Peter Seale's weblog

Thursday, February 21, 2013 7:24:22 AM UTC 

It took two minutes.

While browsing the discourse source code, and more specifically while attempting to load it in Sublime Text 2, I came across their sublime-project file. I'm already aware of these project files, which by the way are great for excluding files and folders you don't want to see in the sidebar, or see included in search results. I do a lot of 'Find in Files' in my day-to-day work, and sometimes get 5007 results, most of which come from a log file. Well I used to get the results, then I saw the light and used a sublime-project file and everything was great.

Fast forward to three minutes ago and my discovery of the Discourse project's sublime-project file.

You can set tab settings in your project files

This is something I had no idea was possible: project-specific tab settings!

  "settings":
    {
        "tab_size": 2,
        "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true
    }

Possibly the greatest thing about this little snippet is the line "tab_size": 2 is indented 4 spots from its parent. The rest of the file is consistently indented 2 spaces.

I don't know if the "for consistency, on this project we use 2 spaces for tabs universally, and btw this line is indented 4" situation is unintentional irony, but I'd like to think that someone did it on purpose. Because that's what I would do.

Final Note

Assuming I ever post again, when I do post again, it will be less researched, quick, unformed thoughts, or maybe things that are already obvious to everyone else. Basically like my twitter feed. I'm thinking of calling this series of posts The World Of Duh. You're welcome.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012 6:20:41 AM UTC 

tl;dr

If you're considering trying out Ruby, just run Ruby inside of Ubuntu on a VirtualBox VM instead of Ruby on native Windows, because the Ruby/Ubuntu/VirtualBox combo is completely painless. I might even be so bold as to say flawless.

Linux is painless (today)

As someone who has lost hours and hours and hours unsuccessfully troubleshooting, and as someone who has experienced a Personal Complete And Total Data Loss Incident, I want to acknowledge that running "linux" in its many flavors can be painful.

And it is with that in mind that I want to let you know that, as of January 2012, I'm having no problems.

With no special configuration required, I've set up:

• VirtualBox (free for non-commercial use)
• the newest stable Ubuntu 64-bit release
• with an instantly adjustable monitor resolution via VirtualBox extensions for Ubuntu and RIGHT CTRL+F
• with working sound *note: don't take this for granted, you punks
• with both Chrome and Firefox
• with internet access, even when I switch from ethernet to wireless and back (my fellow former VirtualPC/Virtual Server users are having PTSD flashbacks right now, sorry)
• with equally snappy performance as the host Windows 7 machine
• with easy and "Windows intuitive" text editing via Sublime Text 2 AKA "new hotness" – by the way, Sublime Text behaves identically on Windows and Ubuntu, so I'm having zero Text Editor Culture Shock. We can talk about text editors later—today, the point I want to make is that by using Sublime Text I can defer "the talk". Compare to the past where my choices were vim (:qA!), emacs (CTRL+X, CTRL+C), and pico (oh sweet, sweet menus written in English!); or the past where I couldn't figure out how to get pico installed and worked with vim. (Vim protip: press "i" and it goes into Normal Mode, then anytime it starts acting weird, hit ESC a bunch and try and get back into Normal Mode. And yes, I said "protip".)
• with copy/paste between host and VM
• with working VM pause/resume that takes a grand total of 2 seconds

So to be clear, it wasn't always this easy.

It probably took less time to install and update Ubuntu than a Windows 7 VM, and I've done both recently, so I guess that makes me a leading world authority on how long it takes to install operating systems on VMs.

It even took less time to blunder through apt-get-ting/gem-ing/bundle-ing all the dev tools on Ubuntu than to sleepwalk through the VS2010 + SP + SQL + SP installers.

So there's your anecdote. As of January of 2012, it's easy.

What does this mean

If you're considering tinkering with "the Ruby" or whatever*, just install VirtualBox and Ubuntu…or whatever works for you. I'm just here to tell you that it's very easy to get an Ubuntu VM set up and running, and it's easier than trying to get Ruby working on Windows.

And, when the Ruby On Windows Pain Factor dramatically drops (like it did with git—oh by the way—if you haven't heard already, running Git on Windows is easy now), maybe you'll hear from me again.

Friday, November 11, 2011 11:07:42 PM UTC 

Every post I write should come with this standard disclaimer. If I ever re-do my blog, I’ll link to this standard disclaimer from the top of every blog post.

This Stuff Just Doesn’t Matter

This stuff, this software development stuff in and of itself, just doesn’t matter. It isn’t the end goal. There are bigger things in life.

All things being equal, it is better to be a competent software developer than an incompetent software developer. This is why I write posts about how to invest my limited time.

All things being equal, it is better to be learned rather than ignorant about software development practices. This is why from time to time I feel the urge to linkblog posts I find on twitter that I believe my blog audience (i.e. you) haven’t seen, and may benefit from. My linkblog posts are gold, I tell you, gold.

