on being a professional coder

I recently finished Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin's The Clean Coder and I'd like to use this space to share, very briefly, my takeaways from the book, as I head into a new team lead position.

• Accurate estimation of coding tasks is essential if you want to maintain trust between coders and managers
• don't be afraid to push estimation back due to scope creep, etc
• TDD is a way to write better code faster in the long run 
• (I already knew this but it was good to hear it again [and again, and again, and again])
• Pair programming is also a way to write better code faster in the long run
• Never tried this in depth, but I'd really like to. Guess as a team lead that might even be up to me!

anyway I'm inspired to be more professional in my coding life, so I guess he succeeded. Book's a quick read, too.

ad blocking "controversy" aka foolishness

tl;dr:  If your website can't make money without crappy ads, and nobody looks at your crappy ads because of advances in technology, then blaming that technology puts you squarely on the wrong side of history.

The creator of peace, one of the most popular iOS ad blocking apps, just pulled his app after a day and a half because it "didn't feel right" to him. While that's his choice, this strikes me as misguided.

There's been a lot of media coverage lately about ad blocking, and complaints about a regurgitated and irrelevant tech news cycle aside, I have seen a quite a few well meaning people stating something like:

ads make the internet go round. it's irresponsible to enable ad blocking software.

As a web developer and armchair philosopher, I'm on the record as being for ad blocking software, insofar as I think it only makes the internet a better place. Crucially, I'd remind the reader that under our current more-or-less capitalist system, no business models are guaranteed by government or (mostly) morality. And tho I think capitalism has some blind spots (see healthcare, maybe?), advertising on the internet ain't one of them.

We would only improve the internet by striking back against giant, centralized ad serving systems. How anyone could honestly defend cross-site targeted ads is beyond me. Do they improve anyone's browsing experience? Do they honestly make all that much money for the sites that run them? For the businesses that pay for them?

I humbly submit that any website that subsists on google (or similar, but right now it's mostly google)'s ad network, that could not possibly conceive of another way to monetize (of which I'll speak more below) does not deserve to make money. This is the good part of capitalism. This is how we improve technology and social organization as a species. This is the process that government interruption / manipulation frequently subverts (see: the DMCA, drug laws, FCC regulation, oil subsidies, etc).

In fact, the DMCA is a useful parallel from recent history: Pirating music is very different from stealing a physical CD, all whiny record execs to the side. But a powerful industry complained that their business model had become obsolete, and instead of letting that business model die a natural death, our government guaranteed it with the DMCA's intellectual property laws. As a result, we are stuck with all sorts of negative externalities. I'd write more about it but Cory Doctorow explains it way better.

Without the DMCA, all the useless blood sucking middlemen (aka giant record labels) would have evolved or shrunken away, and maybe our entire culture would have been better off (fewer cookie cutter pop stars, anyone?). Smaller labels would have had no trouble monetizing, just like they do today anyway - with more interesting physical releases, more/better concerts, a resurgence in vintage-format media, pay-what-you-can downloads, free streaming to help spread music, and much more.

Ad blocking is the same way. I wouldn't be surprised if Google lobbied congress to pass an anti-adblocking law. When you think about it, and for the reasons stated here, it'd be very similar to the DMCA. Google has enough at stake here to make spending hundreds of millions in lobbying dollars quite worthwhile for Google. And as we know, congress is cheap.

Instead of rooting for the old ad-supported paradigm, let's brainstorm how a newer, sleeker web could monetize:

• more thoughtfully crafted ads, negotiated more directly with businesses, not served from ad farms, and hence not so easily blocked (aka native ads)
• opt-in / crowdfunded memberships with perks (plenty of tipping services out there on the net)
• merchandising
• online or offline "rent party" type fundraisers, where website fans could meet and mingle
• In general, new products that people are more interested in paying for

To reiterate and conclude: if your website can't make money without crappy ads, and nobody looks at your crappy ads because of advances in technology, then blaming that technology puts you squarely on the wrong side of history.

A similar opinion I just found:
https://snelling.io/on-ad-blocking

talk about facepalms

learning javascript: valuable
relearning trigonometry: way valuable
spending 2 hours trying to code Math.atan2 in plain javascript because you were too stubborn to spend 6 seconds searching for how to get that stupid angle at any quadrant of the unit circle: priceless!

in related news, Math.atan2 is very useful (altho why its arguments are (deltaY, deltaX) and not vice versa eludes me), and pixi.js is very fun.

unexplainable 500 errors with flask and jquery ajax on google app engine

I was trying to do something simple - get a preloaded partial from the server via ajax. my api call worked directly in the browser, worked when I ran it with $.get() from the console after the page was loaded, but was returning 500 during page load (as in, only failing when it was called as js running at after dom load). I could confirm that the correct flask view was running and succeeding using logging, but the 500 I was getting had NO responsetext, and nothing useful..

After fighting and fruitless searching for 40 minutes, I disabled the flask debug toolbar. Voila! everything worked as expected.

Moral of the story: F$@# the flask debug toolbar.

facepalms: 8

displayport / hdmi not recognized in ubuntu 14 when eighth inch audio jack is not plugged into sound system (lenovo t430s)

yeah you read that title right. can you believe it? I fought with my computer for an hour early this morning, installed a super fresh kernel, played with intel drivers, but nothing wanted to make ubuntu 14 recognize the displayport. It was working the night before!

finally gave up and went to put some music on. boom! screen turned on. what the hell? unplugged the eighth inch cable again. boom! screen turned off. also, the amplifier turned off and on each time I plugged or unplugged the cable. I'm still 99% baffled here but there's another clue - a buzz on the line that I can audibly hear thru the speakers when this particular sound system is connected, that also changes when I restart the computer.

Note that when I plugged headphones into the eighth inch jack, the screen did not turn on (altho there may have been some signs of life briefly).

So best guess (which is probably very wrong?) is that there's a loose connection somewhere in the laptop, and that the added power from my stereo thru the eighth inch connection (which should be flowing the other direction, but this is an input / output jack) is bridging the loose wire? hence the buzz?

UPDATE 6:30pm same night:
scratch the above theory - new shit has come to light!
when I moved my laptop to the living room and plugged the mini displayport into the projector, everything worked as always - without a sound system being plugged in. So then, being the good scientist that I am, I lugged one of my screens into the living room and plugged it into the displayport, and holy moly, it worked fine, no audio cord plugged in. So it's actually proximity to my crazy stereo system that's causing this issue. Unfortunately I don't know enough about sound systems and electronics to posit a complete theory, altho I bet this is enough for someone to be able to. My general idea now is that the magnetic field cast by the bass amplifier on the floor right next to the monitor is somehow involved.

As before, if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear em.
facepalms: 7.5 (would have been 10 but tempered by the sweet relief of seeing that screen turn on)