Harry's Ruminations

It's been quite a year.  The previous twelve years I've written this blog, I've been based out of Georgetown, Kentucky, and I worked at Lexmark.   I've added many things in that time: A wife, a step-son, two daughters, and 2 houses.  Through it all, I remained in Georgetown and worked at Lexmark.  As I write this, both have changed. Set your wayback machine for Jan 1, 2016 and let's see how I got here. January 1st saw us in Indianapolis, Indiana, with the whole crew visiting the Indianapolis Children's Museum .  The museum was great, but in the back of my mind I had a feeling of change coming.  Lexmark had put itself up for sale in October 2015, and things within were highly uncertain.  Whenever I visited a new city, I constantly asked myself: "Could I live here?"  With regards to Indy, I said, "Yes" and kept it in my mind. When I returned to work in January, a pall hung over things.  Management was more flinty than usual, and we sound ...

As I type this, it’s 8:44 am, and I just drove 30 minutes in 10 miles of pouring rain to start the week on 4 hours of sleep. I went to bed about 11:30, but didn’t fall asleep until nearly 1am—very unusual for me.   Like an overtightened bolt, I felt my corners round-off just a bit yesterday, the torque warping my mind just too much to sleep. There’s much to consider, globally, nationally, and within my own hearth.   Much I can do little about.   Globally, there keeps being more of us, and our impact on the planet worsens by the year.   Humans certainly seem less education, humane, and trustworthy than we did even 10 years ago.   Perhaps my eyes are just open to our own debauchery, my naiveté burned away like so much slag from God’s refiner’s fire. I can’t recall Donald Trump.   I can’t unsay some of the things he’s said.   I can generally watch in horror and pinch myself every time I hear the phrase “President-Elect” attached to his name. ...

Some things are too long for a tweet, to short for a short-form essay.  I like to think of them like "macro-tweets."   Some have taken to posting paragraphs or even whole positions on twitter in the form of: 1/7 2/7 And so on.  That's an abuse of the platform.  Longer-form should be somewhere else. End preamble.  * * * So Maria and I have abandoned swimming for the moment.  I don't know why exactly, aside from we don't have an indoor pool membership and the outdoor pool we have is rather.... variable ...with regard to temperature.  I went to swim about 400m with an air temp of 48 degrees back in September, and part of my body just went:  "You're nucking futs, dude." In lieu of that, Maria and I are walking every morning.  Typically a one-mile circuit right outside our front door.  In the back of my mind, I hope we'll graduate to jogging, but for now I'm simply enjoying the time with my daughter. We talk about many things...

Last Tuesday night was surreal. The data all indicated that DJT had no chance in hell of becoming president.   He never polled above 42%.  Then...the returns rolled in.  The NBC anchor team already had their through-line prepped: "Did he lose the election on day one, calling immigrants rapists?"  "If he loses Florida or North Carolina, he's going to have a long night." As the hours wore on, it became clear that we were at the very end of the bell curve, amid Nate Silver's 15% chance that DJT could win.  I became more and more despondent, realizing that of the two bad choices, the Chaotic Evil was going to be the electoral victor. I don't have more to offer than the deluge of think-pieces since Wednesday morning.  Democrats are largely out of power everywhere now.  The majority of governorships, state legislatures, both houses of Congress and now POTUS are Republican. I should be happy.   After all, I'm a (moderate) Republican. ...

Whatever happens over the next few days, I'd like us to remember we're Americans. We've surmounted Monarchy, the burning of the capital, a war between ourselves, mountain ranges, slavery, polio, Fascism, Communism, presidential assassination, Watergate, 9/11, pet rocks, and several sub-par Metallica albums. People tried to take our freedom. "Over our dead bodies!" we cry. And so it was. We will gladly give it away, though, in fear and hate, vilifying our neighbors. I care about what happens next Tuesday, sure. However, what happens in the days and weeks thereafter is what history shall remember. May Lincoln's summary remain true: "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Blessings be with you all.

Postulate: No matter the brilliance of a given development team, it's always more efficient to Analyze/Groom/Think about requirements before  you're in the meeting where you commit to delivering those requirements.   I've been developing software with groups of fairly brilliant people for some time.  The above is my genuine experience. Corollary: When a group of people encounter a set of requirements and expect to scope and commit to them in realtime while reading the document , it wastes everyone's time. Generally, productive discussion results, yes, but that discussion is unbounded. Better: One person pre-grooms the story.  In times past, that's a business analyst or architect, but a member of the development team is fine.  Just be sure before you go into the pitch/commitment meeting someone is warmed-up to present the story.  This is analogous to an intern or resident presenting a case in a hospital to the other doctors during rounds. ...

Too long for a tweet. Too short for a blog post. These are some tech-related skills I'm glad I have.  They come in awfully handy: Touch typing.  You'd be surprised at the number of people who work with computers for a living who can't actually touch type.   Markdown .  Markdown is incredibly handy for tossing-off documentation and forum responses.  I've actually considered hosing this blog entirely and converting to posts hosted on Github, formatted in Markdown. Vim .  I've rediscovered a love for Vim in the past few weeks.  I've intentionally avoided installing Sublime Text 3 on my work machines, just so I'd get better with Vim.  This thing is a frickin' katana for text editing (duh...) Ruby .  A surprising number of production programmers don't have a scripting language under their belt, which is a shame.  Ruby is both light enough for scripting and powerful enough to do basically anything you need.  (Just write RSpecs f...