Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Searching for Warmth in a Label

    I’m having a tough time at my current job. The project itself is going well, though, and the code I’m writing is cool and fun. I’m a consultant working with a small team on a large software project. My 2 failings are being ineffective in communication with the client and not giving accurate time estimations on tasks. There are a plethora of other minor frustrations, but the reason, to me, they are a big deal is that it has all caused me burnout in a 2 month time frame. I typically go in 6 to 8 month intervals. The bipolar reaction from manic to reserved state is easy to see in retrospect. I was subscribed to over 40 email lists, most of which I read and responded to regularly. Reading the blogs was a 6 times a day routine. Nightly I’d dive into something code or technology related.

    Now, I’m not subscribed to any email lists, hit the blogs twice a day, and generally don’t even respond to personal emails. I’ve nearly exhausted my supply of games, and am ever searching for additional outlets, physical preferably at this point. I awake early and skip lunch to ensure I am not interrupted when her majesty arrives since I work from home and get easily distracted when not alone. This allows me to “clock out” earlier than normal. Daily, I pull from emotional reserves, almost scraping my deep set beliefs, all in an effort to conjure up a positive attitude to wear for the day. I refuse to mope around like some pathetic survivor. I’m in this game to win or die trying.

    Two separate, non-related events happened recently that really negatively directed my opinion towards my current career course. I immediately started to recognize the difference between Contracting and Consulting. At least, they were perceived that way to me. I started to write a blog entry in my head… and figured I’d go do some reading before I made up my mind. Even before that, I figured I’d give it some time… a lot of time. A few days to churn on my thoughts, and finally some spare time to read. Contracting vs Consulting on Google pulls up a lot of results. The first 10 provided a lot of good reading on just one instance of this comparison in the blogsphere. Even cooler was the comparisons between the UK and US which I can somewhat corroborate from talking to friends in the UK.

    My goal was to get a real sense of the word, Consulting. The comparison to Contracting helped, but so did the wide array of opinions. I had assumed that if you were in consulting, you were a consultant. However, it seems a lot of people are seeking identity through the term, and this offends others who view said terms as mere unimportant formalities that have very little substance. I found common ground on a lot of the writings and it’s nice to read something out of my Flash / Flex / CF comfort zone. It’s also nice to know the majority of the definitions revolve around perception. While its’ natural for software engineers to loathe a loosely defined term (how could something so good, OOP, lead to soo many passionate flame wars for example?), one clear theme is that the definitions of the words contracting and consulting are in the eyes of those procuring their services, and are hence re-enforced after the fact to those who fit the client’s mold of what the word meant to them. So, while at first glance Consulting may mean someone who advises, and a Contractor may mean hired code muscle, both definitions quickly crumble under scrutiny.

    I was hoping to affirm, deny, and challenge my assumptions, and I feel this is a really good first pass. When things start to suck, I tend to do a lot of quick justifications for my situation. I dare say I do my best to ensure 100% are NOT delusions constructed to deny the inevitable and/or obvious, but rather silver linings, and hopefully better perspectives. For example, in all the times in my career where I hated my current situation, I could always find some redeeming factor. Not necessarily redeeming of the forces that contributed to my suffering, but rather some positive and endearing that arose, and continues to do so while I am still there. While it’s sad I need to get into such dire straits to really appreciate and even recognize some, it’s not always that way. I’m pretty quick to recognize good learning and growing opportunities, whether good or ill, regardless of the weather. It’s just easier on the willpower if you give it some reason(s) to buttress it up.

    Case in point, 5 years ago I was at the studio at my former job furiously clicking away at 11:30pm at night, alone on a Friday night, my 3rd one in a row. I was building a website for my boss to sell his house. Rather, I was making changes that my boss wanted via email communication. What did I learn? Don’t use Fireworks to build a website. I use Fireworks to this day for mockups, image editing and compression as well as it being at the hub of my production art workflow. You don’t, however, see 37signals spouting, “Yes, we use Fireworks-created image maps for every page of our site.” And, those tortuous 6 weeks got me extremely good with Fireworks.

    Small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but valid for me nonetheless.

    Either way, some hour and a half’s gallivant on Google to challenge assumptions has confirmed some, denied others, and learnt me on some new concepts. The jury’s still out, but two things are certainly clear. First, I have no intention of consulting the rest of my life. I had a lot more enjoyment in contracting, and labeling myself under either of the definitions is not what I want to do longterm. Secondly, I have a ton more to learn about consulting.

    Yes, I’m aware the statements contradict themselves, but the latter receives precedence. While I’m frustrated I have no tact with clients, and I refuse to give up when Flex won’t take my 32bit transparency thus taking more hours than approved, I recognize I have a lot more to learn, and should withhold any long term judgments. I’ve learned a lot already, those lessons are valuable, and the influx of them hasn’t slowed down.

    …still, f’me this is frustrating. Flex? You my bitch. Consulting? :: WHAP! :: Thank you… can I have another?

    Some good links I found on just the first page of a Google search. I’m sure if I read some books, periodicals, and talked to others I’d get some more context. Still, this was great for just a 1 hour investment.

    Great Overview of the definitions

    One take on how you are sought after

    10 things to ensure you don’t do with your client

    Consulting vs. Contracting

    Followup

    Original Article

    .NET’rz rebuttal

    Recruiters?

    Honesty

    Best Response

  • Ruby Chronicles #1: Blocks and Yield

    A “wtf” at lunch today while reading this book. There is a section on the 2 types of blocks in Ruby’s methods, and a description of the “yield” method. Totally jacked; it’s basically like sending an anonymous function in ActionScript seperate from a method’s parameters. The function then in turn runs that block of code for every yield statement. The yield statement can also pass parameters to this code block. Why you’d do this is beyond me, but when I yield, I’ll be using yield… imagine that?

