My Distraction

Picks

An article in response to GitHub's new code of conduct. A very sensible point of view. Well written: http://dancerscode.com/blog/why-the-open-code-of-conduct-isnt-for-me/ An article about why lone software projects fail. I've felt all of this. Almost wrote it myself, in reflection on some of my

Props

I'd written previously about how I think the Tim Ferriss Show sometimes seems like a rich person circle jerk (GHOST_URL/commitment/), where it seems the habits he gets into with his guests are things rich people do because they're rich, rather than things rich people

Interviews

Basically any resource about how to get a leg up on job interviews will list a few common interview questions, and the ones I see most often are like, "What are your strengths and weaknesses?" or, "What's your greatest strength/weakness?" I think these

Aspirations

I've spent a lot of time recently kind of floundering. I have projects that I work on, but as a solo dev, I think I'm aiming too high to start. There's a lot of merit in just focusing on creative volume, rather than trying

Commitment

Note: I'm going to commit to at least weekly posts, to keep myself writing, because I like myself better when I do. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There's been a lot of buzz lately about React, the Facebook-developed JS framework view layer. People are very excited about how fast it

Happiness

We lost Crystal's dad recently. I started writing a post, to thank the people who have been surrogate fathers to me. I don't think Crystal's dad really thought of me that way, which makes sense thinking about how you'd see the significant

Cubing FAQ

When people see me solving my Rubik's cube, there's a standard battery of responses, which I'd like to address. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > "I just took the stickers off."/"I just took the pieces apart." Every cuber has heard this a million

Cubing

I think a lot of people who know me kind of in passing know me as that Rubik's cube guy. I almost always have one in my jacket pocket or my bag, and if I'm not actively engaged in something else, I'll pull it

Selection

I was listening to The Tim Ferriss Show, where Dr. Peter Attia was doing some Q&A, and someone asked about whether he thought the ketogenic diet is long term feasible. To oversimplify, it's a low carb, middling protein diet, where you get most of your calories

Expectations

Today, I woke up to some weird smells. Went to the kitchen to investigate, and I found Crystal trying to make popcorn. What she was actually doing was toasting some adzuki beans in a saute pan, after having tried to pop them in the microwave. Saying something to the effect

Ridiculousness

There's a show called Ridiculousness that I found out about yesterday, in circumstances that I'll describe later. Suffice to say, it's pretty much exactly the fake shows that were in Idiocracy (e.g. Ow! My Balls!). I'm really scared.

Real Programming

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html Someone linked to this somewhere on reddit today, and it bothers me. I don't think Mel in the story is someone, really, to be admired. As I've gained more experience programming, my attention has turned more towards

Tech Writing

General update: I broke my hand (I finally punched something hard enough, hard enough to break it [my hand]), and now it's pretty much healed. My wrist is still a little stiff. I can't do push ups, because bending my wrist back makes my hand feel

Yehuda Katz on Open Source Development

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqXU4o24Hkg I really admire Yehuda Katz, and his involvement in Ember is a big part of my sticking with it, and the faith I have in its future. I feel smarter every time I hear him talk. Angular has blown up in popularity, but

Featured

Movies

http://badassdigest.com/2013/06/12/film-crit-hulk-smash-the-age-of-the-convoluted-blockbuster/ This expresses a lot of feelings I've had regarding movies of late, and my disappointment in them, and the direction the industry seems to be going. Here's an excerpt regarding Star Trek: Into Darkness, and the scene where Spock

Government

I think, in general, it's difficult for governments to work as intended. You can get the design right for a specific frame of reference, but things change, and systems that are designed to resist corruption can lack the agility to keep up with the times. Alternatively, your systems

Support Our Troops

There are a lot of ways you can interpret supporting our troops. I think the best is avoiding deploying them in the first place, through use of discretion and diplomacy. Not giving people a reason to want to do them harm. > "Remember, best block, no be there."

Toxins

Just a PSA: If someone is telling you something about your health, and they talk about "toxins", they are most likely full of shit. e.g. "You should not eat any food and drink a bunch of lemon juice to cleanse your body of toxins." It&

Willpower

With my current musculature, I could stand to weigh around 10 lbs less than I weigh. I am particularly good at just dealing with being hungry, so whenever I want to cut weight, I usually just stop eating. I don't like spending time eating, so it feels like

The Future

Sometimes I think we all think it would be super cool to travel to the future and see all of the new crap, but as an experience, I think it would probably be terrible. You'd be treated as the stupidest, most ignorant bumpkin. Probably half the stuff you

Floods

I haven't written in almost a month. A bunch of stupid stuff happened last month starting with a flood (we got like 13 inches of rain in about 4 hours), and then another flood ... of insurance fuck ups. The water got high enough to get in Crystal'

Getting Programming Help

Found this on https://www.reddit.com/r/emberjs: http://ember.zone/how-to-increase-your-chances-of-getting-help-on-emberjs/ It talks a bit about how to get help in the Ember IRC channel, and it applies to a lot of programming help in general. The gist of it is don't use GitHub gists, or

Helping

> redacted: i want to learn more about emberjs, does anyone know any free videos i should watch? > Dafe: Read the docs. > alexspeller: redacted: http://emberwatch.com/ > redacted: alexspeller, thanks! Let me just start by saying that Alex Speller is a global treasure, and I find it

Thoughts on Ghost 7/2014

I've been using Ghost for a little less than two months at this point, and have written a decent number of posts. Mostly, pretty good. I'm enjoying not having to manage my deployment. Feel lazy about not having updated my theme. I've had this

project

Pomello

I mentioned this before in a post titled Hooked [https://my-distraction.ghost.io/hooked/]. It's a pomodoro timer that integrates with Trello. http://pomello.herokuapp.com/ Pushed it out to Heroku at some point. Forgot to write about it. It needs a lot of polish, but I'