The Codebelay Blog

Author: barce

  • Coders Who Don’t Job Interview: Zed Shaw

    I wrote a piece about the current state of job recruiting from a coder looking for work. I wondered:

    What would it be like if you didn’t have to do a job interview?

    (The non-tl;dr summary is below.)

    By “job interview,” I just mean the normal process where I job candidate replies to an ad, contacts an employer directly, or works with a recruiter, and gets a job through that process. High-profile experts are courted, or work out a mutually beneficial deal where it doesn’t feel like an interview.

    I asked around for folks that didn’t have to interview. One name that consistently came to the top was Zed Shaw.

    Zed is the creator of the Mongrel Web Server, and a really great framework that is powered by Mongrel, Tir. Personally, I first heard of him from a video Leah Culver linked to on a talk that Zed gave, “The ACL is dead.” A careful viewing of that talk is always rewarded, especially if you are a coder freelancing for a corporation.

    Here’s my interview with him (conducted over email). Thanks Zed!

    Barce: What’s your own process for choosing the projects you want to work on?

    Zed: Within my profession I try to just work on whatever is needed to get the
    project or job done. Sometimes that ends up being a lot of crap work so
    other people can do more important stuff. Professionally I don’t mind
    this kind of work as it’s low investment and removes the pressure off
    other folks who would rather do interesting things. I think I also tend
    to pick off the lower level work because most of my original ideas are
    usually too weird for a professional setting.

    Personally, I tend to work on projects that match ideas I might have,
    and usually they have a secondary motive that’s outside of programming.
    Many times these ideas come from combining a couple of concepts, or
    they’re based on a problem I’ve noticed, or they are just a kind of
    funny joke or cool hack I thought up.

    I think the most important thing is I don’t try to plan my inspiration
    in my personal projects, but instead go with it when it comes. I don’t
    have a “process”, and in fact I think “process” kills creativity.
    Proess definitely helps make creative ideas a reality, but it doesn’t
    create the initial concepts very well.

    Professionally though, inspiration is for amateurs and I just do my
    work.

    Barce: What advice can you give someone who feels trapped by their job or surrounded by recruiters?

    Zed: Well, if you’re trapped by your job then I’d say start working on
    getting a new one. Nobody is every really *trapped*, but maybe you
    can’t just quit right away. Instead, work on projects at home,
    constantly look for new work, and move to where the work is. Even if
    it’s temporary, moving to say San Francisco during the boom times could
    be a major boost to your career.

    I’d also say that going back to school is a good way to update your life
    and change your profession. I’m a firm believer in getting government
    student loans and using them to go to school. They’re cheap, low
    interest, and the US government is usually very nice about letting you
    pay them back. I’m not so sure about other places around the world
    though.

    Barcee: What’s the most disruptive technology you know about right now?

    Zed: If I were to be honest, I’d have to say Facebook, even though I
    absolutely hate it. It’s probably the one technology in recent history,
    maybe after HTTP and the Browser, that is changing the way governments,
    societies, and regular people work. It’s also sort of irritating that
    the most important thing to hit most people’s lives is also one of the
    most privacy invading companies in the world.

    After that I’d have to say the rise of automated operations and
    virtualized machines. Things like Xen, kvm, and even llvm as compiler
    infrastructure are changing how systems are managed and deployed, which
    then leads to bigger automation for large hetergenous networks. I’m
    sort of waiting for operating systems to catch up and realize that their
    configuration systems are getting in the way of real automation.

    Barce: Thanks again, Zed, for the interview. The take aways that I hope readers get from this are:

    • Zed has open source projects that free him from the normal interviewing process. Building your own open source project is one way to free yourself.
    • “Professionally though, inspiration is for amateurs and I just do my work.”
    • “[W]ork on projects at home,
      constantly look for new work, and move to where the work is.”
    • Facebook is the most disruptive technology that’s changing governments… Virtualization / Cloud technologies are a 2nd.

  • Django Follows the Law of Least Googling

    What web framework should someone new to web development learn?

    Any framework that follows what I call “The Law of Least Googling.” This law states that a tutorial will not let a learner have to Google anything for as long as possible and for as little as possible.

    I’ve followed the Django Tutorial all the way to the end. I did not use Google once, which means Django follows The Law of Least Googling.

    Because of this, I am now recommending that any person new to web development use Django.

    I used to think Rails was the way to go but because of the dependency mess with having to use Rake 0.8.7 to get RSpec working correctly, I am less inclined. Rails is a pain to install on Windows. You also have to google how to get the MySQL gem installed. This is not ideal when SQLite can’t get installed for some reason.

    But once you get Rails running it’s great, but as a newbie, I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of folks already gave up.

    Rails isn’t that bad. It hits these 3 snags:

    • Issues with SQLite3 or MySQL gem install
    • Creating sessions not working correctly with Rake 0.9.2. But There’s a patch.
    • It’s a pain to install on Windows, but I’m not really a Win Fanboy.

