Archive for the 'Technology' Category

30
Sep

Programming: write it down (again)

1 Comment Categories: Programming, Technology and protip

Last day of last month, I talked about the importance of writing down your questions when you’re programming. Last day of this month, similar post - now, it’s about writing down your algorithms when you’re programming.

Since college (when I would “program” by the light of a desk lamp at the top of a bunk bed - pre-laptop), whenever I have a reasonably complex piece of logic to work through, I always start with a piece of paper and pencil, and I sketch out the entire algorithm in pseudo-pseudocode - basic structures, algorithms, control flow. (It’s like being at the board for an interview, but nobody’s watching.)

Why do this? In order of importance:

  • You can focus on the problem. When you’re writing real code, you’re focusing on a lot of things - the logic, but also the syntax and markup, the object-method structures, the tabs, the comments, the format. Each of those things takes some thought, and each moment causes a mental task switch from solving the real problem. (Maybe you’re both so talented and so experienced in a particular language and IDE that none of those things actually require any thought - you’re as fluent as you are in your native tongue. But I’m not, and you’re probably not either.)
  • It’s much faster. You might type faster than you write when taking notes, but nothing’s faster than writing fake code on a piece of paper, drawing arrows and braces to mark sections, using carets to insert content, etc. You aren’t worrying about any of the things above: you will find the problems in your thinking much, much more quickly.
  • You can do it anywhere. On the bus, by the bed lamp, when you’re pretending to make art with your three-year-old. You can think about the algorithm in between things and record your notes, rather than waiting for the moment you’re sitting down. Paper & pen are still more accessible and portable than the MacBook Pro.

Highly recommended approach. Let me know if this or similar things work for you!

26
Sep

Vaporbase micro-CMS: Performance Improvement

0 Comments Categories: Programming, Rails and Technology

(Warning: code talk ahead.)

When I started building the app I’m working on, I needed a quick CMS system that didn’t impose its own parsing language, and I was just learning RoR, so I implemented the Vaporbase micro-CMS based on this great tutorial. While you wouldn’t confuse this with a pro-grade CMS system, it works just fine for the most part, and doesn’t require you to learn a number of new things.

Since implementing it, I’d made a few minor cleanups, but nothing significant, until I had 60 pages in the CMS, and saw a problem: the list of pages was taking a very long time to load (21sec on avg on my dev machine).

Sure enough, there’s a problem: in the Edit and Show Tree Hierarchy section, here’s a line that says

<% unless index_item.children.nil? %>

Looks innocuous, right? Not exactly: for every single page in the tree, this does a separate SQL query (which is a full table scan, though likely on a tiny table) to find out if that item has any children. So creating the page is O(# pages in table), and while the queries itself aren’t that expensive, building the page just takes a while. If your tree is mostly flat - almost certainly the case for this kind of CMS - you’re wasting a lot of time.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution: when you get the list of pages before creating the tree, figure out which pages have children, and then store that list to the side. It adds a bit of code, but not a lot.

# Original: from the index action in the controller
# This gets just the root nodes and then recurs down the tree
@pages = Page.find( :all, :conditions => ['parent_id IS NULL'], :order => :position)
# Replacement:
# build two arrays -
# @pages consists of all of the root nodes (since the view walks down the tree)
# @pageIDs_with_children consists of all pageIDs which are the parent for >=1 page

@pages = []
@pageIDs_with_children = []

@all_pages = Page.find(:all)
@all_pages.each do |page|
if (page.parent_id.nil?)
@pages << page
else
@pageIDs_with_children << page.parent_id
end

(Note that the list might have duplicates, but that doesn’t matter. If that makes you unhappy, check for existence in the else clause.)
Then replace the view line above with

<% if @pageIDs_with_children.index(index_item.id) %>

I saw a >80X performance improvement on this page with this change in development (from >20sec to ~0.25sec with 60 pages), and you’ve just replaced an expensive linear scaling step with a very inexpensive one.