    For example, here’s Ruby calling a method, passing a block that the yield will run inside of the method:

    def method
   puts "start of method"
   yield("this'll be arg1", "this'll be arg2")
   yield("this'll be arg1", "this'll be arg2")
   puts "end of method"
end

method {|arg1, arg2| puts arg1 + ", " + arg2}

    It’ll output (I think):

    start of method
    this’ll be arg1, this’ll be arg2
    this’ll be arg1, this’ll be arg2
    end of method

    The equivalent in ActionScript 1 is:

    function method ( someFunc )
{
   trace("start of function");
   someFunc.call(this, "this'll be arg1", "this'll be arg2");
   someFunc.call(this, "this'll be arg1", "this'll be arg2");
   trace("end of function");
}


method(function(arg1, arg2){ trace(arg1 + ", " + arg2); });

    Which outputs:

    start of function
    this’ll be arg1, this’ll be arg2
    this’ll be arg1, this’ll be arg2
    end of function

    The only difference is the ActionScript example sends it as an argument whereas in Ruby, it appears to be sent as a seperate entity from the methods invocation parameters.

    Don’t get me started on the Archeologist degree one needs to read printf statements…

    Anyway, weird stuff.

  • Flickr’s New Non-Flash Organizer

    Just read Nathan Pitman’s report about the updated Flickr Gamma version. One particular note was the Organizer is no longer done in Flash. Scanning the the announcement page, help page, and bug list, I couldn’t really find any information or context as to why. Anyone have any more info?

  • Sessions with Flex and Flash

    I’m looking for corroboration, confirmation, and/or corrections, so if you got ’em, throw ’em in the comments please and I’ll update this post.

    The more popular Flex and Flash gets, the more exposure I get to large server-side development teams. As most have developed a lot of web based applications, the question of session handling comes up time and time again. I’ve attempted to compare and contrast the current known methods for utilizing sessions in a web browser, and their parrellels with Flex & Flash development. My goal is to better understand why you do or do not need session handling in your web application.

    In this post’s context, a session is defined as a way to uniquely indentify the client to the server. Since normal http interactions are stateless, there is no way for a request from the client web browser to the server to be uniquely identified. Where such situations are needed to know which client is which, and keep data associated with that client while they are interacting with the web application, a sessions is used. The real-world example is keep a list of items a user has added to their cart in an ecommerce site. Even if they go from page to page throughout the site, or back, the session keeps track of their cart items.

    The three main ways to do this are:

    1. appending variables to the URL string
    2. hidden form field
    3. cookies

    The first way involves appending variables that are relevant to the web application state to the end of the URL and making sure each page continues to attach this information along as well. Hyperlinks may add &id=234890somerandomnum&cartitem1=someproductid to the end of the URL when travelling from page to page. The server-side code garner’s context, if needed, since these variables are passed to the server before processing the next page. The pro’s to this is you can easily see what variables are working during development, and this allows you to tweak your pages to test things while using the app. The cons are unweildy URL’s that are extremely long, if you miss passing one variable the whole thing gets fubarred, and harder to secure (assuming your methods handling the server-side variables don’t check for arbitrary data which they should).

    The second way involves sticking a session ID or even additional vars like the above into a hidden form field(s).

    The third way involves utilizing cookies that store session information. Pro is this is very application transparent for the front end, but the con is if cookies are disabled, it won’t work.

    My take as to why server-side developers like sessions is that role information is encapsulated into the request. In the case of AMFPHP for example, each server-side method in a PHP class has a role or set of roles that are allowed to call it. Upon logging in using normal browser security, you’re role is set. This provides transparent interaction between client and server. You can even handle a custom fault of not having the role privaledge to access certain functionality, or even “re-login” if need be without refreshing the page. I guess I don’t understand where this persists, though. J2EE has a similiar setup with a nice, built-in security that works.

    The state arguments, however, make no sense. It is understandable since it requires a lot of effort to work with the developers to get them out of the “page” mindset. There is no page; it’s an application like Outlook; it has state, and doesn’t lose it. There is no page refresh.

    I once worked on a Flash app where in using OpenAMF, the Java guy wanted me to pass him the session ID as the first parameter to every method call. I’d login, get the sessionID as a return value, and set it to a global (static) variable in the Flash app. Every Delegate call pre-pended this value as the first parameter to method calls. It wasn’t so bad, but I never really understood what the session gave us.

    The hidden form variable works similiar to the above; you just store whatever variables you want to keep around in a global/static class.

    While Flex & Flash have their own cookies, they are used for ensuring data persistence across application usage, not sessions. So, if I reboot my computer after using an application, the data will be there tomorrow type of thing. They are for data storage. Just like browser cookies I guess, only harder to delete (harder meaning not built into web browsers like cookies are).

    The current Flex & ColdFusion app I work on, we don’t use ’em. The Flex app keeps state, and just calls ColdFusion CRUD methods. I’m sure we could add roles if need be, but I guess I just don’t get it beyond the built in security some server-side technology has to authenticate requests.

    I’ve never really found a definitive article explaining the session’s role in Flash & Flex development. I’ve seen it discussed more on Flexcoders, but this is mainly because of the influx of server-side talent on that list who is used to dealing with such state. The typical response is “you don’t need them, Flex is a stateful client”, and yet the “logging in” is still discussed. If anyone has anymore sources to add to the above (or correct), please link.