Shifting Bits by Patrick Altman: Latest Entries

Cash Opening Doors

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 15:33:17 -0500

Cash has now decided he can open doors at will.

Bernie Sanders and Christian Progressivism

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 10:50:02 -0500

And he answered them, "Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise." – Luke 3:11 (ESV)

Recently Bernie Sanders spoke at Liberty University.

In response to this speech, a self-described Evangelical Christian responded in agreement on Reddit.

Introduction

Of course, this is rather shocking to some. The typical view from afar is that all Evangelicals are staunchly conservative, and rightly so. The Religious Right was made popular in the late 1970s when religious leaders urged congregants to get involved politically. From this birth-place of a political movement, Evanglicals got a new identity.

In any event, being a progressive Evangelical is not a new thing at all. In my experience, most progressive Christians care deeply about social justice issues which lead them to adopt a viewpoint in line with liberation theology.

I disagree with both the aims of the Religious Right as well as the Christian Progressive Left. I agree with (some) ideals of both, but the means to their ends are misguided, at best.

First, I should start with what I agree with that is on Bernie's heart:

it is vitally important for those of us with differing views to be able to engage in civil discourse
Matthew 7:12, the "golden rule", is something good and decent and to be honored
justice as stated in Amos 5:24 is important and to be cherished
his agreement with the Pope on "There is a need for financial reform along ethical lines that would produce in its turn an economic reform to benefit everyone. Money has to serve, not to rule,"

Now, where I disagree:

income/wealth inequality is a form of injustice
people not having health insurance because they can't pay for it is a form of injustice
people not being given paid medical leave is a form of injustice
youth unemployment is a form of injustice
his assertion that people have to "serve money and wealth"

My problem with Bernie and Christian progressives (and to be fair a good portion of the Religious Right) are not the motives. I believe Bernie and others motives are generally good. I like to believe that most people want to make things better. However, there are three facets of "social justice" banner that I just cannot abide.

Coercion instead of Freedom
Disunity instead of Harmony
Fixed Wealth instead of Elastic Wealth

Coercion instead of Freedom

In order for Bernie's plan, democratic socialism, to work, government force is required.

There is a direct correlation between the amount of equalization to acheive with the amount of coercion that is required. Just think about it. We already have this situation where not only do we not have the option to not pay taxes, in many cases it is removed from our paychecks before we receive them. The government already gets paid first on our labor.

In addition, when you can get a majority of the electorate to benefit at the cost of a very few, the government just becomes a billy club against the minority. This reaks of injustice to me.

When I have the freedom to deploy charity by my own parameters, I am able to experience the doing of a moral good. When I lose that freedom because the government is going to deploy my capital for me, not only is it less efficient (by several orders or magnitude), but I am then merely complying to a threat of force than performing a moral good of my own free will.

Let's put this another way by localizing a hypothetical.

If I feel that a certain poor person needs to eat or otherwise could use my help, I should help them by what means I am able. I should not hire a governing authority to take money from my neighbors just because they have more money than I do, to then divide those funds between the poor person and the governing authority.

Jesus modeled freedom throughout the New Testament.

If we want to go back further, we can see since the very beginning God modeled freedom in given Adam and Eve the choice to obey Him.

Jesus certainly gave commands to his followers, but he never forced them to follow. Jesus was focused throughout the New Testament in ministering directly to people, and instructing his apostles on ministering directly to people.

Therefore, I find it pretty astounding when people want to use the name of Jesus to argue for using government force to reallocate capital to the poor in a very impersonal and draconian manner. I find this a misread of the Scripture at best, and an intentional abuse of it for acheiving political aims at worst. I can see Bernie making the former mistake as he is not a Christian, but the self-avowed Evangelical who commented in response to Bernie's post should know better.

Disunity instead of Harmony

It's incredibly distasteful to hear the very strong theme of class warfare in Bernie's platform in general. He makes an early appeal for civil discourse but then preys on the human tendancy towards envy. Bernie doesn't hold a monopoly on this practice. It is a very common rhetorical device for the Marxist because it is quite powerful. What better way to to engender popular support than to get people focused on other people as the source of their problems.

Focusing on strategies for improving conditions for the poor and middle-class in a manner that is unifying and bring harmony is no easy task. There is an uphill battle to be fought in our country against the messages we are bombarded with involving class warfare. I think a key thing to focus as a government is not "fixing poverty" but creating the conditions that can increase economic mobility. There has been a lot of reports about how economic mobility in our country has gotten much worse, or is all but non-existant, but that is simply not true.

The position of the liberterian-minded conservative is that we can improve conditions for the poor and middle-class in terms of increasing opportunity for economic mobility by just getting government to get smaller and out of the way.

