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Last time I checked:

CDN: 1, USD: 0.78

Clifford Stoll shoots out some gems like:

When you do something the first time, its science.When you do it the second time, its engineering.When you do it the third time its technology.    

18 minutes for a very well prepared presentation.

Een schip op het strand is een baken in zee.
[A ship on the beach is a lighthouse to the sea.]
- old dutch proverb

Steve Yegge, one of my developer idols, has accomplished quite a feat, demonstrated at Foo Camp; porting Rails over to Javascript. However, this task took him 6 months and 2000 hours, according to John Lam, who created RubyCLR.
His two most recent blog posts, a tad obscure, were about the difficulties he encountered and some of the learnings he obtained from the experience. If you haven’t read Yegge before, his often comical approach makes him a pleasant read, with enough material dating back to the Amazon days to last for a couple of months.

This brings me to ponder on a few things:

I assume Yegge’s development effort is not to grow developer *hrm* appendages but to save other developers time in the future, a noble endeavour. Constructing software of this compexity in this short amount of time does lead me to think it has been rather grueling, and the evidence is in his mysterious tale about magic marshmallows. Should we celebrate the 11 daily hours of sweat Steve + team endured (or enjoyed) or rather despise the heroic effort of a few?

It is perhaps my software engineering formation that shapes my beliefs, but I am not the only one to think there is something to be said on this topic. I do concede that reality might require different courses of action than what is good in theory, however it does make sense that a series of burnouts will not yield any positive consequences; how does decreasing motivation, (perhaps) lowered code quality and increasing reasons for frustration within the organization measure up with a repeatable, more predictable process?

I am not criticizing Yegge or undermining any of his achievements. He remains one of my inspirations. However, as a follow up to his post on agile the Google way, this DOES smell like “bad agile.”

PS: On a side note, this is also another indication that Google is not the Valhalla of software engineers that people make it up to be. The truth is, it is Yet Another Software Company (YASC – I just invented that term, pay me royalties) facing the same, very real problems.

I am back from the cave I’ve been hiding into, it’s been a while. Here’s a list of things that happened when I wasn’t there:

1. its a new year, 2007
2. Sun has GPL’d Java
3. I’m running a MacBookPro from work

Besides that, NOTHING happened in the world! Absolutely nothing, other than stuff like being extremely taken by work and life things. I’ll be posting again though.

For a start, here are some things that are in my RSS reader that kept me very productive at work:

xkcd.com steve yegge paul graham worsethanfailure peter norvig programming.reddit.com

I read some more, but it wouldn’t be good for my career going forward to have more things in my RSS reader mentioned =) my weekly reports would undergo scrutiny!

Did this picture leave you breathless? It certainly did for me. I came accross this amazing photo set by Alberich Mathews over at Flickr. I wish I had more knowledge to appreciate the pictures even better, but as far as I can tell, all the pictures sport incredible lighting and are beautifully composited. Well worth the click.

The world belongs to early risers. We do everything we can to delay sleeping, yet we can’t get enough of it. Yet, sometimes we do manage to get to bed early, but we fail to catch the Z’s because we are so anxious to sleep. Being a recent grad, the unregular sleeping schedules are still fresh in my memory, with the odd eating hours as well as the sleepless nights browsing the internet (“research”).
“Sleep is for the weak”, that’s what some actually believe. Well guys, I think you are very wrong. Not only is sleep very important, but due to our newfangled social and professional obligations (damn Edison and whoever invented the candle) we are also expected to stay awake after dusk and still rise a couple of hours after dawn.

I have found a few excellent articles on the subject of sleep, notably on how to become an early riser, its sequel, possibly how to annihilate sleep anxiety and finally, a wonderful article about everything you always wanted to know about sleep but were afraid to ask. The latter goes into hypothetical evolutionary explanations of our sleeping patterns WRT circadian rhythms, and how to make them fit our societal requirements, all written in a funny, pleasant style.

I do not know what to blame it on; sometimes when bedtime comes i’m “in the zone” while coding away, therefore I push back my sleeping hours, otherwise I’m often reading really interesting articles (notice the “s” after “article”) and want to get through till the end, and yet other times… I’m just losing time doing totally unproductive things (yet so satisfying).

The 3 most useful rules I find to waking up everyday at the same time are as follows (but not limited to):

1. To always get up at the same time. No matter when you go to bed, wake up at the exact same time everyday. That way you’re setting your biological clock to automatically be prepared to wake up at a thus-defined time. (i.e no sleeping in, much to my dismay)
2. If rule #1 is observed, go to bed whenever you feel tired. Let your body determine the amount of sleep you need! If your body is set to wake up at 8:30am everyday, you should be pretty lethargic at around midnight or so. Sometimes, 11 could be too late, especially after a pretty heavy workout!
3. Developing a going-to-bed ritual. Mine entails brushing my teeth and cleaning up the smorgasbord of Firefox open browsers (which sometimes actually leads me to NOT sleep!). This will cue your body to go to bed.

