A geek with a hat » Insanity

Follow up to The most pleasant job interview I have ever had

Swizec — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:12:55 +0000

“Hey mum, I’m going to Canada in September to work for Shopify.”

“Yeah I know, why did you take a month to realize that?”

Just over a month ago I described my experience interviewing with Shopify as the most pleasant job interview I have ever had.

Just three days after the interview I got an offer, but fussed over the decision for a month. Originally, to give some other opportunities a fair chance, later because some new opportunities showed up …

Seriously, what are the chances for a client to sell his company to a huge investment bank and wanting to bring you on board juuust as you’re thinking about moving to Canada? Crazy. I didn’t take that one because, you know, bank. Huge corporation. Not really my style … at least not for that kind of money.

Remember kids, if you’re going to sell your soul, sell it well.

I loved Shopify when I was there, it was the most fun and enjoyable looking environment I have ever seen. If I had to decide there and then, I’d go for it at the drop of a hat. But the more I thought about it, the more my fear of commitment acted up.

The main reason I freelance is the pace of switching whole technology stacks every few months. But I also have a lot of free time to pursue my own stuff. Deadlines for a book you say? No problem, ten billable days in a month is enough.

Think I won’t be able to do that anymore.

Oh, you like waking up at 9am, taking an hour to exercise and then two hours for writing and an hour for lunch and then get to work work? No problem, you’re more productive coding-wise in the afternoon/evening anyway.

I have a suspicion I won’t be able to do that anymore either.

In the end, that’s why I decided to work at Shopify. Because it scares me shitless. That which scares you the most is usually the best way forward. It’s your inner comfy coward screaming from the top of his wee lungs that way lies change.

Change is good. I like change.

At least I’ll still have the freedom to work on my own stuff – yes, I asked – and following Ramit Sethi‘s advice to ask for a few extra $k/year, I’m going to have plenty of financial independence as well. Important things those two.

I can’t weave this smoothly into the story so I’m just going to say it. Subscribe to Ramit’s mailing list. Do it. Read it. It will change the way you think in ever so subtle ways. I mean, when was the last time casually reading a free mailing list made you a few thousand dollars? Exactly.

But yeah, in September I start working for Shopify and that will be the end of my relatively short-lived full-time freelancing career. For now.

Now how the hell do I write a resume that will impress a government clerk deciding whether I’m good enough for a visa?

How Draft got me to pay for a free product

Swizec — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:20:37 +0000

Draft is a marvelous new webservice for writing. A bit like iA Writer, but for the browser.

I love distraction-free writing and I’ve recently come to rely on Draft for writing my blog posts. It’s simply the best writing tool out there that I can use with my fancy keyboard (linux, no iA Writer, bad wrists).

But I’m not here today to talk about the marvelous version control features, the fact I can click the equivalent of “Save back to WordPress” when I’m done writing, or even the “Get feedback from an expert” feature.

No, today I want to tell you about the brilliant trick Nathan Kontny used to convert me from a freeloader to the proud owner of a $4 monthly subscription.

I login one day, right from the WordPress dashboard (Chrome extension), and what do I see if not a big pop up sort of thing saying “Hey, you should totally subscribe!”. As a geek and a nerd I find these things tacky, overdone, and rather pushy.

But this was different. There was no blackout, no flashing colours, just a friendly message from the founder saying “Hey, I’m making this thing and I need your help to keep it awesome.”. More importantly, he started a conversation!

Sidenote: Wow, I was just delighted by how easy inserting an image is. Shift+Ctrl+I, drag image into browser. Beautiful.

khem

See, it’s not a pushy sales thing, it’s an honest ask. If you don’t want to, that’s fine too, but please tell me why.

I was instantly convinced.

Left a message saying how awesome I find the service and how infinitely brilliant is the fact I can reply to a “please subscribe message”. Later that day I kept my promise and subscribed.

Better still, later that day I got a reply.

You have no idea how delighted I am by this little exchange. And now I’m spending $4 a month on something I use maybe twice a week for maybe an hour to indulge in what is a glorified hobby.

In comparison, I pay $5 a month for Toggl – the basis of thousands of dollars worth of invoices, I use Github daily and don’t pay a dime … actually I don’t pay for most things I spend my whole days on.

Good job Draft, you’re doing something right. This is probably the biggest bang for buck a service has ever gotten out of me.

An English pet peeve

Swizec — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:23:02 +0000

Remember that experiment I wrote about last week? Where I say it’s better to stand up when editing?

It works! Only problem is I get kicked out of the kitchen around 4pm, just about an hour after I really properly get to work.

Today I want to talk about a little pet peeve I’ve developed with English over the past few days.

Sometimes I feel English majors are the only people who would understand me, but I don’t know any

— Swizec (@Swizec) May 10, 2013

Since my d3.js book is supposed to be very inclusive and inviting I use the first person plural a lot. It just sounds better when going through examples to say “Here we do X” instead of a preachy “You should do X” or a self-absorbed “I did X” … you know, like this post.

As such there are a lot of instances where I write “Let’s do something or another”. Let’s being a contraction of let us.

Now let is a funny little verb in the English language. It’s got no fewer than eight meanings, adding some verb phrases and idioms the number goes all the way up to nine-teen.

Talk about overloading operators, Scala can hide in shame before the might of English.

Let’s – see how I sneakily used the possessive form and not a contraction of let us – primary meaning is roughly “to allow”, so when you say “Let’s go!” you are pretty much saying “Allow us to go!”. But with slightly less imperative in your voice.

All fine and good.

But in the book I also talk about third parties a lot. It’s not just me and the reader that are having fun, behind the scenes d3.js’s functions are working hard to keep us happy. I often write “This or that function lets us do this or that”

lets us

Using “lets us” feels more appropriate than saying “allows us to” or even “enables us to”, especially when I’m supposed to be shortening my manuscript by 60 pages before publication. And it just feels snappier and better paced than the alternatives.

Here’s the dilemma: “lets us” works in some cases, “let’s” in others and “let’s us” is far out. Laughably wrong.

And one of those appears almost in every other paragraph. Paragraph after paragraph, page after page, for 180 pages.

Every single time I see those six letters I have to stop, take a deep breath, and make sure they are correct. Every. Single. Time.

The Slavic Esperanto (0)
Write sitting down, edit standing up (0)
How Draft got me to pay for a free product (1)
I kicked myself in the balls (4)
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Write sitting down, edit standing up

Swizec — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:29:35 +0000

On March 26th I giddily said it takes about two months to write a technical book. Still high from the recent success it seemed like the thing to do.

Hemingway writing

It is now May 9th. I am editing.

Well, sort of. I had thought my writing was awesome, that there will be hardly any editing needed and on 9th of April, just two weeks later, there was a reality check in my inbox.

It was the editor: “Hey this is really great, solid writing, I just fixed some spelling and markup for ya.”

And truly, all the fixes were either typos or British English – they want American. Something about markets.

“Oh and shorten the book by 60 pages. We said 100, you wrote 180, we can do 120 tops.”

*gulp*

It is now May 9th. I am editing.

The stickler is that my beta readers said they’d like even more content in the book, definitely not less. Obviously I can’t cut any content out of the book and I can’t make the code examples shorter either. People have already complained the examples are a bit terse and hard to understand at moments.

I could take out some screenshots, but this is a book about creating shiny visualisations for the internet. Screenshots must stay.

Only thing left is the writing. I have to go through the whole book and use less words to say more.

*gulp*

Facing such a monumental task it is therefore not a surprise I’ve only spent about 30 hours editing my book in the last month. That’s averaging just an hour per day – the average for writing was two and a half.

And editing time isn’t even half as efficient as writing time. For every two minutes of staring bleary eyed at the screen, dragging the words through my mind like so much barbed wire, I spend five minutes prancing about on the internet feeling like I’m riding a unicorn in comparison.

Editing really is sheer drudgery. There is no flow. There is no inspiration. Just a constant ruthless cutting and rewording. All those little things you thought added a special flair to the writing, let your personality shine through, entertained the reader.

Waste. Plain old waste. Vomit of a writer who’s been staring at the screen too long.

It all has to go.

And the writing is much better for it. But you’re still sad to see it all go.

Actually, not so much sad, as indifferent. You don’t feel anything but the monotonous drudgery of rewriting something you’ve already written and not coming up with anything new. You can’t, add something new and the word count goes up not down. Can’t have that!

It’s been fairly successful too. I’ve finished the first two chapters. One cut down from 14 to 9 pages, the other from 51 to 40. Just by improving the writing. No loss of content.

But it’s just so … it’s terrible.

This weekend I discovered a trick, though. I was at a friend’s place and as I was editing in the kitchen I realized that the chairs are terrible and the table is the wrong height.

Peeved, I moved to the counter. Editing standing next to the kitchen counter, shoulders slouched to stare at the screen …

… before I knew it, two hours had passed and I edited five pages of text. Amazing! I had fallen into flow. Editing! Flow!

I don’t actually know if this was because of my friend’s kitchen or because I was standing while writing. But I’m going to repeat the experiment today.

Fingers crossed it works!

Videos from first Javascript meetup in Ljubljana

Swizec — Fri, 03 May 2013 12:15:40 +0000

Tuesday evening saw the first JavaScript meetup in Ljubljana and I think it was a smashing success, if I do say so myself. Everyone who RSVP’d managed to make it despite the impending holidays next day.

Surprising how difficult it is to count people calmly sitting in place and not moving. I’d make a terrible guardian for children on a fieldtrip, but there were somewhere between 38 and 47 people based on my various counts.

All the speakers did a great job of presenting their topics and I was happy to see next to no smartphone and laptop navel gazing from the audience. Rare sight at these sorts of events.

We learned about writing performant JavaScript, where the biggest challenge is maintaining performance across browsers and devices. Apparently writing performant JavaScript for Chrome on a quad core desktop monster is much easier than a four year old smartphone running an outdated version of Android.

Then it was straight to an overview of using modern MV* libraries and the difference between frameworks and libraries – a library is fairly open-minded and a framework is smarter than you so you have to obey.