Fixed Wealth instead of Elastic Wealth

Bernie and Christian progressives seem to have a fixed wealth view, rather than a view that wealth is elastic.

Wealth is created by, and morally belongs to the individual creator. As Rand observes, since “man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.”

This is critical in understanding where these folks come from and why they view so many things as "injustices" that I do not. Exploring this topic is something I'll leave for future essays. But in the meantime, some great reading material on this topic:

Conclusion

The vast majority who want to leverage the government to help the poor do have honorable intentions at heart. Those that would use Jesus as an argument to support this though, I believe are simply misguided. Jesus was about changing hearts and minds, not about coercion. This is modeled all the way back to the beginning with God chose to give Adam and Eve a choice to obey him or eat the forbidden fruit. That is why I'm for freedom and in this freedom seeking, we find harmony and less political discord. To hammer this home, it is important to understand that wealth is elastic and just because someone becomes rich doesn't mean someone else had to become poor.

The Exemplar of Fatherhood

Sun, 21 Jun 2015 16:27:42 -0500

I have been blessed beyond measure by my father, Thomas Altman. Many of the lessons learned from his wisdom are only now being fully appreciated as my fatherhood experience is in its infancy.

Thomas L. Altman

If I had distill all possible descriptions of my father down to just one idea–one that best encapsulates my dad–it would have to be that he has an immense capacity to discern the right path in any situation coupled with a massive heart in his care and consideration for everyone he comes into contact with.

Growing up, my dad taught my siblings and I many life precepts. Some examples include:

always put others before yourselves
arrive early and stay late
whatever we set out to do, always, without exception, give a 110% effort
... and we can do ANYTHING we really want to do
be generous, especially to those less fortunate than you
viewing or treating people differently based on their race is repugnant
thinking of yourselves as better than anyone else is also intolerable
family is important, God is important; they go hand-in-hand
always do what is right, especially when no one is looking

He told us a lot of these things either in teachable moments, around the family dinner table, or on long car rides. Even better though, these things were modeled for us.

My dad always does what he says far more than he says what he does.

This is how I learned the meaning of integrity.

I cannot thank him enough for the love he poured in our family and into me (and continues to do so). I cannot thank him enough for the examples he set for us.

He set the bar pretty darn high for me to live up to as a father to my own children. I'm determined to live up to it. Yes, dad, with 110% effort.

Donated django-logicaldelete to Pinax

Mon, 25 May 2015 12:24:19 -0500

Six years ago, I created a simple Django app to handle logical deletion of records. Today, I donated this app to Pinax.

This app has lived under my personal GitHub repo since I started the project, but since it's just me, I rarely find the time to keep on top of maintaining the code as it deserves.

In fact, I had pretty much forgotten about it even existing until this morning when Brian Rosner said in our Slack channel:

mark the Nth time I’ve wanted an app and searched for it and found it built by someone at Eldarion. this time django-logicaldelete.

Then I go and look at the code and realize there were some open issues. The most recent just being a few months ago, #9 - Delete method related object behavior is wrong.

I also then saw that I hadn't touched the code in about a year, and even that was just merging a pull request.

Finally, when I saw plenty of forks with what seem like good enhancements but no pull requests, I wanted to get this project in a place where it could be better maintained.

Therefore, this morning, I donated django-logicaldelete to Pinax and in the process it was renamed to pinax-models. It was updated to the lastest standards of a Pinax app and will now join the dozens of other apps in the Pinax ecosystem.

Proud of Benjamin

Sun, 24 May 2015 09:17:47 -0500

Our oldest, Benjamin, finished off his final year of elementary school with a bang, winning the honor of elementary student of the year. But that is not why I am so proud of him.

We only have Ben at home for a handful of short years and on one hand it frightens me how quickly time is passing us by but on the other hand, I am so excited to see what he does in life.

I know he is going to do great things, whatever he choses to do.

I feel so incredibly blessed to be his father. The depth of his feelings, the richness of his character, and the boldness of his quiet confidence are well beyond his years.

He has won plenty of awards and recognition for his grades and character over the years. That's not why I'm proud of him. He capped off his elementary career by winning the elementary student of the year honor. Again, that's not why I'm proud of him.

He makes excellent grades and scores well on any type of test. This, too, doesn't make me proud of him.

He has the respect and admiration of his classmates, his teachers, really any that have had the chance to get to know him. Once again, this is not why I am so very proud of him.

All these things that are great and I am excited for him to enjoy them. They do please me as a father but they please me because he gets to enjoy things he has earned and has worked hard for and has desired.

What makes me so proud of Ben is his heart, his courage, and his determination.

He has faced a number of really big fears, and he has faced them head on. Fears that only he and his mother and I have known about. Some of these fears involved becoming completely vulnerable to humilation in order to show the love of Christ to others. Some of these fears have been in risking very public failure.

