Such is the nature of an office at Christmas, there were several large boxes of chocolates knocking about. I jokingly organised them into groups, forming a bar graph reminiscent of the NOC screens that hover above our team. Everybody laughed, jokes were made about the OCD nature of our team, and chocolates got eaten. However as the day went on, I noticed that the layout of the chocolates was affecting what I chose....
I love my Android phone, its great having a bit of kit I can mess with but that just works out of the box. Since Google retired Google Latitude I’d forgotten then my mobile knows exactly where I am and generally I don’t mind this, it helps my phone show me smarter information, but it’s my data and damn it, I want it. Eventually I’ll get round to writing a simple backend to store my location (it’s yet another thing I didn’t do in my time off), however I’d like to get out all my historic data....
Today is my last day of freedom. On Monday morning I’ll be starting a new job, with a new company, in a new office, with a new commute (driving there in a new car) and meeting new people to do new things for new customers. All new. Scary, but fun. For the last six weeks, in fact almost two months, I’ve not been working, I’ve been clotting around home. When I first handed my notice in a knew (in fact I’d engineered) some time to think and play and figure out what I wanted to do....
I had some time to kill on the train to Devs Love Bacon, and limited internet access, so I was looking for an offline project to play with and learn something new in a couple of hours. Step in Rickshaw a graphing library built on D3 it’s a quick way to make beutiful interactive graphs. I used the data from the history of the Glastonbury Festival to built a graph showing the price and attendance over time....
I heard about Bacon(things developers love) a few years ago from friends who went (and lvoed it). I bought a ticket last year but had to go on holiday instead and missed it. I was determined to be there this year, and it was worth every minute and penny. It’s a twin track conference so decisions about what to see in each session had to be made, so where I hada clash I chose to go to the less code orinetated session (code can be read later)....
A little while ago I wrote some terrible code which took data from themoviedb.organd pulled all the actors you listed found every film they’d been involved in. The original idea was to produce maps a little like the fabulous Tube map (which I’ve always had a bit of a love for). It turned out that making the things that look like the tube map is hard, but the data was interesting....
TIME FACTORS // Factoring code all nabbed from http://www.javascripter.net/math/primes/factorization.htm function factor(n) { if (isNaN(n) || !isFinite(n) || n%1!=0 || n==0) return ''+n; if (nEdited 20-12-14: I ran across this brilliant What color is it and couldn’t resist bolting on the rather neat idea of colours based on the time. Yesterday I found my XKCD book that I was given for Christmas and whilst leafing through it ran across this gem about factoring the time....
When discussing code it’s all to easy to use words and language which express your feelings but add nothing to everybody’s understanding of the situation. Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to catch and correct myself (we’ve a new team member and there’s a lot of our stack to learn so it felt important) TL;DR Everything you can do to swap from the emotive to the constructive will reduce tension and reworking whilst improving understanding and learning....
There are probably a lot of much better ways to do this, but recently we needed to get at a couple of messages in a RabbitMQ queue. It’s a dead letter queue and we’ll built a better tool to process it’s messages at some point, but right now we just needed to get hold of one of the messages in it, without removing them all (and loosing them). TL;DR There SSH tunnel into the box, mod an API call nicked from the browser to use it’s cookies to authenticate, format it using jq and then grep out what you need....
A note before I start, this is the second article I’m writing based on votes from http://helpmewrite.co/ A rabbi In Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis I came across the concept of having a rabbi in your life. Not a religious leader, nor necessarily a man, but somebody who is your trail blazer in the company. A quasi father figure, mentor, and set of shirt tails you can ride. When I read the passage about Michael’s first rabbi something rang true, and I ended up looking back over people I’ve worked with and realised I’d had two in the past and not recognised them for what they were....