September was recently my first year at SeatMe, along with my first full year living in San Francisco. It’s been a great year as a programmer, doing some awesome things at a startup that I love, and for life in general, moving closer to many friends in the area. As part of this milestone, I wanted to reflect on what has been accomplished and things I’ve learned along the way.
Two for one special today. My reading backlog of late has been oriented on some well known books covering ideas; how they spread, how they are shared, and how you can get your ideas to stay in someone’s head. I am always interested in improving how I can communicate with world around me and these books offer some great viewpoints on that subject.
The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell
ISBN: 0316346624
The Design Of Everyday Things
Donald A. Norman
ISBN: 0465067107
An interesting look at the design of doors, computers, and things that we interact with daily. The book breaks down the major components of design and how they work. I learned about affordance, which the quality of something to do a task; a door handle affords being opened. The book was an interesting mix of psychology and science, which I’ve studied before with cognitive science. By better understanding how objects exists and how humans interact with those objects, you can design better interactions with everything.
Wednesday night I gave a presentation on how I deploy SeatMe.com @ the Life360 offices in SF. It was pretty fun and had a good turnout! Here’s that presentation:
One other idea someone had mentioned afterward for running a local PyPI was to run a Squid proxy in front of PyPI and set a 1 year cache on everything. The more I think about, it’s pretty ingenious and simple, versus running a full Python app.
After some recent emails from new users of Journal, I’ve released version 0.3. (Journal is a CLI tool to help with keeping a work/personal journal).
If you have Journal installed with pip, you can
$ pip install -U journal
This version has been a long time coming, pulling in some patches from my friend Drew and changing how arguments passing to Journal are handled. Here is the official list:
I’m really looking forward to attending my first PyCon this weekend. After moving to SF, it’s great to have so many cool conferences right in my backyard! It’s sold out this year, which might be a first? The talks look great, but I’m just as hopeful to meet a bunch of cool people and trade ideas on projects and Python. After writing Python for around 5-6 years now, I’m finally beginning to understand most things and hopeful to begin contributing to large projects or things that might help improve the language.
Something I’ve noticed lately with vim plugins are that miniscripts and smaller vim tweaks, any sort of vim functionality, are being packaged and shared as a proper vim plugins via git, not just big IDE style plugins. This may not be an entirely new idea, but I think it’s becoming more of the norm to use pathogen and git submodules to share everything vim related, rather than copying and pasting actual code, I think the idea of managing everything via git, github, and git submodules is pretty neat.
A habit I’ve developed over the last few years is to backup all of my online artifacts and identities once the year ends. Maybe I’m just a bit paranoid, but in this day and age with more and more things being stored in the cloud, control and access to your data is being shifted to faceless servers and scripts that can disconnect you quite easily with little recourse. Whether it’s a TOS violation, a change in a company’s policy, or just something else screwy, it’s not something to worry about daily, but it’s better to be prepared.
I wanted to do some kind of reflection this year, so may as well hop on the bandwagon.
###Whatās the coolest Python application, framework or library you have discovered in 2011?
Fabric. For a good six months of this year, I was managing everything server-wise at my last job through Fabric and learned a good deal about it, hacking in some features and giving a presentation on it at the local Pittsburgh users group. It’s great to be able to automate things and to have that ability in Python.
Design For Hackers
David Kadavy
ISBN: 1119998956
###Whatās The Point?
Design, layout, fonts, and color theory for websites and web applications. Kadavy covers all the main points of design, how design affects how we use things, and through understanding your design decisions, how you can make better decisions.
###How Was It?
A useful and interesting read! The hacker in me likes well organized and straightforward things. Each of the main elements of design were given a chapter and covered thoroughly: what they are, how they work and why they exist in a historical context. There were plenty of visual examples that were current and useful.