The Code Dump

I finished my army service (in the Israel Defence Force) 6 months ago. Before anyone gets carried away, let me assure you my service had no Rambo-like scenes involved, but simply required me to do what I always do – code.

But, it being an army and everything, everyone is required to do some “army” stuff every once in a while. One of those is at the heart of this post. About once a year, you’d get positioned in some far, remote and tiny base/settlement. During those weeks you are required to guard different posts, or patrol around the perimiter of the area.

Let me paint you the picture a little clearer. How would you like having to leave your life, in order to spend a week (or two) in a place that can be only regarded as ‘nowhere’, and spend 10 hours a day doing nothing but looking at some desert mountains? Now, imagine you know no one of the other few that are with you, the room is a dump, and you don’t even want to hear about the showers? Oh, it gets better. At night the temprature can drop so much, that checking your weapon before going to sleep is just painful, and requires you to jiggle your fingers for 5 minutes before you get enough dexterity to actually do it?

The view from nowhere

The real deal, though, is that I find myself missing those weeks, a bit at least. Why would a geek think about a week with no keyboard, and actually just about zero contact with the outside world given that cell reception is scarse, and miss it? Well, that’s just the point!

First of all, as any good geek, I stack a lot of books on my To Read List. Those weeks were where I did my most productive reading. I averaged a book a day, which required me to get an extra bag just for those. Can a week be really bad if you go to read all of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, The Return of the King and more?

But that’s just a bonus, I read a lot either way. The main thing is that you just get time off that you don’t consider to be your free time / vacation. I’ll explain. When you use your few vacation days, you use them wisely. You take your spouse abroad and enjoy the world’s wonders. Any part of a day off I just lay around feels like a waste to me, which doesn’t let me just use the days off to relax.

The problem is, that coders need time to zoom-out sometimes, in order to get new ideas. It was said before that if you’re stuck with a problem, you might get the insight by simply leaving your desk for a few minutes. But those insights are short-sighted. As you sling code, week after week, you get coder’s myopia. Every time I was sent away, I came back with a few ideas to make things better, or do things in a more productive way. It’s just amazing how simply stepping back for a week can help you realize problems you haven’t been able to grasp for months.

Now, unsurprisingly, the vacation days you use never seem to have the same effect. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting you find your solitude in some desert with no cell reception (unless that’s your cup of tea). I think employers will gain by making sure they’re employees have 4 weeks of vacation a year, so that spending 2 days playing video games won’t feel like a waste. I think sending teams together on a trip for a few days won’t be as good as sending them to a conference where they will see new people and new opinions and ideas. The key here is not just the change of scenery, but also simply experiencing something different.

Try to find a chance to zoom out and unwind, I bet it will do good to you and your team.

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After a few years of working in the field, I’ve come to a conclusion: one of the best ways to evolve as a hacker is to work with other hackers. Not just that, I’d rather work alone than work with non-hackers. Wait, I can almost see you reaching to close this tab, mumbling to yourself this is nonsense. I’m not saying workplaces shouldn’t hire junior developers .I’m saying that working with people that don’t have Hacker Quality™ is frustrating.

In my previous work place, about 90% of developers were ‘home brewed’. That means 90% of developers are kids that performed well enough on analytical exams to be put to a 4-month course and study basic programming concepts, and just enough Java to become certified code monkeys. Some, those with hacker quality, keep learning and become real stars after a couple of years. The majority remain grunts that never grow to consider their work as a craft.

My experience with working with them is that the hackers make working so much more fun. You’ve got people to bounce ideas off, learn new things from, debate about tabs and spaces. The rest make work a nightmare, and made me want to get back to my high-school way of coding (all night long, alone in the dark, with some Iron Maiden).

Being fed up with this, when I started working in a new place recently, I made a decision to try and surround myself with fellow hackers. First of all, you should start with the actual selection of a work place. Given my case (which was that I wasn’t going to start anything up by myself), I interviewed in lots of places, and chose the place that seemed to have the best and most hackers in, judging from the people I’ve interacted with in the interview process, and knowing some people from the company.

