I teleported to Goth Island because I love Joy Division”). In IRC, one can ‘Join’ different ‘Channels’ (chat rooms) pertaining to a particular theme or interest (e.g., “I joined the Ubuntu Linux channel because I luuuv Linux”).

The chatroom dynamic is where SecondLife falls short. A user can only be in one place (chatroom) at a time. The user can only chat with people near them. While the user is chatting, they can pretty much just stand there and stair like a crash dummies or perform one of many predefined actions, like goofy dancing or whistling. The problem is that SecondLife attempts to simulate real world human interaction, but fails in the actual interaction portion. Real people use voice inflections and body language to communicate. Granted, real-time voice communication is limited by internet speed, but this is still a major hurdle.

The third point is, well, undeniable. And if you enjoyed the movie I, Robot, then maybe SecondLife is for you.

I bought HCIBlog.com a week ago on a whim for $10 American ($9 Canadian). It’s turning out to be a bigger responsibility then I had thought. Anytime I tell someone someone in-the-know I bought the domain they explode with ideas on what to do with the site.

Not that this is a bad thing, it just puts me in a rather awkward position as now I have to do something with it. Originally I was going to make this my blog during Graduate school,but now I don’t know what to do with it long-term.

For the unintroduced, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is just that; the study and practice of humans and computer-based systems interacting. The promise of HCI is to reduce so called ‘cognitive friction’ or the complexity encountered when a human meets a complex system for the first time. Simple = good, difficult = bad.

Right now HCIBlog.com points to GoDaddy spam. Jay Zeschin suggests that short-term I should put the Google RSS filtering for HCI-related stuff, which is a solid idea and I should probably have spent less time writing this article and more time going on that. Others have suggested making money on it through similar news/RSS aggregating. One person wanted to buy it for $100.

I think I’ll do a temporary RSS feed for now. You win again, Jay.

Create a playlist, have others contribute to it, and listen to full-length tracks for free. Boomshuffle is offering something unique to the Web 2.0 experience.

Sites everywhere seem to be throwing their hat into the social networking-y-web2.0-ish ring. Where Boomshuffle excels this by making music the differentiating factor rather than relying on niche social margins.

QED: A few weeks back I started a playlist, Punk the Right Way, and a few days later someone had added two additional tracks they thought would fit the mix. They were good tracks. Awesome.

It looks like their trying to make money through full album sales. I honestly don’t know how much I’d be inclined to buy music through their site. Then again I’m probably not their target audience.

Anyhoo, it’s worth a look.