The talk about AngularJS deepened the subject by showing a few code examples with AngularJS. Looks like it’s very easy to magically connect things on the screen, but step out of what Angular knows is best and you will have a bad time and likely way too much work.

In the end, the talk about TypeScript explained what it looks like when you port Java to JavaScript. The most interesting part for me was observing the difference in style preferences. I honestly don’t think TypeScript looks better than just using JavaScript …

Either way, the videos are now online. Have a look.

Unfortunately the videos don’t convey the great job beer and cupcakes did of keeping everyone around for a nice geeky chat.

Javascript cupcakes

I love being a geek

Swizec — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:10:42 +0000

I have always seen myself as a stereotypical geek. Kind of introverted, not very athletic, infinitely excitable about the strangest of things, spends more time with people on the internet than talking face-to-face, prefers it even.

And I love being that. The infinite freedom that comes with being a geek is intoxicating.

While normal people have to worry about keeping appearances, about maintaining a fine-knit web of social interaction through a series of carefully maintained half truths, I can just be myself. Because I’m a geek.

People pretending they like certain things, pretending they care about this or that issue, just to fit in. Just so they’ll be liked. As a geek I don’t have to do any of that.

As a geek I can shout at the top of my lungs “I don’t understand football” at the height of football fever during a world championship. Nobody minds, nobody laughs, they just explain the game. “Don’t mind him, he’s a geek you see, he doesn’t get normal people stuff”

When I was about ten years old I couldn’t get enough of The Famous Five series by Enid Blyton. Library copies were always tattered to bits and that just made them better. I don’t remember much, but I do remember one character clearly – The Scientist. He was George‘s dad or uncle and his defining characteristic was that he was always kind of grumpy and locked up in his room where he was “doing science”.

Not to be bothered. Not to be disturbed. Not to even be thought about too loudly. Lunch was often taken to his room because he would forget to eat.

Imagine that!

A guy who gets peace and quiet to work. All summer. In a house full of 12 year olds. That’s the power of being a geek.

Geeks – the only people who get to truly be themselves even as adults. I love it! (said with my best Tennant impersonation)

It’s all starting to unravel for me though. People are suggesting I might want to “grow up” … whatever that means.

Just the other day someone mentioned I do a lot of sports. Ironically this happened at boxing practice; she spends 5 days a week there. A person who goes to practice 5 days a week thinks I do a lot of sports … I have never been so confused.

A few days later I had a call with someone looking for “somebody older” to be a technical lead. An old sage to look over the rabble of Stanford grads he’s built a team out of. I’M TWENTY-FIVE!

I hope it’s not too late for me. Save yourselves! Be geeky!

The most pleasant job interview I have ever had

Swizec — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:11:13 +0000

I love job interviews.

It’s a bit of a hobby really. You get this brief chance to dip your toes in a company’s culture, to see what they’re all about and how they work. If you’re lucky, you get to talk to some awesome engineers who are much better than you.

If you’re really lucky, you even get to travel for a few days!

You can never have too many excuses to travel.

I spent last week in Canada interviewing with Shopify.

Shopify

Lounge mural

It all started a few months ago when I wrote a blogpost ranting about the terrible engineering practices of one of my clients and how I was hired to swoop in and fix their codebase. A few days later I get an email from somebody at Shopify along the lines of “Hey, one of our developers saw your post, then saw your Github. I think we’re doing some stuff you’d find interesting. Wanna talk?”

As always when opportunity strikes, I said “Sure!”

A few days later came the usual first-contact Skype call. Yeah we’re doing this and that, we’re this sort of company, we’re doing so and so. Yes I’m a cool guy, I like making things and you seem interesting, let’s talk some more.

This part is never too interesting. A bit like a first date, both people are sort of kind of interested, but nobody really knows what’s going on so there’s just a lot of gentle probing and poking.

Then comes the fun part.

Just like at Google, there were two technical Skype calls where I got to talk with two different engineers working on extremely different stuff. I think this part was about figuring out whether I’m more of a frontend guy or more of a backend guy.

I did later get to meet with both dudes again. Both called their team The Core Team ™. Friendly rivalries are always a good sign!

Unlike Google last year, both of these Skype calls were extremely relaxed. It was just a casual chat about technology and my approach to coding, testing and solving problems. If there was a pre-prepared list of questions, I couldn’t spot any painstaking adherence to a plot.

One of the interviews devolved into a twenty minute explanation of how batman.js works, that was particularly lovely. Shame I still haven’t had a chance to try it out because it sounds really awesome.

A bit later I was invited to fly over to Ottawa and chat a bit more.

Ottawa

Elevator welcome

When a company spends a few K just to talk to you for a few days, you know they mean business. Still, everyone upheld the casual tone throughout.

My interviews were spread over two days.

Casually, the first day started at noon. I was to come into the Shopify HQ have some lunch and a meeting later.

The HQ was just across the street from my hotel, but my room was facing the other way so I couldn’t see it. Because Google Maps doesn’t know you can walk across parking lots, it took me about ten minutes to find the entrance. Silly Maps.

Stepping out of the elevator I immediately fell in love with the place. Walls covered in comic book posters, memes and an assortment of geek stuff everywhere. There was even one of those Halo helmets at the reception.

How cool is that!

It doesn’t matter that I don’t really play videogames or that pretty walls and wonderful beanbags in the lounge area don’t matter much when you’re staring at a computer all day. What matters is that these are signs of a company culture I’d enjoy. None of that endless grey cubicle crap I saw on my tour of IBM two years ago.

The main lounge used to be a club. I’m told Lady Gaga played there once. Nowadays it’s just a huge room swarming in geeks when catering brings in the food. There’s videogames on the balcony and an endless supply of tea and coffee.

There’s an assortment of teas. Very important.

There is also a table devoted to LEGO. Fun.

After lunch I had a conversation with the guy responsible in company culture. He makes sure there are no asshats roaming around the offices. He’s also the person making sure the offices look as great as they do.

He misses the times when he could spend most of his time hacking on the product and doing design. I got the impression everyone at Shopify is a hacker, no matter their role these days.

Always a good sign.

In the evening I had dinner with a bunch of engineers and one other potential recruit. Both the recruit and I were so jetlagged we spent most of our time staring ahead of us with blank faces and trying very hard to follow the conversation.

The big day

The lounge where I spent most of my time

Then came the big day. Once more it started very casually at half past eleven in the morning. This time with a bit of confusion about who I was supposed to talk to … meetings, changes of schedule, stuff. Hungover from too little sleep I was more confused than anyone and can’t really tell what was going on.

I ended up having a nice chat with a Columbian fellow from the scaling team. They make sure programmers don’t have to worry too much about scalability and can focus on solving problems. Interesting job, but not really for me.

The chat culminated in lunch when the whole of Shopify descended upon the lounge when catering arrived.

All of the six or so interviews I had that day were very pleasant. All happened in the comfort of the lounge couches and I never felt like I was being drilled on the basics of computer science or solving silly problems.

The most technical bit, really, was the two hour pairing session where I implemented some interesting graphs using a library based on d3.js I had never heard of before. NVD3, it makes graphing a bit simpler.

Very unlike Google, where I was cooped up in a small room with a whiteboard all day and forced to produce executable code without a computer. Sure those were fun and awesome, but they were all the same.

At Shopify I was having pleasant conversations. Everyone was more open too. When I asked about their work, they gave me straight answers, explained what they’re doing and we chatted about the problems they are facing and how I’d approach them.

The company culture was out there, wide open for me to figure out. Everyone seemed genuinely interesting and genuinely interested in talking to me.

Finally I had a chat with the CTO. He realized we’ve both been talking to people all day and were getting kind of tired. So he took me out to a coffee shop for a cup of tea.

That was lovely. I really liked the coffee shop too.

Turned out we were both very tired – there were moments where we just looked at each other for a few minutes. Unable to find any words.

His is an interesting story of a guy who used to be the main hacker on the core product and eventually became one of the heads of a company of 170 people. His job these days is talking to people all day. He’s still adjusting.

At dinner later that day I found out that even as the CTO with a bunch of brilliant engineers, he can still spend 2 months hacking away all day with headphones on when there’s an emergency to solve.

After that, Shopify doesn’t crash anymore.

Decisions

I’m not sure I ever got a chance to talk to the engineer who made the initial recommendation based on my blogpost, but I definitely got to talk to a bunch of great people and had massive fun.

A few days after coming home I got a call saying they’re interested. Now I have to make a tough life changing decision between Shopify, freelancing and two other job jobs that have magically landed on my table when I was looking the other way …

Canada, eh?

Swizec — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:42:48 +0000

Job interviews are fast becoming a bit of a hobby for me. Usually just over Skype and for a shortish-term freelancing gig. Sometimes in person for a job job.

Last week I went to Canada to interview with Shopify. This post is about the traveling bit, next post will be about the interview bit. Without revealing too much too soon, I can say it was one of the best interviewing experiences ever.

Canadian parliament

Traveling to Canada

Canadians do say “aboot”, they also say “eh”. But they say eh so much and so often I was unable to figure out what it actually means. It’s not always a question, sometimes it’s more of a “yes, what I am saying did actually happen literally”. It’s a confusing little word.

Canadians are also just as nice as I expected watching american television. The French Canadians are just as nice and friendly as people were in France … which is to say surprisingly little. Luckily I didn’t spend a lot of time in the french parts of Canada. I did take a walk to Quebec though, just to go see the cool Museum of Civilizations.

On Tuesday morning I awoke to a miserably cold and windy Ottawa. Other than the buildings and the odd car here and there Ottawa, the city of one million, looked like a ghost town. I met about one person every five minutes, despite being in the part of town crowded by bars and pubs.

It wasn’t too cold, just -6 really, but my jeans was nothing against the wind. Like I was walking around half naked … thank god for the giant scarf I got from mum for Christmas.

Apparently I visited Ottawa at a rather awkward time. It wasn’t winter and it wasn’t spring.

In winter they have a bunch of stuff going on at the frozen Rideau canal. Turns into a 7 kilometer skating rink! In spring, there’s a bunch of stuff going on at the Bytown market – daily farmer’s market stuff, plenty of events, even a busker’s festival!