In preparation for my job starting on the 31st, I have put it in myself to wake up early everyday (early for me is 8:30 am!). Ever since monday, I’ve succeeded on waking up at the same time and I’m very proud of it, even though its only 4 days now! I can’t wait to start =)

Here’s a quick description of the game we’re building the engine for:

It will be a 3-D puzzle-platformer but set in a 2-D environment (akin to the New Super Mario Bros.) One of our inspirations was ‘The Lost Vikings’ and although we are not making an identical game, it will involve platforming together with a puzzle element.

The twist to the genre is this: we want to simulate people playing simultaneously with only 1 player.

More in-depth discussions on the concept can be found in the meeting minutes, and our thought process is also documented.

The motivation behind this process is to: have fun making a game, get involved in a cool personal project, have experience developing something other than XXX boring apps, have fun and learning project management skills. In broad words: HAVE FUN & LEARN.

For a more detailed description, please check out our wiki.

I stopped playing games, but now I’m making them! =o)
Your comments are well appreciated.

Dreading the fact that I hadn’t used photoshop in years, I installed the beast. Customizing the interface required some image work… I’m sorry to say, the Gimp doesn’t cut it (or maybe I don’t have enough 5ki11z!), photoshop was a no-brainer. Good job Adobe people, good interface consistency; my (rudimentary) knowledge of Photoshop version 4.0 easily transferred to version 9.0 and soon enough, I was making rounded corners! (for that web 2.0 flavor)

Please check the blog and please send me your comments.
I need to update mine’s too, its too ugly! But heh, its less effort to do it for somebody you love instead.

Enjoy, dad. May your internet presence bring you much joy.

The new buzz word is currently the hot stuff in technology circles. Everybody hears about it, talks about it, but not everybody knows exactly what it is. That’s what I’m talking about when I say its like Che: all the kids wear those T-shirts sold by the gap. Do they have any idea who che is? NO! In a similar fashion, everybody wants to jump in the web 2.0 bandwagon.

O’reilly does a good job explaining what “Web 2.0″ is. Mesh was a conference held Monday & Tuesday, 15 & 16 of May in Toronto. What was it about? Web 2.0, the ripples it promises to cause in society, media, business and more. Why have a conference held when we could all read a damn article on the net and be all happy? Well, the point was meeting the people that are causing the ripples and actually start one too, hence the ‘connect, share, inspire’ tagline.

As per the schedule we had quite a few keynotes, workshops and panels. Most of those were really interesting but in reality, these were all excuses and conversation starters for what would happen in between/after them; in line for lunch, at the little cocktail-party on Monday and particularly at the bar.

There have been many blog posts written about the conference, so I won’t explained what happened there, but I’ll give my take on the meta-information I grasped from there:

1. Elliot Noss, CEO of Tucows, plays World of Warcraft and is actually very funny.
2. Everything you learn, you learn more when there’s alcohol involved.
3. Waiting for food gives you the opportunity to go get drinks, which in turn allows you to learn more.
4. Holy crap, most geeks actually look normal.
5. Shameless plugs work: taking the mic at the proper moment and promoting yourself gets you the desired attention.
6. If you don’t go to the bar afterwards, you might as well have not come… sorta.
7. Where the nice chicks are (Amber was there!), the geeks flock like fat kids to pizza.

The moral of the story is this:

Web 2.0 is nothing new, it is just enabling what we’ve been doing for ages: meeting people and creating connections. It’s all about sharing and having an opinion. Web 2.0 is the virtual re-enactment of Mesh… sort-of:

• Some person says something stupid at the keynote (how does the name pinko sound to you?) and you get the fanboys/nVidiots/trolls/flamers all cussing it up on the way to the food table.

• When nerds see chicks, (by chicks i meant Amber, see above) they go crazy: the panel Amber was hosting seemed to be very rowdy!

All in all, the next time you hear there’s a conference like this, just go. Do whatever, sell your used underwear to a pack of weird japanese, steal off your grandma or pledge to do a speech even if you’re a kiddo, just go and don’t forget to get drunk, you might land your next job.

So, dear readers, all 0 of you, this weblog will contain entries on my ‘professional life’ for lack of a better description.
I am a 24-year old recent graduate from the University of Toronto where I was studying computer science.
In a move akin to growing up, I have decided to turn my back on 15+ years of gaming. It was a hard decision, but my bank account and my resume will be thankful for that. By quitting I mean that I won’t be the hardcore gamer I have been in the past, but a few games here and there never killed anybody!

Anyhow, here’s my first step in the adventure game known as

Real-Life : Grown-Up Edition

P.S.:

My inspiration to blog came from going to the Mesh conference which was by the way an awesome experience.
Mesh was about everything web 2.0 and was an excuse for meeting and drinking with people with roughly the same interests.

More on Mesh later.