    Now if we’re talking LAMP, then forget it. It’s easy to get going with something like MAMP, or WAMP, but the frameworks simply don’t have that install and learn to code feel that Rails or Django has. You really cannot use a PHP framework without having to resort to Google very early. For example with CodeIgniter I have to figure out how to point my doc root correctly via Googling.

    My main take away is that if you want to learn to code on the web do it on Django. Python is the language that powers Django. There’s also a great Python tutorial to get you started.

  • I Did What I Loved and Nearly Destroyed Myself

    This is a polemic against the well-written blog post of Adam Conrad called “Do What You Love or You Will Destroy Yourself.”

    The same warning that he applied to his post, I am applying here. There’s lots of stuff, but feel free to skip down to the useful bits at the end.

    I start off by presenting what I took away from Adam’s impassioned piece. Like me, Adam had an early career in computing. I wasn’t lucky enough to have the web be the thing when I turned 19, but I knew enough Perl to get a job coding at the university. I used Perl to create mailing labels that would be stuck on envelopes for snail mail.

    My aha moment came with a Perl-CGI freelance gig that I got in the 90s. I spent most of the 90s as a sysadmin. When I saw that my code was “live.” That was such a great high and experience. I felt powerful and influential, even though it was just a dentist’s website.

    In a similar “listening to my internship moment,” I decided working on the Internet was where I wanted to be. I took about 2 years from this aha moment until I code work as a coder.

    Where’s the problem?

    My true love in life is philosophy.

    For me this means reading and writing in a way that brings up questions and edifies, an existence that sees the beauty of a question not answered, a life that from a coder perspective is highly suspect and irrelevant. How many coders do you know *love* philosophy?

    I would honestly love to spend my days having sex, drinking coffee, reading, writing and more sex – with travel and several residences on the Mediterranean coast of Spain and Costa Rica (Pacific side), thrown in.

    I lived in such a way for nearly two years without the residences but with travel to London and Rome. The sad, sad truth of it is that there is no money at the end of it, and I ended up very much in debt and almost bankrupt. I just became credit card debt free 2 years ago after starting to learn about investing with mexc uk. *phew*

    If you believe that if you do what you love and you will save yourself, you are believing in something that is not true for everyone, and it wreaks of the Cargo Cult. What you love will not determine what makes you thrive; the world figures that out for you.

    There’s a bunch of Joseph Campbell crap floating around that goes, “Follow your bliss.” So many people have followed it blindly to their doom. But you know what? “Follow your bliss,” sells books because it makes people feel better.

    Let me leave you a quote from one of the great philosophers of the Golden Age of Advertising, Don Draper:

    “I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie, there is no system, the universe is indifferent.”

    Here are the take aways and useful bits:

    • As a coder you have to be logical and realistic. Don’t let your sources of inspiration lead you astray.
    • Doing what you love can either make you thrive or ruin you. If it’s choosing between front-end or back-end dev, you’ll thrive either way right now. Think things through.
    • It is all about work-life balance but going all-in makes a great story.

  • Recruiting is Broken: The $2400 Face to Face Interview

    I lost a week of billable last week. That’s how much it costs if you go all out and turn on the recruiter fire hose.

    I got a face to face interview today. It was my $2400 face to face interview and I had to just turn it down because of the back log.

    Right now my clients are less than happy, and now it’s a serious difficult march to get stuff done.

    Now it’s great to be wanted, but to have that cost you money is pretty ridiculous. As a buyer, I shouldn’t have to spend money to buy what I want.

    Recruiting is seriously broken. Only one recruiter really served my needs. The rest of them seriously wasted my time and their clients’ time.

    What we need is technology to disrupt recruiting.

    Who is in?

  • What’s it like to be recruited?

    First off, I’m very grateful to my parents for getting me a computer when I was 8. I am not sure where I’d be if it wasn’t for that.

    I got inspiration from this HN article and did the same. My #s are way higher.

    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2608900

    As an experiment, I submitted my resume to Dice, Monster and CareerBuilder seeking a Ruby on Rails application developer position.

    The result:

    day calls voicemails emails
    Monday 46 22 39
    Tuesday 58 13 42
    Wednesday 23 11 34
    Totals 136 46 115

    I turned off Monster, Dice and CareerBuilder at 11 am on Tuesday and I’m still getting calls & emails.

    Recruiters were submitting resumes to one particular job twice without my permission. This happened 4 times and is definitely unethical behavior. It hurts candidates because you can’t interview at these places anymore.

    The question I’ve asked is: How much are you willing to offer?

    Most of the jobs are in the 80k – 100k range.

    This means that if you got to a startup with no recruiter and are making 120k, the recruiter’s company is making 20k – 40k on the sale of you.

    The better recruiters have connections to companies mentioned in Techcrunch and these are at the 130k range and up.

    The best rates are at Fortune 500 companies, where 200k is market. Heck, you can get an HTML5 / CSS3 position at one and get that rate.