In these cases he never whined, tried to run away, or hide. He was nervous, scared, and stressed, for sure, but he prayerfully faced all of them head on. He is only 11 years old and has already conquered goliaths many adults never have or will.

This is why I am so proud of Benjamin.

2014 Year End Review

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 10:50:51 -0600

This year has been an incredible one and I wanted to take some time today to reflect on all that has happened.

2014 was filled with great triumphs and great loss. It has been a bittersweet year. It was also incredibly busy. One marker of this busyness is the fact that I had a single blog post in 2013 and it was about how I was going to write more and here it is on the eve of 2015 and I am making the first post of 2014.

Reflecting on the things I had written about back in 2013:

I remain involved with jumpstart foundry as a mentor but this summer I took off due to travel
I have been serving as an advisor to gun.io. These guys are killing it.
Golf remains and obsession of mine. I'm still horrible but my handicap index has dropped from 35 to 22 since that post. I plan to take it down to the mid-teens by the end of the 2015 season.
We ended up focusing more on ThoughtStreams than production.io and have been writing code and doing customer development for KPITree.
The service offerings we launched as part of Eldarion's agency business have done really well and are permitting us to help entreprenuers even more.
We had another great year of quality and focused family time.
aminoSoftware is still going strong.

In addition to these updates:

My grandmother passed away after a long bout with Alzheimer's
I started CrossFit.
I delivered by first talk
Attended Brian Rosner's wedding
A number of "firsts" were had in our family

Peggy Rawls Wedgworth

My grandmother passed away on July 2.

I was fortunate enough to spend some time at her side in her final moments. I will always remember how much fun she was and how much joy she would bring those around her.

"Mom" and her grandchildren, circa 1983. That's me standing behind my brother on the right hee-hawing

Some 30 years later, all the grandchildren are grown and there are some great-grandchilden.

"Mom" glances at me taking this photo while supervising a family card game.

Mom, as we all called her, was always seeking out ways for her family to have fun together.

Whether it was organizing trips like the time all the cousins went skiiing for Christmas in Colorado, a cruise to celebrate her wedding anniversary with the entire family, "sneaking off" with different grandchildren to hit the strip in Las Vegas, or just simple games and stories while gorging on candy from her "snack bar", she was all about filling our hearts with joy and creating experiences that will live on as fond memories.

CrossFit

Just signed up for CrossFit. I hope I don't die.

I posted this on January 9th on Facebook. I didn't die, but I did feel like I should have after those first couple of weeks.

Then something happened.

I become addicted to the progressions. I loved being able to to show up and have workouts already programmed for me so I didn't have to think about what to do.

Also, critical for me, was having a group of people to do the workout with. It's a powerful blocker to quitting a workout early when the group you started with is still going.

I kept at it and by November I was doing this:

I am finally getting some of my strength back that I had as a 20-year old college athlete. A great feeling as I enter my late 30s.

Speaking

I have long known that I should start speaking about things that I know. Not only to teach others but also to expand mind-share for Eldarion.

For just as long of a time I have let my fear of public speaking rule over me so that I have let opportunity after opportunity pass me by. Well, this past fall another opportunity arose to fill in as a speaker at DjangoCon. I am not sure whqt came over me but I committed to it before I could think about it for too long.

I jumped off a cliff.

At least that is what it felt like. I spent a TON of time preparing for the talk and about half to 3/4 of that time I think was preparing the wrong way. I ended up with some technical difficulties in my talk but felt completely at ease and actually ended up enjoying the experience.

I am updating and cleaning up this talk, perhaps with a bit of new content, and will look to be giving it another go soon. In addition, I am currently developing a few more talks on Django and different startup/enterpreneurship topics.

Brian and Hannah's Wedding

Amy and I flew out to Denver for Brian and Hannah's wedding. James and Brian are so much more than just co-workers at Eldarion–they are great friends. It was such a blessing to be able to celebrate this milestone in Brian's life together.

Family Time

We have had some incredible times of family-growth this year. This includes both our marriage as well as with our children.

We discovered a drive-in movie theater through a family friend. It was a fun experience which I am sure we will be going to much more next summer.

There were many firsts for our family this summer. Ben learning to water ski was certainly one of the highlights as was spending more than a month on Fort Myers Beach in Florida (one of the benefits of being able to work from anywhere).

As this year winds to a close today, I thank God, through Jesus, for all that I have permitted to have in this life. Most of all, my family. I am honored to have the privilege of the the titles of Husband and Father and these are roles that I do not take lightly.

One thing that I have learned this year, probably more so than in the past, is that experience trumps material possession. The things that give me so much sense of self and wholeness are memories of things done, not of what things I have owned. With that in mind, I want to create more experiences in 2015 for my children, for Amy and I, and with my friends.