Last week … nothing. Completely dead.

Weather turned for the better on Thursday and while still a chilly ~3C it was very sunny and the whole city came alive. Their one pedestrian street was full of people and walking around was an absolute pleasure. Suddenly I could see myself living here. It was no European town like I’m used to, but it was alive. A proper city!

Despite its huge surface area (100×100 km I’m told) and a population about thrice that of Ljubljana, Ottawa feels a lot like Ljubljana really. Minus the ~100,000 students and put on a classic North American grid system … and younger, much much younger. The oldest parts of Ottawa still standing are from the early 1800′s. Just enough to give the city a bit of a flare, a touch of history.

Strange feeling that, a huge city that’s less crowded than my tiny “city”. Their museums were awesome though, at least the two I visited. Museum of Civilizations talking about how Canada evolved from the old peoples to the modern mix of people from France, British loyalists and all the old native peoples. Really loved the huge displays where you basically walk around a colonial town at 1:1 scale, then turn a corner and suddenly it’s a town in the 19th century.

The War Museum had a similar design going where you walk from the early native peoples wars all the way to modern peace keeping stuff, but such museums are usually dark and don’t take pretty pictures, plus they all look alike. There was an awesome assortment of tanks and artillery though. Even a jet fighter!

At the only pedestrian street, there was a bear statue

There’s a huge confluence of rivers right on the border of Quebec and Ontario

Museum of Civilizations reveals that totems are _huge_

There’s also exhibitions built up as old towns

Voodoo exhibition with real human skulls

On Thursday I went to the War Museum where there was a jetfighter

Most displays were too dark to take pics

On my way back I found a cute housey

It takes about two months to write a technical book

Swizec — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:19:05 +0000

A lot of people will tell you writing a book is hard. I’m here to tell you it’s not.

Solving the Hamiltonian path problem is hard, writing a book just takes some hard work and a bit of dedication. It’s not hard when all it takes is plomping your arse down and refusing to get up until something happens. That’s easy.

As Hemingway put it in a movie, “There’s nothing to writing, you just sit down and bleed” Which is odd, since he liked to write standing up … anyway.

Example about distribution of primes along a spiral

After two months of plomping my arse down repeatedly I finally finished my d3.js book. Or rather, I finished the first drafts, which would be a done book if I was self-publishing. Because there’s a publisher involved, I’m now looking at two to three months of revision and editing.

To be honest I’m getting slightly sick of that book. Being able to step away and ignore its existence has been one of the most amazing feelings in the world. I am enjoying my new found freedom to the full. At least until reviewers come back with their You idiot! That’s not how you write that bit there!!

Life can get really frustrating when you try to squeeze at least an hour of focused writing into every single day.

The final tally for the book is 179 pages, 30 examples, 66 days, 171 hours.

That means I spent about an hour per page including research, writing and coding a working example, and an average of almost 3 hours writing per day. All the while doing enough freelancing that my business grew by about 30% in terms of monthly income. \o/

What surprised me is just how much work I had with examples. It is insanely difficult to come up with an example that will exercise what you’re talking about in a particular chapter, without depending too much on stuff you haven’t covered yet and being thin on the stuff you’ve already covered and is now boring.

Then you have to get the examples working.

IRC karma visualisation example

I didn’t really know much about d3.js when I started out and it would often take me a whole afternoon to get a single example working. Like, you’d sit down, read the API documentation and get to work. Error.

Fix error … blank screen.

Get a line on screen … wrong line.

And so on for hours.

It would always be something stupid in the end, or I’d misunderstand what the documentation is telling me. Often I’d resort to looking at other people’s examples myself so I could even get something working.

But then the really fun part starts. When you do have an example, writing just flies. You sit down and start talking about the code, pasting code in the book, showing some pictures and before you know it, that simple example you spent three hours coding has turned into five pages of the book in just half an hour.

It really is quite amazing.

While there’s always stuff you can fix in a book and the writing never seems polished enough, I hope there wont’ be too much work with editing. My approach is very re-writing in itself and I often write the same sentence or paragraph several times before it sounds natural enough.

Yeah, who knew, making yourself sound natural takes deliberate practice. You can’t just dump your brain on a page and think it sounds natural. It doesn’t

Right, you’ve kept reading, now you want a The Point. If you really want to learn something, write a book about it. It doesn’t take long.

The true difference between self publishing and using publishers

Swizec — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:22:31 +0000

Right now I’m writing two books at once and yes that was a terrible idea. Please avoid doing this if you at all can.

One book I’m working on with a publisher, the other I’m self-publishing. Both are interesting processes, but I have noticed one colossal difference between the two:

Self-publishing -> November 2012 to March 2013 (5 months) -> 104 hours worked. Includes researching, writing, marketing, everything. About 40 pages written.

Publisher -> late January 2013 to March 2013 (1.5 months) -> 101 hours worked. Just researching and writing. About 100 pages written.

Might be the tight chapter deadlines I keep missing, might be the nice project coordinator lady asking me what the fuck do I think I’m doing via email every couple of weeks.

But them’s the facts. I get more writing done when working with a publisher.

Da Vinci – The Genius

Swizec — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 13:31:03 +0000

Last Saturday I got a chance to visit the new Da Vinci – The Genius exhibition at Ljubljana‘s main exhibition hall area thing … space?

It was really fun! Perhaps not as much as the one I was to in primary school, but that’s just the age difference talking, really. When you are ten years old, Leonardo is this magnificent guy, half god half human, he can create anything and everything – things you could never even think of!

Naturally, you use a lot of his influences in your own work – yes I used to design strange devices when I was ten years old, never build anything of course. A great inspiration.

At 25 he turns into a curiosity. You appreciate the things he designed because of the times he was living in. The machines look cool, but it is painfully obvious that almost none would ever work – the flying machines especially seem kind of laughable looked at from the present time.

Men flapping wooden wings … four men running in a tight circle to screw into the air, I mean seriously.

If you can’t remember being a nerdy kid, completely enthralled by simple mechanics and Newtonian physics, just watch an episode of Codename: Kids Next Door. It’s all there.

Da Vinci’s wing flappy vertical takeoff machine.

Seriously though, Leonardo Da Vinci was an incredibly cool guy, the prototypical renaissance man. We need more of those.

His work in studying human anatomy was ground breaking – did you know one of the paramount textbooks on anatomy, Gray’s Anatomy, purposefully mimics his style for the sketches? – his artistic works are pretty awesome as well, but they do suffer from problems common to the era.

Can somebody please tell me why artists in the renaissance era thought women are just men with two perfectly round spheres on their chest? It’s ridiculous.

Either way, the exhibition is a leisurely two hour stroll through sheer awesome. You even get to play with some models!

My favourite exhibit was the deceptively simple hygrometer. Put a weight on one side of a scale, some cotton on the other. Scale moves depending on how soaked in water vapour the cotton becomes. How cool is that!?

If you’re even remotely interested in mechanical things, details about the Mona Lisa or cool looking anatomical sketches, you should visit this show on a lazy afternoon.

But definitely bring someone along who hasn’t played with mechanical devices and stuff a lot. The exhibition is much more interesting when you get to help somebody understand why this or that machine works or why it doesn’t.

All you need for a humanoid robot. I once tried to make a hand out of Lego … it was more complex.

Da Vinci art thumbnails

Breaking bounds with BoundBreaker

Swizec — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:17:35 +0000

Remember to clench your butt.

~ the single most useful piece of advice I’ve ever gotten, by @filipdobranic of BoundBreaker

Back in 2009 I was a greenhorn entrepreneur. Not that I’m an entrepreneurial machine pumping out product after product these days, but at least I’m not flopping about like a fish out of water.

Most of the time.

But I did start my first startup in 2009, two weeks before my 22nd birthday. At the time I was still practically a freshman at college and had just quit my job as a run-of-the-mill web developer building crappy websites for an advertising/communications agency. Of course I had no funds and no idea what I was doing.

But hey, I was a hacker and a decent programmer, just how hard can it be to learn how to business? Piece of cake! I’ll learn it in a weekend just like I did python!

Turns out it’s not that easy. Hell, I didn’t even know how to incorporate or that it might be a good idea.

Luckily I met the guys from BoundBreaker. Sure, there was no BoundBreaker when I met them, but in summer of 2010 my team and I became part of their first generation of hackerpreneurs running startups.

BoundBreaker

It’s hard to say whether being part of an accelerator, any accelerator, is better than learning everything on your own or not – especially since I can’t really compare – but it does teach you things you otherwise wouldn’t think of learning. That’s the main benefit of having mentors really – autodidactism only gets you so far.

Public speaking skills are a perfect example of this. Very few hackers invest in learning how to speak in front of a crowd. Just go to project presentations at your local computer science faculty. It’s a mess.

Giving my first or second talk, I walked up on stage. I’ve got this! Always been good with words and I’m a master of improvisation in tough situations!

The 30 minute talk was over in 5 minutes … “Uhhh, you guys know what I was trying to say, right? You’re itching to download this app I’ve built, aren’t you?”

Nowadays I can walk up on stage and it’s as relaxing as sitting at home, watching my favourite TV show. It really is quite an amazing transformation.

And I don’t have just the sheer amount of practice to thank, part of the BoundBreaker deal was to teach me how to present ideas anywhere at any time. Just go up there and wow the audience into thinking my idea is the best thing since sliced toast with mozzarella.

Just clench your butt!

That’s all you need to know when faced with a room full of scary looking investors after you’ve bet the proverbial farm on making this meeting work out in your favour.

Public speaking isn’t all BoundBreaker’s taught me though, there was a bunch of other things too. I learned all about the lean startup model, launching MVP’s, testing assumptions … things about vesting and a bunch of things about running a team.

Turns out, if it takes six months to build it’s probably not a minimum viable product. That lesson took so long to sink in my startup fizzled out in the process. Ooops.

However, that summer culminated in my first trip to Silicon Valley!

The BoundBreaker team organised most of everything to do with the trip so we could focus on scoring meetings with investors and other persons of interest. It’s amazing, but a scrappy startup from Slovenia can totally get to a serious meeting with the founder of a VC fund after spending just two weeks in Palo Alto and talking to people.

