Software is Like Legos

Writing software is a lot like building things with Legos; the really cool part is you get to invent/mold/create many of the Legos you’ll use to build your thing.

If you create them wisely, everything fits together neatly and you have a lovely creation you can build upon and adapt in the future.

If you create them foolishly you can still mash them together to create your thing, but it will be a real bear the next time you need to make an adjustment to it.

GameTonight, now with Event Times

I’ve updated GameTonight to show the time of the event. This is also included in the JSON API and Status Board output. No guarantees that the event times are correct, but they are faithfully represented from the data feed.

This is something that I put off for three years because I was having all sorts of weirdness with time calculations on my local machine vs. the server GameTonight is running on. Thanks to Joe and his incessant nagging constant encouragement, I slogged through the necessary debugging this morning and finally got things set.

I know enough to know that whenever you’re working with dates and times, you want to do everything in GMT then convert out to a local timezone as a very last step. I also know that you probably want your app code to run in GMT rather than looking at the server’s timezone.

In trying to be careful about doing these things right, I learned a bunch of things that didn’t work. Ultimately the issue was with how mktime(), gmmktime(), gmdate() and date() do or do not use the timezone declared for the app vs. the server’s timezone.

Pro tip: use these in pairs (gmmktime() goes with gmdate() while mktime() goes with date()) and create useful logging functions to test their output on various machines/servers. Or not, your mileage may vary.

Your first step when you think “I want to do a project that involves dates, times and events.” should be to slap yourself in the face.

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That feeling when you know you’ve written this piece of code before but can’t remember what project it was for or where to look for it.

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@cfree I’m only one data point, but Time Machine has failed for me 100% of the time and SuperDuper! has succeeded for me 100% of the time.

Twitter vs. Feed Reading

This weekend, Luis wrote about his information diet1 in the wake of Google Reader’s impending closure. While reading his post, I thought about my own feed reading pattern.

I hear lots of people say that Twitter has replaced feed reading for them. I don’t think that works for me, for several reasons:

  1. I like having a casual relationship with Twitter. I don’t want to feel like I have to read everything in my stream for fear of missing something. On days like today when I have meetings all afternoon, I will completely ignore Twitter.
  2. I don’t want certain stuff in my Twitter feed. There are news sources that I like to skim (then mark all as read) in my feed reader that I don’t want in my Twitter feed. Twitter is still personal to me. Most of the people I follow are folks I am friends with.2 Twitter is an intentional distraction for me and I don’t want it to be more than that.
  3. Feed reading is great for following sites that post infrequently, but have great stuff. This morning’s post by Charles Miller is a great example. In many ways, it’s the best tool I’ve found for what I really want: following interesting people.3

I haven’t made a choice for my next feed reader server-side service yet, but I am happy with Reeder for iOS and Mac so I’m likely to stay with something it is compatible with. At the moment this means Feedbin, but I’m also considering self-hosting something. I’d love an Open Source parsing/crawling back-end that implemented Google Reader’s API; plus Reeder adding support for setting a custom API endpoint URL.

Whatever solution I end up going with, feed reading isn’t going to leave my daily workflow anytime soon.

  1. I had culled my feed list and added a few new sources a few months ago, after letting my sources stagnate for years. ↩
  2. I use lists to track business acquaintances, topics, etc. ↩
  3. I would really love, and have played with the idea of building, an app/service that is people centric instead of service/content centric. Aggregate content from social networks, blogs, GitHub activity, etc. and allow me to choose what content from each person I want to subscribe to. Along those lines, I’d love to make my website the owner of that source of data lists… a simple JSON API that returns information about my available content. ↩

Why We Should Teach Programming →

Hadn’t thought of programming this way before but I completely agree. One big example for me is with legal contracts. Thinking of them as “this part does this, this part does that” makes them much easier to understand and negotiate.

Where polyglotism and “right tool for the job” goes awry →

One of the things I enjoy most is incorporating a good idea from one language/project/etc. into another (obviously, you need exposure to other languages/projects/ideas to do this). You can see examples of this in the code I’ve written that interacts with WordPress and how it’s adopted more of an MVC style over time.

I suppose the upside of spending a few hours debugging something is learning how a bunch of code you didn’t write actually works.

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“Dad said ‘no’, but I’m going to do it anyway.” At least it was said cheerfully.

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