My latest rants and raves
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.
The Run Boy Run website was built around the explicit goals and needs of the band: increase album sales, increase concert attendance, and increase concert bookings. Everything I included on the site was in service to one or more of those core goals. As we continue looking at this project, keep those goals in mind.
In Part I, I introduced the tool and the data. In Part II, I discussed how the tool interacts with the data. Today, I’ll take some time to go through the command line interface for the tool.
In Part I, I wrote about the inspiration for the tool, and walked through transforming free-form data into a more structured form. Today, we’ll work on how our tool will work with the data.
For the last three years, I’ve been touring the country in a van with four other young folks, playing bass on stage at house-shows, festivals, performing arts concerts, and a multitude of small venues. This did not leave me with much time for programming projects. I did build a robust web application to run the band website, but that was mostly software therapy to sooth my brain. Now, I’m no longer spending all that time on the road, and it’s time to update my résumé.
When I started the go-pubsub project, I was in love with Interfaces. I still am, but I found that the design I was coming up with for my package was getting clunky, and difficult to work with.
Actually finishing something is important. It often occurs that a person is either a starter or a finisher. If you are a starter, you pop from one project to the next, spitting out big ideas and often pushing through key proof-of-concept implementations. Then you see something else that needs your brilliant touch, and the project you just started is left incomplete – a testimony to your inability to finish what you start. I don’t understand finishers, as I’m not one of them, and while it seems a good idea to provide for them what I provided for starters, like myself, I have new things to talk about.
Sometimes, you just have to take a leap of faith. I’m setting out on a new season of work. Quitting my day job to pursue music full time, and trying my hand at freelance software work, is a pretty scary but exciting future. That is my future…