Shame I didn’t take @kristjanp‘s advice to stay in Palo Alto and seriously put together an investment round after we got the first VC to bite … but alas, mentors can only give suggestions, they can’t run the business for you.

You should apply to BoundBreaker

PS: they even bought me a cake on my 23rd birthday while we were in the US!

In praise of the pass phrase

Swizec — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:31:32 +0000

The idea of pass phrases in favour of passwords has intrigued me ever since I read the iconic XKCD, Password Strength comic.

Munroe’s argument goes that conventional wisdom about secure passwords is stupid and misguided. Experts tell us to use a password that is at least 8 characters long – exactly a character longer than most humans can comfortably store in short term memory – contains mixed case letters and numbers.

A fragment of the OED (1985), showing SGML markup (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Special characters are a good idea as well, but almost nobody uses them because more often than not services reject them on grounds that … I don’t know, I guess their databases don’t support fancy passwords or something. Don’t even get me on services with so many password rules the possibility space collapses into, like, 10.

These passwords are impossible to remember. Meaning people use simple passwords instead.

You’re supposed to change your password every few months as well! People don’t, because they’re too hard to remember.

You should use a different password everywhere! People don’t, because they’re too hard to remember.

Passwords suck

To make matters worse, “secure” passwords aren’t secure at all. An 8 character password considering common alphanumeric characters people use most often gives you 60^8 combinations. At 1000 guesses per second this is guessable in about 5000 years.

Okay, that’s impractical. You’re better off using a different vector of attack … like a good wrench to the wrist. Or those stupid security questions.

But passwords aren’t random sequences of letters! Remember, people can’t memorise those. Most often they use a common word and capitalize the first letter, then add a few numbers at the end. Or possibly some numbers at the start.

There are just 15,222 6 letter words in the English language, giving enough room to add two numbers. Accounting for capitalizing the first letter that gives us 25^2+15222+10^2 combinations. Guessable in about 15 seconds.

Oops.

Including common substitions – 1337 sp34k – gives us a few more combinations and the usual password is guessable in about three days. And that’s with a very secure looking password that is almost impossible to remember!

Sure, we cheated a bit by using a dictionary attack, but hey, anything goes! I’m sure real attackers have even more tricks up their sleeves.

Pass phrases win

password hell (Photo credit: Ron Bennetts)

Take pass phrases on the other hand.

Using a combination of three or four common words is something you do every day. Your brain is hard wired to be great at memorising this stuff … remember all those cool lines you’re still referencing from movies made 40 years ago!

Three is the number you shall count! The number of the counting shall be three!

Khm, yes.

The great thing about pass phrases is that they are usually long. Very long.

An average english word is about 7 characters long, three words create a password with 21 characters. With a dispersion of 2 characters per word, your password will likely be 15 to 21 letters, adding spaces and you’re at 17 to 23.

Now, assuming you’re using nothing but lower case letters and spaces that still gives 26^17 combinations. Guessable in about 3 tera years. That’s 3 and 13 zeros.

Nobody’s guessing that via a character by character attack.

Let’s look at a dictionary attack then, that saved us before, maybe it will help now.

There are 171,476 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. Using just 3 words, any words, gives you 3^171476 combinations. In other words, a dictionary attack at 1000 guesses per second would take so many years the number’s got 81,804 digits.

Eighty one thousand digits.

That’s longer than the expected death of the universe isn’t it?

Sure, not all combinations of words make sense, some words are more common than others. The vocabulary of an average college grad measures at about 17,000 words. That still gives you 3^17000 combinations, or an 8100 digit number of years to guess.

Without funny symbols. Without numbers. Just simple lowercase words.

I’m already switching all my passwords to pass phrases. You should too!

The first Barcamp Sarajevo

Swizec — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 11:54:26 +0000

Three days ago Sarajevo saw its first ever Barcamp, organised in just five days. Hat’s off to @sidonath, @johnjoseph, @nesuss and @neshill for pulling it off! Impressive feat that.

Barcamp Sarajevo Venue

The event itself was fantastic, a Barcamp going back to what a Barcamp is supposed to be – a bunch of people getting together, making an impromptu schedule at the event itself, most talks being hastily slapped together at the last minute because speakers still don’t know what they’ll be talking about before their morning coffee.

Or maybe that was just me.

Either way, Barcamps I’ve been to lately have been straying away from this ideal of an almost impromptu sharing of minds. They’re becoming too much like full on conferences … although I’m told it’s impossible to have a homely Barcamp environment when 200+ people show up.

With less than fifty people the Sarajevo Barcamp was just perfect. Plenty of new people to meet a completely new crowd, while still small enough to be manageable for even the most shy of speakers.

Surprisingly few people were nervous however, good job speakers! Your presentations were pretty damn awesome and I had fun sitting in on all of them. A benefit of the single-room format as there were not enough people for two tracks.

In a startup nothing is true

The event wasn’t very tech centric, so I learned a lot about the startup scene in Bosnia – of which there is more than I expected to be honest. It’s looking pretty vibrant actually!

We even got to see the launch of a new startup Forum387. They claim it wasn’t a launch and their website still asks for a password, but they promised we can start playing with the tech next week. A working product demo done live at a public event is a launch in my book.

Their approach to reviving forum software is pretty intriguing too. Should give Discourse a run for their money. They even have clients lined up! More than many startups can say for themselves.

I also learned that the unlocking is illegal fiasco we’ve witnessed lately has been long in the works by telephone companies. Way back in the early 50′s you were not allowed to install a hush-a-phone on your device, but were advised to use your hand instead. Somehow that’s better.

The future of forums

The appearence of speaker phones and subsequent lawsuit also set precedent and enshrined in law that we are allowed to connect any device to the network. Making the internet possible! \0/

And apparently spending 50% of your time working on opensource projects for free means you will never have money problems again. It’s also all sorts of rewarding!

Personally, I discovered that giving presentations without slides is quite fun. Much more flexible than keeping track of what slide you’re on, it’s easier to move around the “stage” and jump up and down. Or rather, it feels more necessary and it’s something I should be doing anyway.

But nobody will remember anything you say, which is a shame. Simple visuals help people remember important facts you wanted to convey.

That said, one of the coolest things about this Barcamp was that no talk went without questions. Almost all of them had a discussion going half the length of the talk itself! That’s amazing and I think something that only happens when audiences are kept small enough.

It was truly an awesome Barcamp, definitely one of my favourites and I’ve been to many. The fact there was tea available is just icing on the cake.

7 of us waiting for Salep with our hosts and a cat in the coziest tea place ever

A geek goes surfing in the Adriatic

Swizec — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:40:20 +0000

Late Friday afternoon two of my mates, @zidarsk8 and @smotko, start talking about a Saturday surfing trip to the cold windy waters of Medulin, Croatia. They invite me along.

What the hell, I might as well go, been meaning to try surfing ever since I was in the US with @zidarsk8 in 2011. Sure, I’ll go!

Okay, we pick you up at 5am. Bring a towel and some sammiches.

I regretted the decision immediately.

this is a perfect beginner spot /sarcasm

chopy waves and sharp rocks and strong onshore. The good thing about this is, if you liked this, then it can only get better, because these were the least surfable waves you’ll ever see, probably.

~ @zidarsk8, the next day

Later that night we talked about just how cold the water would be, how fun putting on a wet wetsuit would be in winds that make your knees shake when you’ve got a bazillion layers on and just how treacherous Medulin is for surfing – sharp rocks, current towards even sharper rocks, crap waves.

At this point I was 90% committed to chickening out.

As if by a miracle, I woke up at 4:55am. Whyyyyyy am I doing this!? What the fuck is wrong with me! I tweeted that I’m chickening out.

But fuck it, I just couldn’t let this go. Chickening out now, I’d never hear the end of it; and poor @zidarsk8 was running around Ljubljana until midnight to collect all the gear for me – surfboard, wetsuit, everything. Ten minutes later we were on the road.

Medulin.

Banana for scale

There were waves! Scary rocks! No sun. Mud. Cooooold. Hopping out of the car I wouldn’t be getting dressed quicker if there was a gun to my head! T-shirt, long-sleeve shirt, hoodie, winter coat, scarf, wool hat, hood. Still shivering.

Next time I saw my balls was Sunday morning. That’s how cold it was.

Then the fun begins.

Amidst all this cold, you have to start undressing. Completely undressing. The only thing you can have on under a wetsuit is a pair of swim trunks … or better yet, nothing. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to be naked in some other dude’s wetsuit.

As every fiber in your body SCREAMS at you in panic, you step into the water. An instinctive chill. Your whole body shudders.

Although, hey, this ain’t so bad! This wetsuit stuff actually works. This is less bad than getting into the soup-like water during summer when it feels like you’re about to freeze to death as you step in.

This is all right!

Better view of the Medulin swell

Bravely I waddled into the tiny waves. It was all right. Everything is going to be okay. I’m already having fun!

The surfboard is a floatation device anyway, what could possibly go wrong?

I flop myself on the board and the absolutely tiniest of waves washes me off like a snowflake. I try again. The board wobbles and dances. Somehow I stay on.

What, I’m supposed to paddle this thing? Through walls of water!? Just to get to the lineup? You must be daft, sir!

The more I paddled, the less happened. Every wave was an insurmountable obstacle. Sometimes I’d get washed off to the side. Sometimes simply flipped over on my back and the surfboard would go boink against my head.

Fun times!

Sure, the swell was just half a meter. But when you’re lying face down in the water, at the low point of a wave, there’s a meter of water towering above your head. Just waiting to drown you. To pounce on the hapless victim stupid enough to dare nature.

It gets worse once you consider the water was extremely choppy. That means waves in superposition. Two waves at once. More than a meter of water above your head …

… it really does feel like a mountain was attacking you. Promise!

Surfboards, mine was the middle

Eventually the waves calmed down, I sort of learned how to paddle, I almost learned how to sit on the board and wait for waves. There was no need to tow me around anymore. It was time to catch some waves.

Impossible.

