Fighting against toil, busywork, and mindlessness.
Saying you are a lazy engineer might seem like a bad idea – after all, we recognize laziness as a vice, not a virtue. But for me, laziness is the fight against toil, busywork, and mindlessness. Being the right kind of lazy means finding ways to eliminate the work that my clients hate, so they can spend more time and energy on the work that they love. Sometimes the solution is technical; often it is human. I can help you find that solution for the work you hate. With a BS in Electrical Engineering and years of development experience, I'm prepared to take on the work you hate. After all, that's the work I love.
Before setting out on the road, I had a salaried position developing sites for destination marketing organizations. Most of my work was on the back-end, but I was often called in to tackle some of the more interesting front-end issues.
There are currently two small projects in progress: simple tools that address problems I have experienced recently, and anticipate experiencing again in the future.
I built this application for the band that was my primary occupation for a few years. Because I had near-total freedom, the Run Boy Run website became a testbed for my approach to web development.
A couple weeks ago, I had the chance to take the simple portfolio-images tool I quickly built on Friday, and improve it. As I mentioned at the end of Portfolio Image Pipelines, I updated the command to utilize concurrent pipelines. It was a good exercise to rewrite the main loop to utilize pools of workers completing tasks concurrently.
This week has been focused on porting my old personal website from Jekyll to Hugo. I was hoping there would be good fodder for a blog post in that, but it turns out that the conversion is pretty boring. Hugo is a lot like what Jekyll is slowly trying to become. There are a few things that I miss from Jekyll, like the asset pipeline, but that always felt a little bit tacked on. There are a lot of things in Jekyll that feel tacked on (I write on this blog powered by Jekyll).
There is a book that every creative professional or manager of creative professionals must read: Peopleware. DeMarco and Lister make a strong case for people being more important than process or technology. In Chapter 10, Brain Time and Body Time, the authors recounted an experience with a client company where they began to measure uninterrupted work time. At some point, the engineers began to display red bandannas on their desks to indicate that now might not be a good time to interrupt their work. Fast Status is like a digital red bandanna.
