There is an electric outlet on one of the walls of our house that is located abnormally high on the wall. Maybe the previous owners had a table or something, and placed the outlet at that height because it was more convenient. In any case, it wasn’t where we needed it, and it simply looked odd where it was. Since I am in the middle of fixing up this room, I decided to lower it to a height consistent with the other outlets in the house. That should be a simple enough task, as I’ve done similar things many times before. I started cutting away the drywall below the outlet at the desired height, and continued upward. The saw kept hitting a solid surface a little bit behind the drywall, so I gently continued up to the existing outlet, and then removed the piece of drywall.
What I found was completely unexpected: behind this sheet of drywall was what had previously been the exterior wall of the house! This room was a later addition, and instead of removing the old wall, they just nailed some drywall on top of it!
Note the white shingles behind the drywall!
Now I understand why the outlet was at this peculiar height: the previous owners had opened up one row of shingles on the old wall, and simply placed the outlet there. Now, of course, moving it will require quite a bit more work.
This is a great example of where you should liberally comment your code: whenever you write a work-around, or something that would normally not be needed, in order to handle a particular odd situation. This way, when later on someone else owns the code and wants to “clean things up”, they’ll know ahead of time that there is a reason you wrote things in what seems to be a very odd way. This has two benefits: 1) they won’t look at your code and think that you were an idiot for doing that, and 2) they’ll be better able to estimate the time required to change it, since they’ll at least have a clue about the hidden shingles lurking behind the code.
Yesterday was the 2015 Tour de Cure San Antonio, a cycling event to help raise money to find a cure for diabetes. This was the third time I’ve ridden it, and the first time I felt in good enough shape to attempt the century course (century = 100 miles). In order to fit in such a long ride, we arrived at the site at 6am! Note: I’m not one of those crazy people who think this is a good time to be doing anything other than drinking coffee.
Wa-a-a-a-a-a-y-y too early!
We were scheduled to start at 6:30, so we all lined up at the starting line before then. But the event organizers thought that it would be a wonderful idea to talk to the riders about all the wonderful things we were helping to accomplish by raising the funds that we did, so they kept us waiting until just before 7:00, straddling our bikes. I was ready to go a half hour earlier, and instead of starting the ride out ready to conquer the world, I started the ride feeling kind of crabby. All the rides do this to some degree, but keeping us waiting for over 30 minutes was uncalled for.
Waiting to start the ride
The weather was the big question mark, with rain and thunderstorms moving across the region. And, of course, we didn’t escape them! It started around mile 25, and continued for the next 10 miles or so. Lightning, rain, big wind gusts (straight into our face, of course!), but I kept going, knowing that there was a cutoff time for the century: if you didn’t reach the point where the 100 and 65 mile routes diverged by 11am, you wouldn’t be allowed to do the century, because you wouldn’t finish in time. Here’s a shot of the rest stop right after the rain stopped.
After riding through the storm – soaked!
You really can’t see how soaked everyone is, but trust me, my gloves and socks were pretty soggy! You can, however, see the patches of blue sky just beginning to break through. The rest of the ride was dry, which was a relief.
I got to the rest stop located 3 miles before the point where the routes split a few minutes after 10am, so I was happy that I made the effort to ride through the bad weather. I’ve only done a full century once before, and it was really important to me to not have that be a one-time event. I headed out from that rest stop, and continued down the road. If you haven’t done a ride like this, they give you a map of the route ahead of time, but most of the roads are in pretty remote areas where you don’t know the roads, so you navigate with the help of signs put up on the side of the road by the event organizers. They have each route marked with a different color, so where the routes diverge is easy to see. So I rode ahead with some others who were also doing the century, but a few miles later we came upon a sign that only listed the 65-mile route; there was no mention of the 100! We stopped, thinking that we must have missed the sign; perhaps it had blown over in the storm, and we all didn’t see it. Just then a marshall drove up (the routes are patrolled by ride marshalls, who make sure that riders are safe), so we stopped him to ask about the 100 mile route. He checked it out on the radio, and then told us that we should go to the next rest stop, where the routes will diverge. Well, I got to that stop, and asked the people there, and they told us that they had pulled the direction signs for the century an hour earlier than planned! I was furious! All of the work I had put in to training for this ride, and all of the discomfort of riding through the thunderstorm so I could make the cutoff, and they took that away from me and many other riders for no reason.
So I took out my phone, pulled up the century route PDF, and tried to plot a path to go to one of the rest stops on that route. I couldn’t backtrack to find the turnoff intersection, because even if I had, I would have been much too late at this point. So I knew I wouldn’t be able to do the full century, but at least I’d get as close as I could. So Google Maps plotted a route, and I took off, ignoring the signs for the 65 mile route, and creating my own.
