ben lowery



Playing with WordPress for Android 2.

Great writeup by Bob Borson on building a shower that won’t leak.

Update: Decided I didn’t like the narrow look. Back to the old design.

Trying out a new site design, much narrower than my old design. It’s only about half done, but I had enough to push forward with it.

The main motivation was narrowing down the text column, which should make it easier to read. I might try jumping the font size up to something slightly silly for body text, like 16pt, just so its easier to have big images. That’s the only thing I really do not like about the current iteration, images have gotten too small, as well as videos.

I’d like to let them overflow the text column, but I can’t find a way to do that with CSS. A negative left margin of 50% does not line up quite right.

I’ve been slinging code for a long time now. I had my first gig for pay back in 1996 and with a couple small exceptions, I’ve been telling computers what to do since. But for the past year or so, I’ve been a rookie all over again.

November before last, the company I worked for merged with another. After a few months, my baby turned into a proper application and got pushed out the door.

I moved on, getting a new project in a language and toolkit I hadn’t used since college, on top of a database system I’d never used in anger. Similar to what I’d used in the past? Sure, but the devil is in the details. Knowing your way around a system is a big part of what separates the efficient programmer from the rookie.

I was a rookie again.

Now, I’ve done this a few times, and I think most programmers who’ve been around for a while have too. Times change, frameworks come and go; you either learn and adapt or your spend the rest of your days maintaining someone else’s legacy. Thankfully no one has really come up with anything new in computing since the 1960s, so all the different systems are built on similar bones. I find the learning curve for each new system is a little shallower than the one that came before, though some jumps are harder than others. Learning good JavaScript was mind bending, as were C++ templates.

Being a rookie again is frustrating; I feel like I’m moving in molasses. Tasks that should take an hour end up taking a day. I find that this is rarely because of a lack of understanding with the language, but instead a lack of experience with the tooling and frameworks used to build a proper application. Every programming environment has a language at it’s core, but the truly distinguishing features are the frameworks and tools around the language that let you create useful applications.

When I’m a rookie, I want to become proficient as fast as I can. To that end, I always try to find a guide or a mentor, someone already proficient in the thing I’m learning. A good guide will help you to efficiently use what the framework provides and steer you around the potholes and pits of certain death. Have them review your code and your architecture, as often as possible. Make sure they know you’re treating them as a mentor, otherwise they might get a bit annoyed with the constant review.

I also write down what I’m learning. Just quick notes in a notebook is plenty, or I’ll keep a blog. Writing things down helps me to remember what I learned. Something about forcing the knowledge out of my head and out onto the page helps me internalize the lesson. Things I write down, I remember for years. Things I don’t I seem to quickly forgot.

Next, I try to teach what I just learned to someone else. Teaching is the best way to make sure you fully understand something. To teach, you have to really wrap your head around a thing, so much that you can explain it in words and pictures to something else.

If I keep that up, I find I’m out of rookie land pretty quickly.

Lucky me. I entered a drawing back when the Google TV was announced and found out last week that I’d won! This afternoon, a shiny new Logitech Revue (with Google TV) arrived on my doorstep. After the ChromeOS netbook that showed up last week, I’m suddenly on Google’s good side.

Impressions so far on the Revue:

• Unboxing, my initial thought was “chincy.” The keyboard is neat, but looks a bit like a kid’s toy to me. However, it’s pretty nice to type on, sturdy in use, and I’m really growing to like it.
• I don’t have home TV service, at all. No cable, no OTA HDTV. Everything I’m watching is off Netflix, so no real review of how it handles your cable box.
• Setup was pretty easy, if a bit … complicated. With my Apple TV, I plugged it in, gave it a wireless password and I was done. With this I plugged it in, gave it a wireless password, told it the model number of my TV, which I had to pull off the wall to find (ugh), waited for it to install an update, rebooted twice, went through a crazy screen tuning exercise, and then got a nice intro movie telling me how awesome the device is.
• Vs either my Apple TV or my XBOX 360, having a keyboard is super freaking awesome. I’m typing a blog post on my TV. Yes I could do this by hooking up a laptop to my TV via HDMI. It’s still awesome.
• The Netflix app is pretty sweet. Much better display than the 360 app, if less pretty. Having a keyboard for search is phenomenal.
• The thing has a fan, which roars to life during bootup. So far, the fan hasn’t come on in use, but if it does, yikes. So far, so good.

More later as I play with this thing some more. So far, it’s pretty cool. The web browser alone makes it pretty awesome.