Check it out: “Hello, Arduino” in CODE Magazine, an introduction to the programmable microcontroller designed to be approachable and fun. If you’ve ever had a hankering to see your code manifest your will in the corporeal world, you’ll love the Arduino. My article will take you step-by-step through a “Hello, World” project, even (especially!) if you’re a complete beginner to electronics.

(Why’d I buy the magazine? Not to worry, EPS sent me three copies of my own, as is right and proper. I just wanted an extra one to leave at TechShop. Plus, what a thrill to purchase a magazine with my words and ideas in it! “Yes, I’d like a latte and maybe you recognize the author of this article, hmm?” Regrettable narcissism, I know.)

I’ll be giving an Arduino presentation at That Conference in August in Wisconsin. Please come to my talk, say hi, show me what you’re building!

If you’re a parent or get to hang out with kids on a regular basis, introduce them to the Arduino. You will have a blast building stuff together. Here is a nine-year-old developer I pair-programmed with at CodeMash (she specified the requirements and did all the typing):

I’d love to hear about your projects. Make great stuff!

Code snippets, where you need to type only a short keyword to automatically insert a small piece of relevant code, are a great antidote. I learned this strategy from watching Burke Holland teach us about CoffeeScript. Most code editors and text editors support code snippets, and if yours doesn’t, you can use AutoHotKey to define a set of hotstrings.

Here’s an example of one of mine. In the Arduino IDE, I type:
.ledhigh
and AutoHotKey immediately replaces that with:
digitalWrite(led, HIGH);
delay(700);

My snippets are short so that I can explain as I create the code, creating an experience for the audience that feels very much like live coding—but it’s live coding with flawless fingers.

I put my Arduino presentation snippets on GitHub. You’ll notice two tips there. First, I prefixed my hotstring abbreviations with a period to make conflicts unlikely. Second, I added a conditional at the top to make the hotstrings apply only when the Arduino IDE is active.
#IfWinActive ahk_class SunAwtFrame
I discovered the class of the window by using the Window Spy application that comes with AutoHotKey. I used the ahk_class instead of the window title because, although the Arduino IDE changes its window title based on the sketch it is showing, the class type of the window stays the same.

It’s tempting to launch into a presentation figuring the most exciting way to share code with the audience is to type it live. If you’ve ever actually done this, though, you know how devilishly your hands will betray you. At the other extreme, a wall of code on a slide will captivate your audience, at the expense of anything you might be saying at the time. Use code snippets to dole out code in explainable chunks, live but without the typos.

If you’re at CodeMash, I invite you to the talk. It’ll be a blast, and I have a cool giveaway from MakerShed and O’Reilly Media.

Although I have no trouble falling asleep (quite the contrary), I am dogged by insomnia because I delay and delay going to bed. And—as you well know—that makes every other aspect of life more difficult.

So, c’mon, we owe this to ourselves. To fully be our true awesome selves, we need a full night of sleep.

Sleep hygiene

The key to transforming sleep from a battle to a balm is regular routine. Sleep hygiene, like dental hygiene, is a collection of healthy habits, a pattern that signals “sleepy time” to your brain. Same bed time, same nightly routine, a restful wind-down to the day.

“I stay up until I’m sleepy,” you protest. But here’s the thing: shining light into your eyes tells your suprachiasmatic nucleus, “It’s daytime! Stay awake. Stay awaaaaaake!” If you’re punting on the internet, you’re not going to get sleepy. Not at the right time, anyway.

I’ve read up a lot on good sleep habits and, previously, practiced them rigorously, to get debilitating daytime sleepiness under control. In college I underwent an all-night-and-all-day sleep study (ugh, it was awful); results were inconclusive but various pharmacological solutions were bandied about. And I thought: I don’t need to be medicated; I can beat this. For more than a decade, I have, but habits have been sloppy lately, with bedtime slipping later and later. Time to change that.

As important as flossing and folic acid, make sleep hygiene a habit. Close the laptop, perform your nightly ablutions, and get into bed.

Take willpower out of the equation

My sage friend Aneel gave me the most useful advice on sleep hygiene. Willpower, he says, is a resource you deplete. At the end of the day, you’re tapped out. Therefore, any decision that relies on willpower—the decision to go to bed, for example—is likely to be made… poorly.

The solution is to take the decision out of your hands. To wit, automate it. Schedule the computer to shut down.