All things being equal, it is better to be intentional about your career path and career goals, especially when it comes to dealing with Microsoft’s endless framework lahar. I see a lot of time wasted on studying for exams, and attention given to half-baked frameworks that subsequently under deliver. And I don’t know why, but I have the urge to fix this problem. For those of you who could not care less about helping others make wiser choices with their learning investments, sorry, but it’s who I am, and it bothers me enough to blog about the topic…frequently.

All things being equal, it is better to go to work and experience less unnecessary pain. This is where a lot of my “written for the search engine” and “suriving TFS” posts come from, and where I hope most people find value. I write many of my blog posts with the singular goal of reducing pain. Pain isn’t the ultimate evil. (There’s a great discussion about pain in A Canticle For Leibowitz, which by the way is the first post-apocalyptic book, but I’m too lazy to find the exact quote. PS—dork alert)

All things being equal, it’s more productive for me to blog here than to sit on the couch on a Saturday and take a nap while watching college football. Though there’s nothing wrong with any combination of naps and college football. It’s also better for me to blog than to play video games; or browse the gaming subreddits; or watch someone on twitch.tv live streaming while they play video games; or best of all watch someone on twitch.tv live streaming while they browse the gaming subreddits, which frees you from the chore of browsing the internet yourself. You should probably visit that hyperlink, because it’s just perfect. It’s like watching Inception if Inception featured laziness as its major theme. It just makes sense. Go watch Inception, and go click that link.

I’m not a super expert genius ninja samurai ZeroCool hacker

If it appears that I’m presenting myself as an authority on any topic, make sure I back it up with personal experience. If I don’t have the personal experience to back up my claims, take my argument for what it is: an unsupported opinion. I know that I’m not an expert, and when writing blog posts my self-image doesn’t change—but maybe here on the internet, where they don’t know you’re not a dog, you don’t read my posts the way I intend for you to.

I’m not an expert, but if it so happens I am, I’ll tell you why.

This is a good rule in general. Given blog posts aren’t built off of months of investigative journalism or academic research, the best blog posts are harvested from personal experience (as opposed to blog posts written by pundits with no experience). And let me draw one more point from this: a lot of .NET experts aren’t experts either on the subjects they write about. They are no more an expert, no more experienced, no more capable and have no better software development experience than you or me. They’re just people like you or me with better communication skills. With that said, some of them are true experts. The difference between a good blog post and a great blog post is, in my opinion, the great blog posts are harvested from years of painful experience. Compare this great blog post to my post on the same subject, but clearly written from a newbie’s perspective for an example of this in action.

One additional point I’d like to make is that I feel like I’ve crested the hill and I get it now. Software development is a known problem for me. I’m comfortable with the things I know, and I’m comfortable not knowing the things I’m fuzzy about and still working on (see: estimation; finding out what the customer wants), and I’m comfortable with the fact that I may never learn Haskell, or SmallTalk, or BizTalk, or Joomla. This greater sense of perspective wasn’t always how I was, and I get the idea that most of the working world is full of people who don’t get it yet. So yet another of my part-time crusades is to get everyone up to speed, at least to the point where they get it. I’ve met people who (without some help) will remain forever behind, forever…for lack of a better word: incompetent. And I don’t see my “getting-it-ness” as unique expertise but simply what all software developers should have. I look around and I don’t see that…getting-it-ness. Find me a better word. I can’t write more explanatory text right now without repeating myself.

I will make every effort not to blog work arguments, or be passive-aggressive in general

My theory is most blog posts spring forth from blog arguments or work frustrations, as I feel this urge to blog work arguments from time to time. If I won’t say it in person, I shouldn’t say it on the blog. And even if I say it in person, some work arguments should be kept in the family.

Every now and then I step out of bounds.

And finally, this stuff just doesn’t matter

Software development is not important in the grand scheme of things. Being a bad software developer in and of itself does not make you morally inferior. To pick on something specifically: software craftsmanship is not a new morality, whereby you are righteous (professional?) if you write clean code and unrighteous (unprofessional?) if you don’t. Depending on the bigger picture, and I place emphasis on the phrase bigger picture, you may be doing serious harm by e.g. overdosing radiation therapy patients via your software, or more likely, putting your company out of business because of your incompetence—but in and of itself, being a bad (worse than average?) software developer isn’t evil.

This stuff just doesn’t matter.

Every post I write, no matter how passionate I may sound, no matter if in truth I get carried away and lose perspective and start believing it, this stuff just doesn’t matter.

Wednesday, July 06, 2011 5:01:48 AM UTC 

Microsoft MVPs, all aboard!

“It’s like we were all reinventing wheels and barrels in .NET land in the past 5 years, when just on the other side of the island, people were beginning to wonder what is the best material to pave a highway with? … It’s like the Ruby community lives 3x faster than the .NET community, and has been for the past 5 years.”