22
Sep

Search Evernote, not Google

0 Comments Categories: Evernote, Programming and Technology

I’ve played with 100 note-taking/history-recording tools over the years, and none of them have ever really taken off for me. I started playing with Evernote soon after the beta began, and while I loved the interface and the story, my uses were very occasional.

Now, however, I’m constantly in Evernote - it’s third only to my browser and Textmate - as I’m coding. 

Why? I’m using it as a programming information repository. Every day that I program in Ruby on Rails, I learn a few new things or change the way I do things - today, for example, I learned that interpolation is faster than concatenation, and yesterday I finally found a clear explanation on how yields work. What I do now is every time I find an interesting piece of information, I clip the whole page to Evernote, add a few tags, and then keep on going. Occasionally I’ll paste screenshots from the PDFs of some books I own as well, which then (usually) get magically transcribed for me.

I’ve realized that I was using Google to search for the same information over and over again, and then trying to remember which link I liked the best. With Evernote, I’ve already recorded that memory, so I just have one source. Every day a greater percentage of my programming-related searching is happening in Evernote.

I’ve thought about making a separate notebook for my Rails/Ruby content and making it public - if I do so, I’ll post it here - though obviously it’s not a replacement for an actual text, it just has pointers to things I’ve cared about. However, if a dozen people did this, I’d love to have links to all of their notebooks.

13
Sep

On Apple, Amazon, Reviewing, and Large Companies

0 Comments Categories: Amazon, Apple and Technology

Two interesting stories going around in the last week, which I find to be similar (even if their impact is different): Apple’s being raked over the coals for rejecting an iPhone app that duplicates Apple functionality, and Amazon’s been dealing with the customer review attack on Spore, including purging and then restoring all of the reviews.

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to manage the Amazon customer reviews business, and so I know very well what the current team is going through. My assumption is that the Apple app store review business has some similar processes and problems. Here are some things I learned while dealing with this:

You start with some philosophical rules, and you try to make them stick. Providing guidelines is the only way to start. Example philosophies for Amazon (made-up, these aren’t real, don’t quote them anywhere else) could include “our customer is the Amazon buyer” (so no, Ms. Vendor, we won’t take down the negative reviews of your book, even though you spend a lot of money on advertising with us), “we eliminate reviews with demonstrably false information”, and “fairness is more important than justice” (so if you generally write good reviews and then get caught plagiarizing once, you can be given more chances). 

All sensible on face and all make sense to folks who think in these kinds of abstractions all day - there may still be debate but these are good places to start. 

There’s a clear chain of command for decisions. The escalation path from “customer service rep in her fourth week receives a review complaint in the mail queue” to “Jeff decides the review stays” should be very clear. (In my ~2 years dealing with customer reviews, btw, Jeff only engaged once on actual content, and the issue was much larger than just reviews (and he was getting hundreds of mails on this topic) - he generally trusted the heads of these teams to do the right thing as long as they could articulate the philosophy.)

All of this sounds good, of course, but then people get involved. And customer service reps are trying to interpret the philosophies (if they can find them among hundreds of pages of other rules), and some of them are judgment calls (what is “demonstrably false?” If I say “the defibrillator didn’t work and my dad died,” is someone going to check? are comments on voting records trustworthy? etc.) that different people will make, and of course you don’t want Jeff or Steve Jobs or anyone making every decision.

So it’s messy, and when it’s messy, strange things happen - reviews appear and disappear, apps go away and come back (like Netshare), etc. 

This is a long way of saying that it’s entirely likely that the banning of Podcaster is a problem of human judgment in a theoretically well-structured system - not least because the decision seems inconsistent - and that could easily come back, not because of a correction of a philosophy, but because of a correction of a human error.

Now, it’s Apple’s responsibility to make that correction, and then to treat the errant employee with respect and look at how the company can do a better job. 