Script those zees

(Outside the US, do people “catch some zeds”?) I need something taken care of without having to think about it? PowerShell!

I created a PowerShell script that warns me to wrap up my work, then sets the computer to sleep. I call that script from a Windows scheduled task.

$WarningDuration = 5
$MessagePlural = ""
if ($WarningDuration -gt 1) { $MessagePlural = "s" }

[System.Media.SystemSounds]::Asterisk.play()
[void] [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms")
[windows.forms.messagebox]::show(("Save your work. Sleep in {0} minute{1}." -f $WarningDuration, $MessagePlural))
Start-Sleep -Second ($WarningDuration * 60)

[System.Media.SystemSounds]::Beep.play()
Start-Sleep -Second 2
[System.Windows.Forms.Application]::SetSuspendState("Suspend", $false, $true)

Caveat emptor. To write this script, I picked up pieces of PowerShell and stuck them together with mud and spit. Please make a better version, put it in a gist, and link to it in the comments. Sleepy nerds will thank you.

Start the Task Scheduler, select Create Task, create a daily trigger a little before bedtime, and set the action to run your PowerShell script.

It’s currently set later than I’d ultimately like, but if I made too drastic a change all at once, I’d just flout myself and restart the computer. So this is a compromise, a deal I’m making with myself for now. Incremental improvements.

I won’t tell you what time it was when I wrote that script. Heh.

Deque, a provider of accessibility solutions, provided help-desk Q&A support during the rally by answering the hashtag #dequeAIR. I reached out to them (Phrasing a tech support question in 140 characters really focuses the mind.), and got great help from @ChrisCM2006.

Here’s the problem. The screenreader pronounces @TexasROSEorg as if it were a word. Putting a title attribute on the anchor tag did not help, nor did wrapping it with an abbr tag with a title attribute. It just read the contents of the tag, like this:

But I want to make it sound like “Texas Rose org.” Now, this is a good moment to take a sidebar on accessibility, which is that calling something “accessible” is a personal and subjective assessment. What works for one person can completely flout another. Meeting the needs of as many different audiences as possible is complex and difficult, and always involves trade-offs. So if you are a screenreader user, please tell me whether it is helpful, or a hindrance, to have the Texas ROSE Twitter handle pronounced as three words instead of one.

The solution is to tell the screenreader to ignore the one-word version, and to include a three-word version that is pushed way off the visible screen.

Here’s the markup:

Follow 
<a href="http://twitter.com/TexasROSEorg"><span aria-hidden="true">@TexasROSEorg</span><span class="offscreen">Texas ROSE org</span></a>
for electric utility news that affects you.

Inside the anchor tab, there is a span with the attribute “aria-hidden=true” wrapping the version for text-consuming users. The aria-hidden attribute tells the screenreader to skip the contents of that span, so it is not read out loud. The three-word version that follows is read by the screenreader, and to avoid showing this version in the text, it is given a CSS class that sets its position far off the viewable frame.

Here’s the CSS definition of the offscreen class:

.offscreen {
  position:absolute; 
  left:-10000px; 
  top:auto; 
  width:1px; 
  height:1px; 
  overflow:hidden;
}

Why use the positioning trick instead of “display:none” or “visibility:hidden”? Many screenreaders will not read content that is hidden via display or visibility, but will read content that is inline but “appears” to be off the page.

The result is a @TexasROSEorgTexas ROSE org that sounds like this:

I was pleased that I got the screenreader to pronounce the Twitter handle the same way I would have said it out loud. I do hope that it creates intelligible words for screenreader users, as well. It’s only “accessible” if it actually suits what people need.

I had a fantastic time being part of Headspring’s team and competing in and learning from Open AIR. It was a well run event and a great opportunity to be nerdy for a worthy cause.

ReSharper.ReSharper_ReSharper_UnitTest_RunContext

See also: http://blogs.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2011/06/resharper-60-release-candidate/#comment-331090

Context: Google Apps, toto, dorothy, plain HTML

I am using the toto blog engine to publish the Polyglot Programmers of Austin site because I have always wanted blogging to comprise nothing more than text files and source control. (toto is nearly so.) dorothy is the toto template I forked for the site.

I am using Google Apps to get a calendar and an email address at my domain. To make the email address work, I had to prove to Google that I control the domain, which you do by uploading a special file from Google to the root of your website.