Every single time I tried, the wave would simply outrace me. Paddle like a maniac, nose pointing down the slope of a wave. Yes, yes, I’m going to win! Woosh, the foam passes you. Your board points at the sky and you know you’ve lost. All that effort and now you have to turn around to paddle out to the lineup again.

Got a bit of help two times, got pushed into the wave a bit. That was the wildest ride of my lifeI Whooooosh and you’re racing towards the shore! The wobbly bucking board suddenly completely still. You think about standing up. You’re having so much fun you forget.

Before you know it, you’re in ankle high water again and it’s time to paddle back out in hopes of another ride.

Surfing, it sounds crazy, it sounds insane … especially the part about putting on wet wetsuits in weather that makes you dream of a warm fireplace … but it’s possibly the most fun you can have with your clothes on!

I was hungover from exhaustion all Sunday.

Can’t wait to do it again!

We drove back through a snow storm, with thunder!

First lessons learned about writing technical books

Swizec — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:39:44 +0000

A while ago a publisher contacted me to write a book on d3.js.

Even though I once managed to create a picture with d3.js and wrote a quick tutorial about it on my blog, I didn’t really know much about the library. It’s a seriously confusing piece of technology that almost seems more black magic than common sense.

Explains the loud clamouring for books on the topic. (two have been published so far)

After a few months of back and forth the contract was penned and signed, two weeks ago I finished the procrastination stage and started writing.

I’m learning a lot writing this book, suddenly d3 is no longer a mystery only mbostock and New York Times know how to use … I’d go so far as saying the book will be better because I’m writing it as I learn because I still remember which parts need more attention.

This being my first technical book and my first book with a real publisher and ISBN number, I’m learning more than just d3.js.

1. You will write more than you think

Starting out, the publisher asked me to create an outline with a rough estimate of how many pages each chapter is going to be. I was supopsed to create a 100 page book and, to be honest, that seemed like an insurmountable task.

A hundred pages! That’s, dude, that’s like a real book! I can’t write a hundred pages about something I don’t know, are you insane?

But write an outline I did. I looked at each chapter, furrowed my eyebrow, twisted my lip into a grimace, and wrote down an imaginary number. This chapter will be 10 pages long! This one will be 30! Yes, that sounds about right.

The number of pages evenly summed up to 100. Perfect!

Then I started writing. The first chapter was going to be a 10 page quickstart into the world of d3.js, I would show you how to set up the environment for the rest of the book and explain three quick visualisations. Get something working within the first 2min of reading a book, y’know?

It took me 10 pages to rush through a single example. Yes, rush through. You get the depth of nothing, but you might be able to perform some inference learning and do stuff on your own.

I am currently writing the second chapter, a 30 page deep explanation of the basics, at 36 pages I have covered about 70% of the material … and that’s including the buildup of knowledge that makes code explanations progressively less detailed.

Code samples, their explanations and plenty of images since we’re writing about, well, images builds up fast.

2. You have no idea how much time you need

Despite the insane amount of content you will create explaining basic concepts you previously thought were self-explanatory, writing a technical book is a stupidly slow process.

Perhaps because I’m spending as much, if not more, time learning the material myself, playing around to see what things are doing and so on … but it just takes time. A lot of it.

The publisher didn’t pull their deadlines out of thin air. Well they did, but they asked me to approve them. Oh, what, I have until March to write this? And it’s only December? Sure, that sounds perfectly reasonable!

Then the first full writing weekend happened. When it was over I was the proud owner of slightly more than a first chapter. In fact, I had the whole first chapter and what I thought was a third of the second chapter.

It had taken three days to write 20 pages.

I was exhausted, I was dreaming SVG and HTML. It was terrible. Suddenly the deadline was super close. I could feel it nipping at my heels, smell its ugly breath as steam escaped its nostrils, I could almost feel its yellow teeth brushing against my thigh.

Then you notice you forgot to explain something. But it doesn’t fit at the end of the chapter because it would ruin the flow. You put it in the beginning and voila, just like that, you have to change some 20 screenshots.

3. This is not creative writing. By far.

The thing that really gets me most, though, is that writing a technical book is just not very creative. I know I know, a good writer can make any piece of writing fun and I certainly hope I’m making the book an entertaining read.

Writing it, though, is just not fun. It’s work.

Schlep work through and through. You create an example. You have fun creating an example. You could spend countless hours just playing around, finding out how things work.

Sometimes you do spend hours searching for a good example to illustrate your point without relying on the concepts you have yet to teach the reader. Then you avert your eyes to the other screen. Grab your keyboard. And write.

Explaining every little detail, making sure you didn’t gloss over anything, keeping the reader engaged and interested … it’s … it’s just a little bit boring, you know? Sometimes I feel like an idiot for explaining something, like I’m insulting the reader by not assuming they know that crap.

Then you show the writing to a friend who is a good representation of the target audience - Hey, can you explain that a bit more? You kind of glossed over it. I am surprised and confused. Your example is terrible.

So yeah …

Right now I’m writing two books at the same time. That was a terrible, horrible idea, but here we are. I’m supposed to finish the d3.js book by March. I might have a chance at meeting that deadline.

I’m afraid it is unlikely that the Why Programmers Work at Night book should get an update in February. This makes me sad.

But what makes me even more sad is that I am not entirely certain the publishing contract allows me to post this blogpost. I think it’s okay because I didn’t mention the publisher or the title. I am also uncertain whether I’m allowed to show the drafts to my friends, that’s a bit of a grey area.

Going to be showing the drafts to my friends anyway. Editor feedback is measured in months. A travesty really, feedback loops should be quick and efficient.

Numbers that baffle

Swizec — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 14:10:12 +0000

Eight days ago I get an email from a nice lady saying “Hey I came across your blog and was wondering if you would let us syndicate it on our site? Why programmers work at night would be the first post.”

Baffled. Completely

Her email said nice_lady@businessinsider.com … why I looked at her email and not her 20 line signature I don’t know.

Okay, so that’s kinda cool. Business Insider is a bit of a big deal and I’m writing a book about this stuff … “Sure, you can syndicate, if you link to my book.”

Bam. Swizec featured on Business Insider. Now I can die happy. Maybe.

But it doesn’t end there. Ever so slowly the article started picking up speed, it was seen by 30,000 people the first day, when I looked again two days later it was 200,000 and the damn thing breached 400k sometime yesterday.

So the business insider version of Why programmers work at night has been read over 400k times O.o
— Swizec (@Swizec) January 21, 2013

Right now it’s at 442,000 views … I just … I have no idea what’s going on. I wrote that essay a year ago, I was a bit in a hurry, it isn’t very well thought out and the writing is atrocious. It took me a while to accept the huge traffic the first three days, eventually I even stopped being crushed by the immensity every time I tried to write something … but this is just getting silly.

In a whole year of collecting dust on my blog the article attracted 290,380 pageviews, add the 442,551 from Business Insider and that’s some 732 thousand people reading something I wrote. There are no words.

Well okay, there are the four hundred or so words I’m writing in this post, but there are literally no words.

Since the business insider incident, plenty of peopole have been asking me if they can repost in this or that publication. I grant permission to all. It’s even gotten as far as some big name New Zealand IT professionals website. And the other day a guy used me as a reference to write a cool article about measuring the effect of interruptions on programmers.

I need to write him an email actually, knew I forgot to do something last night.

There is one very good thing that’s come of all this however -> record book sales! I’m up to $999.71 for this month. Hooray \o/

Anyway, the biggest and most vocal feedback I got for the Business Insider post is that I am pissing off the internet by stealing XKCD and I should not do that if I value my inbox. After explaining the story a bazillionth time I finally broke down, cried a bit, sent an email to the editor and got them to fix the attribution.

Why they thought I could draw such an awesome comic is beyond me.

Project soundtracks – how I killed procrastination

Swizec — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 12:08:21 +0000

I am a procrastinator.

Everybody who’s ever agreed to meet with me can confirm that I am always 5 minutes late. It’s not because I’m mean or don’t respect people’s time, it’s because I leave it to the last minute to pry myself away from work and start getting ready.

The point is, I procrastinate everything. I’d start procrastinating five minutes later if I could.

It’s very bad.

Cure, step 1 – pomodoro

About a year ago I started using the Pomodoro techniqueto ward off procrastinating while I work. You know, the whole, finish ten lines of code, go online for two minutes, write a bit of code …

Italiano: Autore: Francesco Cirillo rilasciata a Erato nelle sottostanti licenze seguirÃ OTRS (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You might call it stupidity and bad work habits, but I was procrastinating The Next Step ™.

Pomodoro’s 25 minutes of work, 5 minutes of internet right-to-the-vein worked great. For a while at least, I’ve started slipping up a bit so sometimes it’s 27 minutes of work or 7 minutes of internet. But that’s okay, it keeps me generally inline.

I noticed something far more interesting than a general improvement in work habits.

For a while now I can no longer get any work done without a ticking pomodoro timer. The connection between that annoying tik-tak is so strong it’s become impossible to focus on a single task when the noise isn’t there.

Sometimes work would be better without forced breaks – when writing for instance – but I just can’t do it. Unless something is ticking I can’t keep my grubby little paws off the twitter and facebook and hackernews and so on.

With ticking, effortless. It seems whenever the ticking starts I feel an irresistible urge towork. To drop whatever internet buffoonery I’m up to, fire up a code editor and get cracking. As irresistible as hunger.

As a result, I’ve started turning the timer on before I actually start working. Otherwise I would just procrastinate starting until the day was over, but the ticking gets me to stop within a minute or two.

Brilliant.

Cure, step 2 – project soundtracks

About two months ago I decided to take the concept of training myself in a mad Pavlovian experiment even further.

What if I could program myself not only to feel an irresistible urge to work, but an irresistible urge to work on a specific project?

Spotify (Photo credit: kaioshin)

The idea of project soundtracks was born.

I have four or five work playlists in Spotify. 8-bit music mixes has proven the best for coding, while The Electro Swing Revolution seems best for writing. Blogging happens without a soundtrack to a well tuned radio station.

Amazing results! Seriously.