    Another question: How long has this job been advertised?

    Sure demand is high, but a great job will never be on the market long. If it’s been there awhile or has been re-branded with a different buzzword, beware.

    The technology:

    I totally agree with folks who say that Facebook has made us closer, but recruiting technologies and its industry have made hiring managers and candidates farther apart. Someone or a group of people need to create a technology to disrupt this industry of selling people.

    http://socialrecruitingreport.com/2011/06/02/removing-the-middle-man/

    Recruiters are people who are trying to solve a pattern matching problem with crappy tools, but the better those tools get, the more in jeopardy their jobs are.

    How I feel? I feel objectified. It’s hard to swallow the image of a bunch of douchebags submitting your resume for jobs you never applied for.

    I guess this is what it’s like to be extremely attractive woman who has just become single. Some of the recruiters are total players and won’t leave you alone when moving on would be more efficient and a better bet. Others are really, really bad, and you can tell they are reading lines from a script.

    The recruiters I go with work like this:

    1. They tell me *their* story. Why are they in recruiting? What do they want out of life?

    2. They really listen. This means asking questions like, “How is Javascript different from AJAX?” Or deciding that what is on paper doesn’t match what they are hearing, and that you’re underselling yourself.

    3. They get you lunch for your time. This is totally optional, but very nice.

    4. They wrap up the meeting by telling you something about you that you might’ve not known about. E.G. one recruiter told me that I saw myself as more than just my job and that I like to protect people.

    5. They are very efficient without seeming so.

    What to do instead:

    If finding a job is a pattern matching problem, and you are a coder, then code that regex that brings you the job of your dreams.

    You’re looking at 20k – 40k more / year if you can just cut out the middle.

  • How Do You Explain WordPress? Use Ruby Metaphors!

    Last night I went to the WordPress Meetup at the Automattic office on Pier 38. I was late, but thank goodness that their sponsors had free booze and pizza.

    What struck me about this meetup was how folks explained WordPress and how to do production pushes with it.

    They had to use Ruby best practices metaphors.

    This is a dramatic change from 5 or 6 years ago when the opposite was the case.

    How do you push to production? “It’s like using Capistrano.”

    How does WordPress.com push code to production? “We use SVN with no branches. It’s like git without the merging.”

    What if you wanted to do RSpec / TDD? “Use something like Simpletest to exercise the user tables?”

    There was no automated solution for what to do with serialized data, and pushing that serialized data from dev to stage to prod if said data contained a different FQDN for each environment.

  • 5 Ways to Reduce Twitter Spam

    I’ve been working on reducing the amount of twitter spam.

    To me Twitter Spam is any sort of @ reply or DM that links to a site that tries to hack you back, and it can do so more than you care for.

    Here are 5 ways that work for reducing twitter spam:

    1. The silent cannot be spammed. If you stay quiet for a few days the amount of folks who will spam you goes down.
    2. Make your account private.
    3. Prune your account of the spam-like and spam vectors. For me this means removing folks that follow more than have followers or act like bots (because they probably are). This also means using Echofon on the iPhone. Echofon is helpful in that it shows the vector a spammer used to get to me. In this case I might get spammed an at reply every time a certain user “ats” me back. Echofon makes this very obvious.
    4. Actively block spammers and report them as spam.
    5. Avoid using terms that spammers like. You know the one’s I mean. I’d mention it here but it would ruin my blog’s ranking. 😀

  • EmpireAvenue.com is Addictive

    {EAV_BLOG_VER:b09730a5ab0973e6}
    I’m currently hooked on this virtual stockmarket for Social Media: empireavenue.com.

  • Fake User Wins Instagram Contest

    What’s a fake user? What’s fake?

    On Instagram, the photo-sharing social network for the iPhone, I caught eye of a drama that’s unfolding right now over who is a fake user and a real user – not to mention the distinction between fake photo and real photo.

    Here’s the blow by blow.

    • User @sunshinepeyton starts posting pics that are not her.
    • User @chicago has a contest which the fake account won.
    • Other folks start getting accused of being fake, e.g. @jakec223 , and starts the #iamnotfake tag.
    • @chicago calls out the faker. See below.
    • Users start posting photos of themselves with text to try and show they’re not fake, e.g. “My name is Jake @jakec223. I am not fake.”

  • Quora’s Troll Proof Trade Off

    I wrote an answer to a question using scientifically backed up data on Quora.

    The result? My answer is totally at the bottom. Who’s on top? The Internet Famous.

    Quora does a good job of giving you troll-proofed answers, but after Scoble burst onto Quora’s scene it’s not obvious that troll-proofing comes at the expense of a decent well-thought out answer with backed up data and a reputable reference.

    So what is quora good for, or rather what’s in it for me? If I want a well-thought out, quotable sound byte that has to come from someone famous, this place is pretty much it. But if truth should, God forbid, come from someone like me still trying to make a name for himself, then ya, Convore is the place to be.