Just getting to a good work place isn’t enough, because I’ve yet to hear about a place that is 100% hacker driven (other than start ups with 5 people). You should always try and work with the better guys around. Seems like interesting projects tend to gravitate towards hackers, wherever they are. Even if the better guys aren’t working with you on your current project, grab a coffee with them. Some chatting on whatever is going on with other hackers always makes you see things differently.

Given that you usually can’t get rid of the less-competent guys (legally), your only next chance in increasing Hacker-to-Coder ratio is bringing in more hackers. If you know of any good hackers that might be in search of a job, get them an interview. Usually, that’s all it will take to get them in. Also, try and take an active part in the interviewing process. That will allow you to influence the type of people that you’ll work with, and maybe raise the bar a little bit.

I really think that investing energy in the peopleware of the workplace accounts for 80% of the evolving of coders there. And, given that we coders rarely see daylight and spend most of the time at work, that’s the lion’s share of learning opportunities you’ll have. Maybe it sounds odd to put all this effort in a place that isn’t yours, but does it really matter who’s the founder? You’re there, and better make the best of the experience.

All that leaves in the workplace is making sure your team encourages learning, experimenting and sharing (maybe I’ll cover it in another post sometime).

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This little excerpt from the bash man page explains the reason I just wasted 2 hours:

Note that the order of redirections is significant.  For example, the command
ls > dirlist 2>&1
directs both standard output and standard error to the file dirlist, while the command
ls 2>&1 > dirlist
directs only the standard output to file dirlist, because the standard error was duplicated as standard output before the standard output was redirected to dirlist.

This is a short tip post. If you were ever frustrated with the fact that OpenOffice documents with equations don’t show up properly when converted to MS-Word documents you’re gonna love this!

It’s a known problem that converted equations need to be “double clicked” in Word for it to re-render them and show up properly. Turns out someone has posted a great macro here that simply does that automatically for you and saves the need to go through the whole document manually (if you don’t remember how to set up a macro, like me, there are nice instructions here).

After playing around a bit with my new Arduino, I’ve gathered a list of a few things that I wish I knew when I started, as it would have saved some of my time. Hope it helps someone. Happy hacking!

There’s a builtin LED
This one I didn’t get right away. There’s a reason most of the examples in the tutorial sections refer to LEDs on pin 13 – there’s a small LED on the Duemilanove that’s already connected to that pin. It shines in orange (just like the TX/RX LEDs) if you write to that pin, but, of course, one can connect something else to that pin to use it.

That little button is the RESET button
This one might just be me being an idiot. I thought that little push button was a general purpose one. Well it’s not. It’s a reset button – whenever it gets pressed it resets the sketch running to the start. Boy, did I spend a lot of time pressing it and trying to debug my code til I figured it out…

There are builtin “software” pull-up resistors
Once you get you should connect a push-button, you might notice that every tutorial says you should use a pull-up resistor. Well, it turns out you can simply use a software one on the Arduino, and there’s no need to conenct one. After setting up the push-button pin as input:

pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);

Simply tell the Arduino you need a pull-up resistor connected to it:

digitalWrite(buttonPin, HIGH);

For more information, read here.

The “Serial” library doesn’t really require a serial connection
Even though Duemilanoves and other new Arduino-boards only have a USB connection, it turns out that the Serial library can still be used. Whatever you write using it shows up in the Serial Monitor in the development IDE and you can send data to the Arduino using it too!

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I ordered an Arduino Duemilanove a few months ago, and other than simply testing it to see that it starts up I haven’t touched it. It’s been lying on my desk, making me feel guilty every time I saw it.

Today, having a few spare hours and because I just finished reading “Programming Embedded Systems”, I decided it was time to finally do something with it.

I spent ~3 hours soldering the Proto-Shield that came with it. It was the first time I ever did any soldering and I think it turned out OK, after some help from Dad.

Then, I made a simple ‘Hello, World’ application that changes LEDs according to a button press. What can I say, the amount of satisfaction from such a simple thing is so big! Maybe, it has to do with the fact that as a software developer, I rarely do things that have a physical effect.

Original Video – More videos at TinyPic

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