The only problem was that Google Maps thinks that there are a bunch of roads in that area that simply don’t exist. I went up and down the roads it suggested, until I finally gave up and figured I had better head back to the finish of the ride. Here’s one example: note that the map in the lower left corner shows a road, but what is actually there is a driveway made of sand that dead-ends at someone’s house. The map shows it continuing all the way through. And yes, I plan on letting the fine folks at Google Maps know about this problem.
So I rode back to the highway, and continued west until I hit the return path for the century route. I followed that back to the finish, with a total of 81 miles on the day (here’s the RunKeeper record of my ride). And waiting for me at the end was my wonderful woman Linda, who has done so much to support me for this ride. It was great to see her smiling face!
Crossing the finish line!
So while I didn’t get to complete another century, I did have an unusually adventurous ride. I do hope that the organizers learn from this event, because I would really like to do it again next year, and it is for a very good cause. If you’re interested in donating, they are still accepting donations for this event for the next few weeks, so follow this link and give what you can.
PyCon 2015 ended over a week ago, so you might be wondering why I’m writing this so late. Well, once again (see my PyCon 2014 post) I blame the location: the city of Montreal. We like it so much that Linda and I planned on staying a few extra days on holiday afterwards. After returning, though, I again payed the price by digging out from the accumulated backlog. It was well worth it, though!
Old Montreal at night
If you weren’t able to go to PyCon, or even if you were there and don’t possess the ability to be in multiple places at once, you missed a lot of excellent talks. But no need to worry: the A/V team did an amazing job this year, and not only recorded every session, but got them posted to YouTube in record time – many just a few hours after the talk was completed! Major kudos to them for an excellent job.
The swag table (top) and pile of stuffed bags (bottom)
PyCon is an amazing effort by many people, all of whom are volunteers. One of my favorite volunteer activity is the stuffing of the swag bags. Think about it: over 3,000 attendees each receive a bag filled with the promotional materials from the various sponsors. Those items – flyers, toys, pens, etc. – are shipped from the sponsors to PyCon, and somehow one of each must get put into each one of those bags. Over the years we’ve iterated on the approach, trying all sorts of concurrency models, and have finally found one that seems to work best: each box of swag has one person to dish it out, and then everyone else picks up an empty bag and walks down the table, and one item of each is deposited in their bag. Actually it took two very long tables, after which the filled bag is handed to another volunteer, who folds and stacks it. It’s both exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. We managed to finish in just under 3 hours, so that’s over 1,000 bags completed per hour!
In between talks, I spent much of my time staffing the OpenStack booth, and talked with many people who had various degrees of familiarity with OpenStack. Some had heard the name, but not much else. Others knew it was “cloud something”, but weren’t sure what that something was. Others had installed and played around with it, and had very specific configuration questions. Many people, even those familiar with what OpenStack was, were surprised to learn that it is written entirely in Python, and that it is by far the largest Python project today. It was great to be able to talk to so many different people and share what the OpenStack community is all about.
Last year PyCon introduced a new conference feature: onsite child care for people who wanted to attend, but who didn’t have anyone to watch their kids during the conference. Now, since my kids are no longer “kids”, I would not have a personal need for this service, but I still thought that it was an incredible idea. Anything that encourages more people to be able to be a part of the conference is a good thing, and one that helps a particularly under-represented group is even better. So in that tradition, there was another enabling feature added this year: live captioning of every single talk! Each room had one of the big screens in the front dedicated to a live captioned stream, so that those attendees who cannot hear can still participate. I took a short, wobbly video when they announced the feature during the opening keynote so you can how prominent the screens were. I have a bit of hearing loss, so I did need to refer to the screen several times to catch what I missed. Just another example of how welcoming the Python community is.
True to last year’s form, one of the keynotes was focused on the online community of the entire world, not just the limited world of Python development. Last year was a talk by John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sharing his thoughts on government spying and security. This year’s talk was from Gabriella Coleman, a professor of anthropology at McGill University. Her talk was on her work studying Anonymous, the ever-morphing group of online activists, and how they have evolved and splintered in response to events in the world. It was a fascinating look into a little-understood movement, and I would urge you to watch her keynote if you are at all interested in either online security and activism, or just the group itself.
The highlight of the conference for me and many others, though, was the extremely thoughtful and passionate keynote by Jacob Kaplan-Moss that attempts to kill the notion of “rockstar” or “ninja” programmers (ugh!) once and for all. “Hi, I’m Jacob, and I’m a mediocre programmer”. You really do need to find 30 minutes of time to watch it all the way through.
This last point is a long-time peeve of mine: the notion that programming is engineering, and that there are objective measurements that can be applied to it. Perhaps that will be fodder for a future blog post…
One aspect of all PyCons that I’ve been to is the friendships that I have made and renewed over the years. It’s always great to catch up with people you only see once a year, and see how their lives are progressing. It was also fun to take advantage of the excellent restaurants that the host city has to offer, and we certainly did that! On Sunday night, just after the closing of PyCon, we went out to dinner at Barroco, a wonderful restaurant in Old Montreal, with my long-time friends Paul and Steve. Good food, wonderful wine, and excellent company made for a very memorable evening.