“Why is it a pattern that, … people try out Rails, and they just never come back?”

“I’m very happy with the tooling I have at hand at this point. I can’t really say, right now, that I’m missing anything from my .NET development environment. Quite the contrary, actually; not having to cope with the lockups of VS, the non-sense behavior of TFS, the testing-hostile tools and frameworks, has been a blessing.”

“ASP.NET MVC is a fine framework. I just don’t feel like it is as productive as it could be.”

…the above list hastily compiled off the top of my head.

There are no .NET developers

“Other than that, I'd rather not spend time on [learning .NET at home]. It's not that i don't like .NET, but i just don't find it a very interesting space to be in anymore. There's very little innovation going on and the new things that the community and Microsoft are working on most often seem like either new libraries or frameworks to keep doing the same things we've been doing for years, or building things that other development communities already have for a while now. It also doesn't help that a lot of the people who used to be in the ALT.NET community seem to be spending a lot of their spare time learning new languages and platforms instead of pushing for improvement in the .NET community like they used to do.”

“What if .NET developers stopped identifying themselves as .NET developers? What if they just considered themselves to be developers? I think we’d see a lot less, “how do we get Microsoft X to catch up with Y?” and a lot more “Let’s just use Y because it already does what we want.”

Seriously, the amount of energy being poured into playing catch up is saddening. Imagine if all of that effort was poured into the tool that’s already better at this.

There are no .NET Developers. There are only developers who have been brainwashed into thinking they can only write code in .NET.”

Takeaways

1. Ruby (Rails) and other non-.NET frameworks are crossing the chasm into the mainstream.
2. Rails is a better platform. Every former .NET developer who has first tried, then written, about Ruby on Rails has reported it’s both more enjoyable and more productive. Every, single, one. EDIT 2011-07-11: ok, maybe I exaggerated. Ken has something to say as a .NET/Ruby guy who still likes .NET as much as/more than Ruby
3. I’m sensing (and feeling) Microsoft’s .NET platform is stagnating, especially recently. Aside from multiple positive reports [1, 2] on the NHibernate rewrite, I have nothing to look forward to in .NET. And while I’m here, let me be the first to say: providing a new platform for Windows development excites me in the same way that iPhone-platform development excites me—that is to say, not at all.
4. You don’t have to self-identify as a .NET developer. Instead, self-identify as a developer whose skillset is in .NET. Learn another platform (which is surprisingly easy) instead of investing extra effort in .NET. I happen to like the WPF project I work on, and my next project will probably be .NET (given my skillset), but there’s no reason I have to assume it will be .NET.

EDIT 2011-07-14: New Takeaways

There have been many, many comments over what I’ve written. My average blog post gets 0 comments. The median for blog comments here is also 0. The 75% quartile for blog comments: also 0. The 90 percentile mark for blog comments—you guessed it—also 0! So it was something of a shock to see people are actually reading this post, and commenting or blogging responses.

And very few of them seem all that happy with my post.

Many of them assume that I am a Ruby zealot, or that this post was about “Ruby vs. .NET”, so I must have written something poorly above. I don’t know. My new takeaways (which supersede the old list) will hopefully give you a better idea of what I meant to say originally.

It’s important to note the context as well. My blog is mostly targeted at people like me, that is to say, .NET developers, and the people who forgot to unsubscribe when I stopped posting about SharePoint. The post should not categorically offend everybody, no matter what background, but from all the feedback I’m getting: it is.

On with the takeaways:

1. .NET developers (i.e., YOU) should check out Rails. If you are a .NET developer, and you haven’t checked out other frameworks like Ruby on Rails, you should do so. Instead of learning about Silverlight, for example, or whatever v1 Microsoft product that comes out of BUILD, or waste your time studying for MS certifications (seriously?), check out Rails. Rails is a viable way do develop web applications and is worth the time investment. Somewhere down the line, you may even be able to get paid to do Rails work, even in a city like Houston, even outside of the startup scene. And, it is surprisingly easy to learn other platforms.
   PS—these are not strawmen alternative learning investments I’m setting up. There are real people, real .NET developers, who spend their time struggling through WCF books to take the exam, or go “all in” and study up on the newest MS framework, and never quite get caught up.
2. Drop the “.NET developer” mindset. There is a kind of assumption among .NET developers that we are .NET developers, and will use whatever the .NET framework provides to solve our problems. If we need to develop a web application, for example, we’ll consider ASP.NET WebForms or MVC, or maybe one of the alternate .NET web frameworks. Or SharePoint. We don’t look outside the walls. So, look outside the walls. .NET isn’t as fresh and shiny as it used to appear, and the alternatives are getting quite good (some would say: better, believe it or not). Again, it is surprisingly easy to learn other platforms.