kicking the no-habits habit
My ability to get a technical blog going has been hampered by my inability to stick to any habit lately; it’s something that I’m working on, but I think the trickiest thing is identifying the habit I want to train myself into that’s the biggest priority (the queue is about 20+ “new habits to adopt” long). Try to do too many at once and you’re doomed to fail.
Tumult in my work and personal life has of course added to my inability to focus technically. In particular, I haven’t been doing a lot of coding since I last posted (in May). Instead, I’ve been doing a lot of internationalization work on a very nuts-and-bolts level; climbing full-bore into the creepy abyss that is the overlap between sys work and developer work; taking on the interpersonal drama that is characteristic to any developing job but rarely makes its way into the job description.
I’d like to say I have some interesting insights on internationalization work or on adapting a git-based deploy infrastructure to a multi-system scale, but as I’m still mucking about I don’t think my thoughts are all there.
I’ve hardly written code in the last few months, let alone this year at all, which probably has a lot to do with my enthusiasm for tech being so unfocused. I finally had the opportunity to crack into some Perl code this weekend, which - it being Perl - only reminded me of how quickly my mood can plummet from 100 to zero looking at the stuff. I’d like to overcome the gag reflex, though, so I’ve tried to persist - currently reading the “Symbol Tables and Typeglobs” entry in Mastering Perl, and digging around a bit in Perl Design Patterns.
Right now, my biggest issue with using object-oriented design patterns in Perl is how ugly the implementation is in comparison to other OO languages (it doesn’t help that Perl is an OO language as an add-on). I’m finding that grasping these concepts requires digging into additional advanced concepts that can be really daunting. I understand that the point of design patterns is for code readability / maintainability, but if advanced Perl mastery is required to make sense of code that uses these patterns, then only those initiated to such practices will actually find the code readable. At work, only a small portion of our code base uses some of these concepts, so my hope is to augment this code with comments directing our developers to the documentation where these concepts are covered. In a world where we all have pre-existing advanced knowledge, leaving notes like “the concept being used here is x” is probably redundant, but that seems to be unrealistic. Finding a happy medium between elegant code and clues for those who don’t yet grasp the voodoo seems to be an important, albeit tricky, step.
Socially, recently, the big tech community events have been:
- Open Source Bridge in June - met and interacted with tech friends old and new; delighted myself by discovering that I actually found a lot of the tech talks super interesting, not just the social ones (until now, I don’t think I had enough of a technical foundation in industry to take on a new topic out of the blue). I also happened to meet our newest dev hire at work for OS Bridge, and so it’s been beneficial on a workplace level too.
- I presented at Code N Splode for the first time in August - on puzzles, coding competitions, and puzzle hunting - the edges of the geek world that have drawn me more than free-time coding projects (although I’d like to do more of those).
- I competed with three other local programmers (Maria, Reid, and Igal) in the Playdash event, a puzzle hunt put on by now-local puzzlehunting aficionados Team Snout. Looking forward to seeing Portland become a puzzlehunting city.
Now that I feel like I’ve caught up a bit - hopefully I’ll try to get back into the habit by throwing out some small bits and pieces - in particular, “RTing” things that I’ve found interesting on other tech blogs, on the days I happen to stumble upon them.
In the meantime, I have unpublished my long rambling post from post-barcamp, mostly because I was embarassed at how long and rambling it was. I am aiming to be more like the fantastic female tech bloggers I get to see online every day, and they’re pretty good with saying it right concisely.