Breaking the Log Jam

Sun, 21 Jul 2013 11:07:34 -0500

So it's been far too long since I have posted anything to this blog. I have been better at times about consistently posting and when I do subsequent posts become easier to write. I have posted a bit over on the Eldarion blog, but even there I haven't gotten into a good rhythm yet.

I have been debating what to post first for a while, since it has been 8-9 months since my last post and the more I delay the more pressure I feel to write something truly great which creates this cycle of procrastination and cognitive burden that I can't stand.

Therefore, I am hoping this breaks the log jam.

I don't recall everything that I have been doing since I last posted and am not going to review emails, project commits, and so forth to try to give a comprehensive overview. That said, I wanted to give a highlight of something I have been doing over the past several months.

This summer marked my second as a jumpstart foundry mentor
I am serving as an advisor for two companies in this summer's cohort at jumpstart, gun.io and Zingfin
I have really jumped off the cliff on taking up golf and have become a bit obsessed with it. I am really horrible right now as I just start out but want to be playing competitive golf within the next five years.
Currently working with the team at Eldarion pretty hard to launch two new businesses in the later half of this year, production.io and KPITree. Very excited about this.
Also, currently in the midst of launching an array of new service offerings for Eldarion's agency business.
Made time during this busy summer to take some downtime on a couple of low-key, much-needed vacations with the family.
Amino Software entered it's 7th year of operation. It's been an incredible run and we are figuring out what's in store for the next several years.

Lots of exciting things going on right now and I really hope to write more frequently about everything both here (for personal stuff) and on Eldarion's blog for all the work going on there. If there are particular areas you'd like to see me explore a bit deeper, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below and let me know.

SendGrid Events and Eldarion Open Source

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 08:38:52 -0600

Yesterday, I blogged about one of our new open source Django apps, django-sendgrid- events. It's a small app, in terms of lines of code and/or complexity, but I think it opens up a ton of potential in things you can do for users of your site.

In addition, to making that post yesterday, we updated our Open Source page with half dozen or so new Django apps that we have released throughout 2012.

In addition, we have been gettings tons of great feedback from a post published about a month ago, entitled 5 Reasons to Hire an Agency. If you are in the position of looking to hire new engineers either as full time employees or as contractors then give this post a read first. If you have any questions at all I welcome the opportunity to speak with you on the phone, take your emails, or respond publicly to comments on this post.

Go check these things out! I know you'll find more than a couple things useful if you are setting out to build a new site today, or even updating an old favorite.

Easily Add Stripe Payments to your Django Site

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 15:46:43 -0500

Earlier today I blogged over on Eldarion's site about how you can easily add Stripe payments to your website with a new app that we have developed and open-sourced under the BSD license.

Be sure to check it out!

Golf and Data

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 19:01:37 -0500

I have recently taken up golf and am loving the opportunity to get outside and away from my computer. I work a lot so it's a good way to force me to disconnect for a bit and focus on something else. Most importantly though it has become something that I can do and enjoy with my son as he has taken to the sport as well.

After some recent practice sessions, I am immediately drawn to wanting to record data about how I am doing so I can monitor progress. There are so many data points to collect and analyze over time that I am not sure where to begin. That said, it's a bit cumbersome to stop between each swing and make notations. Surely this is a solved problem these days.

Even something as simple as just estimating distances and percentages of solid contact with each club is something I'd like to record but I have trouble gauging distances past my various wedges and short irons and even then I am only about 75% confident that I am accurate. I know a range finder would solve this problem to at least establish where certain landmarks on the range are (not sure the signs are always right or I am hitting in an area not near any signs).

So it's got me thinking naturally about a iPhone app with a very simple interface, ideally with just a single tap or two between each hit. Something like select a club that you are working with and it pre-populates with your previous average distance. with two buttons, "Good" and "Bad". You then take a swing, judge whether it was solid contact or not and hit the appropriate button, optionally typing a different yardage if it was solid/good contact and the distance was different (no sense in recording yardage of bad hits, I am thinking).

One of the recent items the pro has told me to practice is taking my loft wedge and get used to taking swings to hit it 15 yards, 35 yards, and 70 yards, to get used to three different swings while at the same time focusing on accuracy. In thinking about this app idea, I see this as setting up 3 different "drills", one for each distance that I could then give it a binary good or bad.

The goal of this is being something that is very unobtrusive to record and provide an easy way to monitor/judge performance over time. For example, if I record 2,000 swings over the course of the next 2-3 weeks doing these drills, I would hope to get feedback that the % of good contact + accuracy has gone up, rather than just rely on my feeling of improvement, which I believe would be all too fickle.

I haven't found an app like this so far. Has anyone else? If not, maybe it's worth building.