The biggest benefit is that context switching between projects is now almost effortless. As soon as a certain playlist starts my mind immediately jumps to its project – ideas star popping up, context is becoming clear and I can remember specific details I’ve worked on days ago.

More importantly, other projects and concerns fade into the background instead of jumping all over each other, begging for my attention.

Has any one else tried this before, or noticed similar effects?

EDIT: some playlists:

Bacon muffins – a doomsday experiment in cooking

Swizec — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 14:01:56 +0000

BaconDoomsday muffins

Yesterday was doomsday. It didn’t go to plan so we’re still here. Hooray! \o/

To celebrate doomsday we had a party with a bunch of mates last night, there was a geeky guaranteed-to-be-random double blind secret santa and food. Not a lot of food because the party was organised by guys, but food nonetheless.

Since I don’t really eat sugar anymore I took it upon myself to bring something awesome instead. The only appropriate doomsday food I could think of were Bacon Muffins.

The original recipe is from Kitchen trial and Error, found via Gojee. Despite or (maybe because of) some adjustments the muffins came out really good. The whole batch was gone before I managed to take my coat off. Should’ve made two batches, but alas at such low speeds time isn’t stretchy.

My only fail was that I used too much baking powder so the muffins were too crumbly and left a bit of an after taste. I’ll know for next time!

BaconDoomsday Muffins

Bacon+leek

To make doomsday muffins you’re going to need about an hour, a skillet, two big bowls and a strong right arm if you’re too lazy to clean the kitchen power tool – Mr. Mixer.

Makes 12 muffins and a blob.

Ingredients:

6 slices bacon
1 leek
2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup cornmeal
1.5 teaspoons baking powder (I used a whole bag, that was too much)
1 teaspoon baking soda
0.5 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
0.25 cup sugar
1 cup butter (makes a quarter cup when melted)
0.75 cup sour cream (one small 180g cream was perfect)
0.5 cup milk
1.5 cups shredded edam cheese - any soft cheese will do

The original recipe asks for scallions, but my local store didn’t carry them, leeks were a solid replacement. Onions wouldn’t be pretty enough without the green bits. I also replace cheddar with edam cheese for similar reasons.

Not sure what the sugar is doing there, I used half the amount from the original recipe and probably won’t use any at all next time.

Cut the bacon into strips and fry on a skillet. Don’t use any oil to do this, there’s enough in the bacon. Add thinly sliced leek (leaves and all) and warm it through once your kitchen smells like delicious bacon heaven. Sprinkle with a bit of salt and pepper
Preheat your oven to 200 celsius (use the fan if you have it). Liberally apply butter to the muffin pan with your fingers. Use plenty or they’ll stick.
Take a big bowl and mix the flour, cornmeal, salt baking soda and baking powder in a big bowl. This is where everything will end up in, so do make it a big bowl.
In another bowl scramble the eggs, add the sugar and mix it together nicely. Use a microwave to melt the butter, then whisk it into the sugar egg mix in thirds. Add half the sour cream and milk and mix until consistent. Then add the rest of the sour cream and milk and mix again until the fluid is consistent. Now it’s time to add the bacon mix and the cheese.
Flop the wet ingredient mix into your dry ingredients and stir together until no dry patches remain. This will produce a very pasty batter with glue-like consistency
Put into the pan. Keep in mind these muffins aren’t growers like usual so fill the models right up.
Bake for about 12 minutes – until the muffins are light brown. Let cool for 5 minutes and pry them out with a cutlery knife.

And there you go, delicious doomsday muffins! The recipe sounds complicated written out, but I assure you it’s pretty simple … just keep an iPad or something for reference while cooking.

In the oven

Best TEDx event I’ve been to #tedxlj

Swizec — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:38:05 +0000

A full opera house

On Sunday the Ljubljana Opera House came to life. Dress code casual, still more men in dress shirts than usual, no women in gala dresses. Plenty of make up to go around. Almost nobody in sneakers.

That’s what happens when TEDxLjubljana is put in the opera house. Can’t put on just anything to go there, feels wrong …

And what an event it was!

Imagine a jam packed historical building, nearly six hundred people lucky enough to get their tickets in the minute or two it took for the tickets to run out. All of Ljubljana was there. Like something out of an old novel, where “the town society” gathers, acquaintances rekindled, old friendships affirmed, new ones formed. A sea of people, familiar faces popping out to say hello every couple of minutes.

Taking a breath before rushing for the free food was a grave mistake – šmorn ran out quicker than an English speaker could figure out how to pronounce the word!

I think my favourite talk was the surprise music performance by Saška Vipotnik, who performed an unplugged version of some Neomi songs. Turns out I really like their music and her voice, who knew!

Another talk that sticks to mind explained classical music; it should really be called classy music because that’s what it is. Classy and sometimes very modern … must admit I don’t really know what the talk was about, but I really liked the grand piano intermezzos Ana Šinkovec used to give examples for what she’s talking about.

Don’t think I’ve had the chance to hear a grand piano playing live before.

Ana Šinkovec playing the piano

Two talks contend for the title of best talk at the event, I think. One was Ernesto Sirolli’s Shut up and listen that we watched on the big screen, the other was about wolves. I’m not sure Miha Krofel had a bigger point or some agenda behind his words, but I was completely enthralled by everything that he said.

Wolves are amazing creatures, there’s more of them practically in my back yard than I could ever imagine and they lead amazing lives. Did you know wolf packs in Slovenia have recognizable names and territories? That was really fascinating to me. He even showed us a map!

The wolf talk was a wonderful example of simply educating people without pushing an agenda or The Point. Let everyone draw their own point or agenda now that they know what’s going on. Very refreshing for a TED talk.

Oh and, just so you know, wolves won’t attack humans, or at least this particular researcher, even when they feel threatened.

All in all a magnificent event and I once again feel a fire burning right under my arse. Half of those speakers with awesome stories were my age!

I infiltrated #railsgirlslj, here’s what it was like

Swizec — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:29:39 +0000

#railsgirlslj (at Telekom Slovenije)

This Saturday I infiltrated an event for girls. Girls awesome enough to dip their toes into the world of web development and programming in general.

It was a bit like geek heaven.

There you are, surrounded by 75 human females, every one of them hand picked to be interested in what you do. Girls who came there to learn, with a mind completely open, everything is new. You can say almost anything and they will believe you. No questioning, no male ego. Just acceptance that you know what the hell you are doing.

Not daunting. Not daunting at all.

I volunteered to mentor at Rails Girls Ljubljana in a moment of weakness, one evening when I was very tired. Immediately regretting the decision I saw it through anyway … the experience was amazing, I was not disappointed.

My impostor syndrome meter was through the roof. You see, before the event I had a grand total of two hours of Ruby on Rails experience. Tried to go through the Rails Girls guide the previous evening, failed miserably on my machine because all the generators and scripts did the wrong thing for some reason. Probably a version thing.

Learn all the code!

Perhaps sensing my hopelessness the girls in my group (three per mentor) did not ask too much about Ruby or Rails. They focused more on the interesting stuff one can actually teach in a day – how to make things pretty.

I could help with that!

Talked their ear off about html and css … the other mentors relay a similar experience. But that’s what beginners are like, they want something to change on the screen, something cool to happen. Perfectly happy changing templates around, they rarely care about the deep logic behind things. There’s easier fruit to pick.

Although I’m sorry there wasn’t enough time to explain one of the girls how to make a twitter bootstrap button with a custom colour. Would simply take too long.

The best thing about teaching girls, the absolute best thing is they don’t have annoying ego problems.

Teaching guys, I would mostly sit around and observe what they’re doing. They would poke around, ruin everything and only after getting hopelessly lost they would ask about some irrelevant issue. They wouldn’t ask for understanding, they’d ask “Hey, why is it complaining about this comma?” … are you kidding me, you clearly have no idea what’s going on and you ask me about a syntax error?

Girls … they ask. If something isn’t clear, if something doesn’t work, if they’re simply unsure of something. They ARE going to ask you. And you will be confused, you will have to pull on all your past experience with other frameworks … and when you fuck it all up, you can always ask another mentor about that tangential syntax error.

I probably learned more about Ruby on Rails than the girls did, but I couldn’t have done it without them. They taught me plenty simply by asking good questions and making sure I didn’t have a single minute of down time in the three or four hours we spent coding together.

Hopefully we taught all the ladies that computers aren’t some arcane mystery and that they will at least consider programming as a solution to the problems they encounter in whatever they’re doing.

The fact it took 10 minutes to teach everyone where [ and ] are will forever stay a warm memory of just how utterly I underestimated the importance of initiatives like Rails Girls.

PS: Thanks to Rails Girls franchise for the awesome guides. I would be completelyeven more lost without those

Everybody, pic borrowed without permission from FB page

PPS:

@swizec P.S.: Pic permission granted, just mention Katarina Jazbec as our super awesome photographer ;)
— RailsGirls Ljubljana (@RailsGirls_LJ) December 17, 2012

Is writing the same as coding?

Swizec — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 12:13:44 +0000

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

~ Hemingway

Lately I’ve been enamoured with Hemingway. Looking up to King is a great way to find a writing style people enjoy reading, but Hemingway looks like a way to write good content.

Mostly I like his approach. At least what I’ve lately seen in movies of his character. There’s been so many references to him lately it almost seems like the universe wants me to pick up a book of his and start reading. Movies, blogposts, comments on this or that forum … he’s everywhere.

Shame my only memory of his content is watching the Old Man and The Sea movie as a kid and being totally, utterly, bored out of my skull.

What really convinced me to start reading Hemingway was his javascript. “Code reduced to its essentials with no word or variable wasted.”

Writing like that isn’t the easiest of things, much easier to fluff things up to seem important and educated. Then again, distilling things to their core will often leave readers with a lack of understanding, making too many assumptions and often missing the point you are trying to make.

Easier for readers to hang on your exact words. Always.

In that regard, the internet public is not much different than a compiler. It too will only look at exactly what you wrote, execute it so specifically it will make you cry. Why won’t you do what I’m trying to tell you, you stupid computer!?

Computers don’t read between the lines.