Problem: Requesting the HTML file returns a 404

When I naïvely deployed the Google Apps domain-verification file to my heroku site, the verification did not work. Navigating to the url of the file returned a 404, file-not-found error. I needed to get toto out of the way, tell it that this file was outside its purview, do a Jedi mind trick and get the file simply to be served as if it were not Ruby.

Solution: Add to the list of static files in config.ru

Open the dorothy template’s config.ru configuration file and find the “Rack::Static” declaration. That collection lists the files and directories that should be served as static content, without interpretation. Within the brackets, add to that array of urls an entry for the Google Apps file. Surround it with single quotes. Precede it with a slash, to indicate it lives in the root of the directory. Mine looks like this:

use Rack::Static, :urls => ['/css', '/js', '/images', '/favicon.ico', '/myGoogleFile.html'], :root => ‘public’

Put the file itself into the /public folder, since the Rack::Static statement specifies that “public” is the root of the site. (See it at the end, there?)

Commit config.ru and the Google Apps file to your git repository, then push them to heroku.

git push heroku master

Yay!

I want to hear what you have to say.

If you know a developer who ought to be presenting at conferences or writing blog posts and isn’t, deploy that phrase. Say to him or her, “I wish you would submit a talk to [conference|user group] on [subject of expertise] because you have good ideas, and I want to hear your thoughts on the subject.”

You feel exasperated about your powerlessness to change the lack of diversity in our profession? To the point that you feel antagonized just hearing about it? Me, too. This is something you can do. A personal appeal, delivered one-on-one, can do so much good. Do it.

I resisted Twitter forever because, every time I asked someone why I should sign up, they answered with something irrelevant about all the funny things you could read, or whatever. No one ever said, “I wish you’d join Twitter, Sharon, because I want to hear what you have to say.”

How many of us dismiss those calls for speakers, thinking “What would I talk about? I’m not doing anything cutting-edge”? Imagine if someone encouraged you, reminded you of a skill you’ve forgotten is interesting and valuable, simply asked you to share your knowledge and ideas. Would that feel empowering? Do that for someone.

A lot of you wish our industry were more diverse. You’d welcome it if it could somehow happen. But it feels like a problem far bigger than the reach of one person. Scarily so, if you want my take on it. This, however, we can do, one person, by one person, by one person:

I want to hear what you have to say.

Make eye contact.

An Excursion into Psycholinguistics

To avoid filler words, it helps to understand why we say them, which falls under the domain of psycholinguistics.

When you and I are having a conversation, we take turns speaking, and we use a variety of verbal and non-verbal cues to signal when to switch. I’ll ask a question and then pause, and you instinctively know that it is your turn to talk. While you’re telling a story, you’ll pause periodically to see if I am following, and I will make an encouraging sound (“mm hm” or “go on”) to confirm that it is still your turn. You might say something that sparks an idea in me that I very much want to share, and the changes in my facial expression—bright eyes and an intake in breath—convey my request to have a turn. If I get these cues wrong and repeatedly speak during what you consider your turn, you will think I’m rude and interrupty.

Note that most of those transitions were signaled by a pause. To avoid being interrupted, when you need a moment to organize your thoughts but are not ready to relinquish your turn, you’ll phonate (fancy linguist term for “make noise with your speech apparatus”). You don’t have any words to say, but you want to fill the silence to retain your hold on the conversation, so you’ll use meaningless words. You’ll say “um.”

Maintaining Your Turn While Presenting

Consider how turn negotiation changes when you are presenting in front of an audience. Your instincts tell you that a pause will cause you to lose your turn, but in reality, you’re on stage. It’s your show. We in the audience have granted you an extended turn. You would feel uncomfortable in a one-on-one conversation talking for 20 minutes without exchanging turns, but it is normal, expected, and exactly appropriate during a presentation.

How do you override the unconscious desire to say “um” to maintain your turn? You make eye contact with your audience members. Deliberate, focused eye contact. Avoid scattershot scans over their heads or a fixated stare at the clock on the back wall. Instead, look at the members of your audience. Deliver a clause or a whole sentence to one person, then connect with another person for the next. Two beneficial side-effects are better reception from your audience and improved pacing in your delivery. Deliberate pauses become built in as you deliver points to different individuals.

When you make eye contact, your unconscious mind gets direct evidence that it is still your turn. You can see that there are no bids from the audience. You can feel the audience’s attention. That need to fill pauses with noise melts away.

Follow @PolyglotATX on Twitter, check out the Polyglot Programmers site for date, time, and location, and please come join us.