(L to R) Paul McNett, Steve Holden, Linda and me.
This was my 12th PyCon in a row, and I certainly don’t plan on breaking that streak next year, when PyCon US moves back to the US – to Portland, Oregon, to be specific. I hope to see many of you there!
I found out yesterday that Mike Beane died. Mike was one of those people in my life who are becoming more and more common: someone with whom I interact a lot online, both professionally and personally, but spend very little, if any, time with in person. I think that the way the news of his death hit me shows how it is possible for relationships in the online world to be just as real as those in the physical world.
I first encountered Mike in the pre-internet days of CompuServe in the early 90s, where we were both active in the FoxPro forums. There was a very active, vibrant community there, and Mike was a very visible part of it. I first met him in person at the FoxPro DevCon in 1995 in San Diego. During that conference I was talking to another online regular, Sue Cunningham, and mentioned that it was great to finally meet her and several others whom I had only known online until then. I mentioned Mike, and she exclaimed “Mike’s here? I have to meet him!”. I told her that I would make sure that I would find him for her. Later that evening I saw Mike, and told him to stay where he was. I found Sue and brought her over. She looked up at him (he was pretty tall!) and said “Funny, you don’t seem tall online!” He didn’t quite know how to respond – how does one project height in a text-only world?
The one other time that I met Mike was when I got stuck in O’Hare airport overnight. Bad weather had canceled the final leg of my flight home, and as I had spent the night in O’Hare on two previous occasions, I really didn’t feel like doing that again. The only person I knew who lived in Chicago was Mike, so I went to the pay phones and looked through the phone book (geez, does that sound ancient!), and found a listing for a Michael Beane. I called it, and sure enough, it was Mike. I asked him, if it wasn’t too much trouble of course, if I could crash on his couch. I was willing to get a cab to take me there, but Mike insisted on picking me up. He took me into his home, introduced me to his wonderful family, and put me up in his daughter Allie’s bedroom. The next day he fed me breakfast, hung out with me until it was time to return to the airport, and then drove me to the terminal. He really went out of his way to make me feel welcome.
I really haven’t had a lot of contact with Mike since the days when I worked with FoxPro, but he did write me recently to congratulate me on my new job with IBM. I was really saddened to hear of his death last week, and truly feel that I’ve lost a friend.
If you know me, you know that I have a sense of humor that can be risqué at times (ok, perhaps crude would be a better description!). I’m also known to engage in the predominantly male form of communication that involves bonding by insulting each other: put downs, the dozens, whatever you want to call it. I also hold very opinionated positions on politics and religion, and enjoy engaging in lively discussions about them.
Yet when I am in a group of people I do not know very well, I do none of these things. Why? Because I am aware of their potential for offending people, or at the very least, making them feel uncomfortable. So I default to respect.
In programming, a default value is one that is used unless specifically overridden. Setting your default to respect means that unless you are certain that everyone within earshot (or who can otherwise observe you) knows you well enough to properly interpret your words or actions, limit yourself to those words or actions that do not require special interpretation; those that show respect for the people around you. Failing to do this is one of the biggest sources of the problems in the tech community when it comes to how women and other under-represented groups are treated. At conferences, or online, guys (yes, it’s a guy problem) act as they would normally do when they are within their tight-knit group of friends, and say/write/do something that is interpreted as offensive or even hostile. When their poor choices are pointed out, they get defensive, using the excuse that their intention was not to offend, so no one should take it badly. Or they attack, claiming that the person who pointed out their behavior is too “politically correct” (at best), or an over-sensitive bitch (if the reporter is a woman). These attacks all too frequently cross the line from name-calling to outright threats.
But refraining from sexual references or racial stereotypes is not being “politically correct”; it’s a sensible default value. Maybe later you might get to know these people better, and more importantly, they’ll get to know you better. Only then when you make a crude joke will they know that you mean no harm. But until then, the only sensible approach is to default to respect. The practice of a conference having (and enforcing!) a Code of Conduct is really a way of defining these sensible defaults for people who apparently never learned them growing up. It is encouraging to see them become more common than not, for that will help our communities “grow up” and become more inclusive. The days of the tech world being an old boys club are quickly drawing to a close, although it can’t happen fast enough for me.
So does that mean that you need to muzzle yourself? No, of course not. There are plenty of places where you can express yourself; hell, if you follow me on Google+, you’ll see that I’m not at all shy about stating my opinions. It’s totally appropriate there, because if you don’t like what I’m writing or the way I write it, you don’t have to follow me; there are plenty of other people you might like better. But a conference or an online forum is a community vehicle, and filling them with potentially hostile or offensive words or actions means that we will turn away many who would have otherwise helped the community grow better. We all suffer when otherwise talented and interesting people choose not to engage in our communities because they do not feel welcome. So do us all a favor and when you are in a community situation, set your default to respect.