But they do add a lot of lines. First and foremost, a computer assumes you’re an idiot. A far cry from the pure execution machines of the 1960′s, computers these days perform so many optimisations on so many levels it’s nearly impossible to tell what exactly is going to happen once you press Run.

Though, at least a computer reads what you wrote before executing … Most often, at least on the internet, readers will skim the first two paragraphs, decide what you were going to say, then start making assumptions and maaaaaybe fly through the rest of the text.

Not like programming readers is hard enough already.

Here you have a black box, you can’t look at what’s inside, but look, here’s a language it understands. Your job is to use this language so the black box changes its internal state in a way to produce your desired effect. You can’t know exactly what the changes should be, but they must produce this effect.

Each black box behaves differently …

Go. Write something.

Being young and naive

Swizec — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:54:22 +0000

Image courtesy of InstaGotof

Slovenia is in turmoil right now. Protests against the government are happening almost daily, some are turning into riots. This happens in countries with a lot of unemployed and underemployed young people. Especially if you also add a lot of established industries falling apart and everything that brings with it.

Have to congratulate the police on their bang on job, though! Just 100 meters from a full out war you would never guess something odd was going on.

Last week I published my opinion on the matter (link in sloveninan), perhaps foolishly, I seemingly went against all the protestors. Although it’s difficult to say because they are merely against, without much notion as to what they are for.

Young and naive

There was a lot of backlash. Eventually had to turn off twitter so I could get some work done, didn’t dare read the 70+ comments left on the post itself.

People my age and younger mostly quipped that I am a neoliberalist scumbag, whatever that is … the post itself was really more libertarian in nature. Promoting the idea of self-sufficiency rather than relying on external factors for your happiness and success in life.

Those older than me predominantly agreed that I am simply being young and naive.

“Oh, kiddo. You have so much to learn in life still. Why do you spout nonsense when my sage wisdom has taught me that you are just young and naive? You live in a bubble, boy. A sheltered existence!”

I know I should just ignore ad hominems, but this one hits very close to home.

It’s the sort of logic I’ve had to deal with all my life. People simply dismissing what I have to say because I am younger. When they agree - “Oh my, what a wise youngster!” – when they disagree - “Oh the follies of naive youth; he’ll learn”

Can there be anything more annoying?

The treatment began when I was about 14. Of course his opinion of the world is completely invalid! Look at the pubescent youngster, thinks he’s absorbed the wisdom of the world. HA!

Back then it was nihilism. I couldn’t come to terms with the idea nothing I do ultimately matters in the grand scheme of things. It was too much freedom to bear. Discussing with adults didn’t help much, their feedback amounted to “Oh, you’re young. You’ll grow out of it eventually.”

I didn’t grow out of it. I simply learned to harness the immense freedom and power stemming from the ability to do anything.

Similarly I’ve always believed I can achieve anything if I just try. Once I really set my mind on something, I will get there eventually. Probably not on the first try though.

Mentioning this to adults … “Oh you poor soul. You’ve lived a sheltered life under your mommy, don’t you know? Real life doesn’t work that way”

Well, I don’t know what crawled up those adults’ behinds, but so far I have reached and surprassed all goalposts I have ever set for myself, with the exceptions of those where found a better goalpost.

I had to stop setting goalposts …

Being excited about success is much better than the emptiness that comes from reaching a goalpost and looking into the void beyond.

So yes, I do live in a bubble. My life is going surprisingly marvelously. I do enjoy every single day like it was the best thing since sliced bread.

But I built this bubble myself. I come from a single-parent home, my mum is a disgruntled government employee with 20+ years of service. At times she’s had to work several jobs so we could make it through the month. Nothing was handed to me on a silver platter – I got plenty of things on a tin platter though; I’m grateful for those.

I live in a bubble because all my life I have been young and naive. Naive enough to believe in myself, foolish enough to never ask permission.

My one dream in life is to stay this way until the day I die.

Webcamp Zagreb report

Swizec — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:57:05 +0000

How do you get a hardened night owl to wake up before it’s light out? You promise a cool geek event.

Orange juice in lieu of tea

On Saturday I went to Webcamp Zagreb with @HairyFotr and two lasses who wanted to tourist around Zagreb while the boring geeks do their thing. After the GPS sent us to a strange settlement some 20 kilometers outside Zagreb, after stumbling around Zagreb for an hour we finally found the Webcamp.

Only an hour late!

The event was your usual barcamp with two tracks, a break room and a comically tiny hall between the two rooms. Gridlock after every talk! Started wondering if the talks were purposefully scheduled so that the people who would like a certain talk would almost definitely have to move ot the other room for the next one.

At least that’s what seems to have been happening …

Unfortunately, all talks save mine were in Croatian. I think I understood everything, but there’s simply no way of knowing for sure. At one point it felt like the talks weren’t technical enough … I probably just set too high expectations in my mind when reading the Croatian descriptions.

Only picking out the English buzzwords will do that to you.

Erlang, like life, is made of tiny strings

The best talk, the one that sticks in my mind as “Wow, I learned something new!” was the Erlang talk by Saša Jurić. Apparently Erlang is very similar to node.js at its core – a single-threaded approach to concurrency via creating micro threads that are run in parallel by a scheduler. It all sounded a bit like somebody took the idea of node.js, added some steroids and a bit of computer craziness. And voila, Erlang – a system for massively parallel web development.

Another cool talk was about the insanity of doing everything on bleeding edge technologies. More of a cautionary tale than really educational, but the presenter did a remarkable job of keeping me interested without really telling me much I don’t know anyway.

A hardened bleeding edge veteran

The fact they’re using Scala in production put a bit of a damper on their message. Or made it into a good war story. Hard to say.

As for my own talk, I think it went well. Considering my vision was swimming from a brain splitting headache and I could barely speak without slurring it went really quite remarkably well. And I only forgot one point I wanted to make. Success.

All in all, 8/10, would go again!

I made $730 by selling an unfinished book for 3 days.

Swizec — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:49:46 +0000

Saturday afternoon I decided I was ready to unleash my book on the world. Or rather, the 0.1 extremely unfinished draft version of the book.

How finished do you consider it ? I’m counting 16 pages of actual content. I’m expecting a book to be a bit more work than a long blog post. /../

I understand that you would like to have money early to fund the process, but releasing drafts is not a good idea. And this $3.14 price point is not serious.

~ A Reddit commenter

Why is the price capped at $10? I’m sure there are people who’d be willing to pay more

~ A HN commenter

Consider a book that’s about 6000 words long, most chapters are just outlines and the most developed chapter is missing two important sections. Selling this almost sounds like a bad joke.

However, after a few weeks of work and estimated reading time breaching the 30 minute mark, it was time to run the next experiment in the series - will people part with money for this?

Using Leanpub allows me to run this sort of experiment with a clear conscience. People pay however much they want and they’re getting future updates for free – they are basically paying for a future finished book.

Set the minimum price at $1.73, the suggested price at $3.14 click publish, create a few coupons, post to reddit and twitter and away we go!

Mentally, I drew a line in the sand at 10 sales. That would let me know this book is worth my time.

883 readers and 272 sales later … oh boy!

The book reached frontpage for several hours both on r/programming and on HackerNews, amounting to a total of 23,203 unique visitors and 28k pageviews.

Histogram of readers vs. $ paid – X axis unlabeled because google docs are giving me trouble

HN referrred just over 8000 visitors, who used HN’s promo code 240 times. The 7500 people from Reddit used theirs 362 times. Promo codes made the book completely free, by the way. It’s also hosted in full on Github, so it’s not like I was forcing people to pay me money so they can read a draft of the book.

The book made a total of $959.88 in sales, of which I get a $730.40 cut in royalties. Much better than going with just about any other publisher – I was recently contacted with a promise of 16% royalties. And I really have a lot to thank Leanpub for, they made publishing the book dead simple and have invested all the work in having a landing page that converts.

Here’s the really cool part though; out of everyone who paid, 77% paid more than minimal price and a whopping 38% more than suggested price.

Great success!

And I can’t even put a price on all the useful feedback I received.

What writing a book feels like

Swizec — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 11:43:01 +0000

When I set out to write Why programmers work at night I knew it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, but hey, I’ve got plenty of writing experience. How hard can it be?

So far I’ve written 895 posts on this blog, written morning words on 561 consecutive days amounting to just shy of 460,000 words. If that was a novel it would make the list of longest novels. Clearly I am well prepared!

I had no idea.

Man, books are hard.

Screw startups, launching small businesses and fun web projects. Writing a book is the most mind bending experience you can have, with the possible exception of having sex for the first time. Startups are an emotional roller coaster, very tough on the psyche – writing a book isn’t even a roller coaster.

It’s schlep work through and through.

My book is taunting me to write moar.

Most of the time you have no idea what you’re trying to say, but you have to say it coherently. It’s as if your thoughts on the subject are being revealed to you while you write. The moment you’re done with a subchapter you immediately need to rewrite it because now you know what you were trying to say and the initial paragraphs are all wrong.

Sure, you’re not supposed to edit while writing, but this isn’t editing. This is refining a mind dump into a first draft.

There’s also a special kind of flow to the whole thing. Coding flow is easy, it’s something I can go into almost instantly. But writing flow … that takes time. And unlike coding flow, this one can’t be paused. If you pause your flow, your writing will feel different when you get back. Readers will notice a break in the flow.

Very jarring.

So you do things like that *points at previous line* to make it seem intentional

At the end of the day, you feel great! Finally managed to have a whole day for writing, It was awesome. Marvellous Ecstatic! You got plenty done and the book is almost ready to have its first Minimum Viable Book version unleashed on the world.

You look at the time tracker – 4 hours. Just four actual hours spent writing. Because writing isn’t coding and it’s almost impossible to keep focused for more than an hour at time. Haven’t built the stamina yet.

But you’re getting somewhere anyway. The chapter you’ve spent two weeks working on, tens of hours, is finally shaping up.

Reading time 00:14:50.

A retrospective of an unproductive day

Swizec — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 11:33:19 +0000

Last night I was going to bed thinking “Man, I accomplished nothing today! What a waste.”