 

31
Aug

Programming: When you’re stuck, write it down

1 Comment Categories: Programming, Technology and protip

Hey. Long time, no blog. Been busy.

Thought I’d share a tip that I’ve used for many years when programming (or learning almost any new thing) and I’ve been using recently: when you’re stuck, write it down.

Say you’re trying to figure out how to do something in [pick a framework], and you’ve Googled the heck out of the most-likely search terms, and nothing’s coming up.

Then write down your question as if you were going to ask a teacher/email it to a friend/post to a Google group/etc. Write down all the details: explain the thing you’re trying to do, the problem you have, and the number of things you’ve tried. Be as clear as you can, but don’t worry about being concise.

Literally every single time I’ve ever done this - and my rule-of-thumb is to do it after ~1.5 days worth of trying to figure it out myself - I find a number of new avenues to try, and almost always solve the problem on my own.

Writing it down forces you to take the jumbled thoughts in your head (they probably weren’t jumbled when you started, but you’ve changed paths so many times now) and turn them into a narrative. The process makes visible paths that your random walk opened up but that you didn’t see.

(This has been a procrastination for completing a writeup of my own.)

01
Jul

Not-at-all-fun things to do with Twitter

1 Comment Categories: Technology and Twitter

Every once in a while I hit another breathless article about all the cool things you can do with Twitter. Most of them involve either following things I don’t actually care about or submitting obscure numbers for reasons unknown.

So here’s the start of a list of things that might seem less fun.

  • Get your stuff stolen. When I get into burglary, I’ll start with Twitter. Hey, Ian’s at a play! That’s plenty of time to take his MacBook and mardi gras beads.
  • Get spammed. OK, The Onion stopped, but still, it’s like double opt-in to friendly spam.
  • Be fooled by a fake celebrity. Ira Glass? Fake Ira Glass, currently dealing in non-sequiturs. (Some were likely devastated.)
  • Keep up with dictators.
    what are you doing?

    (Sadly, I believe Twitter has started blocking the creation of other dictator’s names: Pol Pot & Robert Mugabe were “unavailable” but have no pages. Probably that’s a good thing.)
  • Wait for pages to load. You already knew that one, but I was Internetally obligated to include it. Sorry, I don’t make the law.

Anything else to add?

30
Jun

Starting a Seattle CTO Support Group

0 Comments Categories: Seattle and Technology

I’ve been thinking for a while about trying to put together a Seattle “CTO Support Group” and have mentioned this to a few folks, and I’m finally kicking this off. I posted basically this message to the Seattle Tech Startups mailing list this past Friday, but I’m not sure who that hits and misses. I’ve had ~20 people express interest so far.

Opening thoughts:

  • Attendees are CTOs (or whatever title denotes “head of technology” - software and ops) at local companies/govts/etc. Starting point is that this is one person in a company, feel free to tell me that this doesn’t make sense for your organization, but the goal isn’t a replacement for other tech gatherings with more open invites.
  • Figure the makeup of the group will determine the balance between small/medium/large companies, private v. public, funded v. bootstrapped, etc. Early folks have been primarily (but not entirely) small startups.
  • Would have regular get-togethers - breakfast? lunch? - hosted by some company, ideally in a regular location (prob. in downtown Seattle or Pioneer Square) or in a rotating location.
  • Get-togethers would be 70% mingling, 30% presentation (probably from someone in the group) on an interesting topic - could be technical, could be managerial, could be look-at-the-industry. Assumption is that the content and topics are meant for hands-on leaders and are real-world, not stuff we’d read in a Gartner report if we read them anymore. Obviously interactive.
  • Assumption is that everything is under FrieNDA.

If you fit the description and would be interested enough to attend regularly, let me know (and if you have a preference b/w breakfast or lunch, or another bright idea, let me know that as well). There’s an “Email Me” link in the sidebar of scottru.com. I’ll likely host the first one in the next N weeks at WhitePages HQ in downtown Seattle (and probably could host regularly, we have a good space depending on size).

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