But then I stopped feeling bad (and became awesome instead) and thought about a small bit of advice Marc Anderssen pushed into the internet a few weeks ago – the trick to feeling productive is simply remembering all the things you did that day.

When I did that, my day suddenly started looking pretty good

I wrote a blogpost about an old trick that was new to me – 2000 people read it.
I had a skype call with a potential client, which went very well
Had a cup of tea with friends (and I totally got gifts for my two-weeks-ago birthday, score!)
Solved two important UX problems on a project
Delivered an “I went traveling” gift
Processed 30+ emails
Wrote a few thoughtful replies
Picked up my sister because super bad weather and buses don’t mix
Had boxing practice

Sometimes the difference between being productive and feeling productive is simply that you ended up doing other things than what you planned, or they were things that have to get done, but aren’t something you really care about.

Other times you were just lazy.

It’s sometimes difficult to tell which day was which.

Lessons learned after a month of freelancing full time

Swizec — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:09:53 +0000

A month ago I decided to stop thinking of myself as a student, launched a sole proprietor type of business and dived into freelancing full time.

Starting out I imagined vast riches, clients fighting tooth and nail to book me and fighting off uninteresting projects with torch and pitchfork. After all, that was my experience before going full time.

I’ve since discovered a few things.

Luckily lead generation is simple as ever. While my blog has all but dried up as a lead generator because of lessened traffic, having a well connected friend or two really helped in getting introduced to people who might need my help. Posting on the monthly HackerNews Seeking Freelancer converted two or three times. I’ve heard good things of oDesk and might start using it.

Note to self: start measuring conversion rates for introductions. Important stuff.

Everything takes too damn long

I used to spend up to 40 hours every week on classes, homework and studying, leaving just 15 to 20 hours to work on sideprojects, freelancing and more importantly – closing deals.

Because I prefer to work with startups my “The Client” can be described as a scatterbrained, overworked individual who will not look for help until things are literally splitting at the seams and their world is falling apart.

Longcat

As such, this is what my sales cycle looks like:

Get lead
Send email
Wait two days for reply
Agree on Skype meeting
Reschedule Skype meeting 3+ times
Skype chat

Negotiate basic contract

Sign contract <2 weeks later>

Receive tasks <3 weeks later>

Usually this wasn’t a problem. I had plenty of things to keep me busy and could barely keep up with the speed of interaction myself. Honestly, I didn’t even notice it took that long and there were so many steps!

Now?

Well … heh … now eeeeverything is paaaainstaikingly sloooooooow. So very very slow. Two or three days to reply? Are you daft man! I want this project tomorrow, get cracking immediately. My coding fingers are twitching with excitement!

Oh and let’s not forget many projects don’t even make it through all those stages. Some fall off because they can’t afford me, others scrape whole projects after a pivot, some find a local freelancer and feel that might be easier to work with.

Out of ten leads, three might come to a signed contract and some actual work. And yes, I do need to optimize those steps and, indeed, start measuring what the drop-off rate actually is.

Lost in time

Some deals close quicker than others, so I was not without work this month. Yay.

Lost in time, by notfrancois

But while I rant and rave about the time it takes to close deals, when it comes to actually getting some work done … that’s surprisingly difficult.

Without external time-compression from classes and homework deadlines, I thought I could get massive amounts of work done every single day. Instead, I can’t seem to fit more than five or six hard billable hours into the day. Just doesn’t happen, time has become somewhat gooey and stretchy.

You wake up, do some exercise, eat breakfast, shower etc. It’s 11am.

You write a blogpost for the day. It’s 1pm, sometimes later.

You make some lunch. Deal with a Skype meeting or two from all those deals you aren’t closing quickly enough. Perhaps do a bit of paperwork because banks and such close early.

It’s 4pm.

You finally get to work, are interrupted a million times by chores and people who don’t understand you are working from home and before you know it, it’s time for dinner.

Another massive interruption, takes a while to get back in the groove and it’s almost midnight. Get to inbox zero for the day and you’re too tired to get back to work.

Voila, nine to ten hours of productively spent time, less than six billable hours. Magic.

Getting paid

Please pay here, by stevendepolo

And yet, despite all that. Despite working your arse off to fit at least thirty billable hours into a week, you are working at light speed compared to your clients. Especially when you aren’t working on the core product, but something they would really like to have. Probably.

Lack of pressure doesn’t help with time gooeyness.

… aaand wait a week for the client to look at your deliverable and decide if there’s any bugs. Two weeks later, you still haven’t received the final piece of materials needed to finish the project, put a bow on it and make the delivery.

Then get paid in full. Because an XX% advance will only get you so far. You still need the actual money.

I’ve been lucky enough to avoid non-paying clients so far. They either pay immediately or at their own pace, but in a timely manner. The real problem are indecisive clients who take too long to say Okay, we’re done. and clients who are too busy to provide everything you need.

…

While they can afford to take forever, I simply don’t have that sort of runway. Take on more projects in the meantime? Of course. Eventually get swamped when everything goes through at once? Naturally.

Being a full time freelancer is tricky, but I love it completely.

A week in Paris

Swizec — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:38:01 +0000

Paris panorama from Communist HQ roof

Paris, that city where Starbucks is the cheap place to get your caffeine fix.

Despite having to subsist on nothing but sandwiches for a whole week, Paris was marvelous. As some bloke in a Woody Allen movie once said “Paris is a wonderful city to just get lost in.”

It really is.

Since I went to Paris with a group of architecture students on a field trip there was certainly a lot of strolling around the city going on. An average of four hours of pure walking every day I would say … consequently, I have no idea what the party night-life of Paris looks like.

12 euro sandwich at a bistro

Not that I could afford it anyway.

Buying a cup of tea in a lovely Parisian bistro – those things it’s famous for – will set you back between four and five euro. That’s a lunch here in Ljubljana. A single sandwich will cost anything between five-ish and seven-ish euro … eating a proper meal is easily a twenty euro expense.

Even a falafel costs ten euro.

Luckily, everything other than food is reasonably priced. Clothes and gadgets cost about the same as at home, public transit is cheap and hostels aren’t too pricey if you’re willing to settle for a strange room with a bad paint job, one shower and bathroom per floor and a wash basin situated sort of in the middle of the room.

Unfortunately humans need food. A lot of food as it turns out.

But enough about money.

Pretty things

My favourite aspect of Paris were the bistros. They all look very lovely, make you want to sit around, sipping cup after cup of tea, for hours on end and all the seats are turned into the street.

Eiffel tower

On the whole, the city felt a lot like letting a modern web designer loose on London. Wide streets, plenty of whitespace, silly sounding language and more room for activities. All the buildings are roughly the same height and look very similar to one another.

There are a lot of carousels.

Every two hundred meters there is a butchery, every hundred meters there’s a bakery and every fifty meters there’s a pharmacy. Fancy shops are situated on Champs-Élysées – much like London’s Oxford street.

There are very few commercial chains. Most shops are small things seemingly owned by families.

Since this was an architecture trip, I didn’t get to go into any museums and such, we mostly looked at modern-ish buildings of various designs. This was a strangely pleasurable turn of events on how I usually experience cities that I visit.

The group

You’d never guess how interesting building’s facades can be – the arabic institute features shutters, Pompidue has all the installations on the outside and some manner of gallery thinks its facade is a forrest.

The national bibliotheque was wonderuful as well. All the books are stored in four skyscrapers, while the reading areas are all underground and in the middle of it all is a forest of very tall trees.

Marvelous.

Oh and I got to see Loeb’s rally car in the Citroen showroom, Morrison’s grave and Wilde’s terribly fangirl’d grave … seriously, how can a guy who’s been dead for 112 years still have that many fangirls trying to ruin his grave?

PS: I do not advise travelling with a group of ~12 females, it gets very … group dynamics and stuff.

There’s a whole street of sex shops next to Moulin Rouge

Oscar Wilde’s grave

Loeb’s car

Lecourbuiser’s house for an art collector

Pere lachaise cemetery

Carousel in the midst of the financial district

The national bibliotheque

A water park thing near Pompidou

Communist headquarters interior

Arc de Triomph in the evening

View of Eiffel tower from the Arc

In the end we dispatched a pack of postcards with @ponywithhiccups

Why you can’t focus on a single great idea

Swizec — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 09:40:10 +0000

Last night I was reading Effective Programming: More Than Writing CodeJeff Atwoods’ Effective Programming: More Than Writing CodeEffective Programming: More than writing code. In the chapter about marketing weasels abusing people’s innate biases he talks about a concept that strikes very close to home – Aversion to Loss.

Turns out, humans would rather spin around in circles keeping all options open, than say NO! to opportunities that are clearly useless. I think this perfectly explains why I keep working on a bunch of good ideas and can’t seem to focus on a single great idea.

So far, this realization has not helped me fix the problem.

Ariely and Shin conducted an experiment on MIT students. They devised a computer game which offered players three doors: Red, Blue, and Green. You started with 100 clicks. You clicked to enter a room. Once in a room, each click netted you between 1-10 cents. You could also switch rooms (at the cost of a click). The rooms were programmed to provide different levels of rewards (there was variation within each room’s payoffs, but it was pretty easy to tell which one provided the best payout).

Players tended to try all three rooms, figure out which one had the highest payout, and then spend all their time there. (These are MIT students we’re talking about). Then, however, Ariely introduced a new wrinkle: Any door left unvisited for 12 clicks would disappear forever. With each click, the unclicked doors shrank by 1/12th.

Now, players jumped from door to door, trying to keep their options open.They made 15% less money; in fact, by choosing any of the doors and sticking with it, they could have made more money.

Ariely increased the cost of opening a door to 3 cents; no change–players still seemed compelled to keeping their options open. Ariely told participants the exact monetary payoff of each door; no change. Ariely allowed participants as many practice runs as they wanted before the actual experiment; no change. Ariely changed the rules so that any door could be “reincarnated” with a single click; no change.

Players just couldn’t tolerate the idea of the loss, and so they did whatever was necessary to prevent their doors from closing, even though disappearance had no real consequences and could be easily reversed. We feel compelled to preserve options, even at great expense, even when it doesn’t make sense.

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