Having gained a lot of interest in static site generators lately, combined with the desire to more easily own my content and reduce (eliminate) the amount of unrelated ads that show up for readers, I grabbed my domain, migrated my content, and setup my new digital cottage!

All my new content (and frequency of it shall be updated) can be found at my new home https://dillieo.me The other nice thing is that I have an easier way to access (and share) some of my random code snippets I’ve leveraged/built/used over the years. See you there!

It has undoubtedly been the toughest and most grueling year for me and my family. And yet, we found little nuggets and new traditions to bring us closer together and celebrate along the way. Here’s a hat tip to 2022 and an excited jump into a much better 2023.

See the rest here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/vpWjiZs4vMBX8LMb9

Without a doubt life 4.4 has been the roughest version/year I can think of. It during these times that keeping a sense of gratitude and thankfulness becomes even more important. With that in mind, here are the three things I’m most thankful for in 2022.

Coffee

Yes! Beyond a simple morning wake up, the joe, bean cubed, jumpin’ beans has become a family thing. At the beginning of the year I came up with a “ritual” that I wanted to try. With so many coffee places in the Pacific Northwest, I wanted to find a new, local (or regional) coffee house every weekend to try out. This would be a great way to support local companies, enjoy new tastes, get out of the house, and explore.

What started as just a quirky and fun thing turned into a ritual that we have not missed, even when we had to have it delivered due to people under the weather. The girls look forward to the event with so much energy and even wind up finding the places for us! We have found some amazing places, but more importantly, we’ve found some more time together. We’ve even attempted to document our adventures a bit on Instagram.

Running

Running has been my serenity, and even more so this year as we battle mental health issues and look for places to help defrag and wok our some of that stress. My intensity, length, and routine have fluctuated quite a bit over the years, but I’ve always made sure to get out and do some kind of running, and was really fortunate to finally get to return to the RAGNAR trails this year with a group of 5 others in Oregon.

My Wife

I could easily take another hundred posts to unpack this further, but having that best friend, and lover, and schemer, who is willing to walk through the really dark times with you, celebrate the small wins with you, and still keep compassion for others, including relative strangers, is something so rare and valuable and I cannot be thankful enough for my beloved, and the growth we’ve had together through this trying time. We’ve become stronger through it all.

Et Vous?

What are you thankful for this year? It is more important than ever to find even the small things in your life and name them as we approach the grey of winter and cold it brings. There’s also plenty of evidence to show how a mindset of thankfulness does wonders. I’d like to hear them!

Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

The Archmage Ged, from The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin

Only a couple of weeks in so far, I’ve found an immense relief in just being. Time with family, time running, time enjoying a slower pace, it has refreshed my soul like no other. It also helps clear my mind for acts yet to be done, decisions that will come, and the continued course of life, wherever the good Lord will guide it.

That I have waited so long to give myself these gaps between acts seems rather baffling. It is something I will make sure does not take this long to occur again.

Relax

It seems like for the longest time the day to day of work has been a sprint. A really hard sprint. Check in, reply to email, reply to slack, update a quote, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, review a little code, give a little advice, meetings, email, slack, email, slack, meetings, make list of things to do tomorrow that didn’t finish today, stop. Then repeat. Wow, I got tired just typing that all out!

This constant sprint gets exhausting. While I’m fortunate to enforce a non-50 hour a week schedule, I’m literally back to back in things with no time for breaks in between. The mental exhaustion is real, and it begins to trickle out into home life because the stress begins to wear you down. It is time to breathe, it is time to move slower. It’s time to…

Recharge

All of that is going away. Slack has been uninstalled. Work email account has been removed from the phone. Travel with family will start soon. Sleeping in will commence. Books will be read. Runs will be had. Yard work will be enjoyed. Coding will maybe be done. I’ll admit that my hobby project needs some work (and an iOS build dang it), and my python skills need some leveling, but if it doesn’t happen, no sweat! But most importantly, it is time to…

Reboot

The current operating mode for life is not going well. If one were to leverage the analogy that each decade of your life is a version of software, then the 4.2 and 4.3 versions had some algorithms that resulted in maxed out CPU and RAM usage, which is not beneficial to the long term health of the system. Sometimes the best way to do things is to reboot the system, since all the tasks in the queue simply get flushed out and you have capacity in which to start over.

…and start over I will! I’ll be more protective of my hour by hour time. I’ll provide space to step back, analyze, evaluate, and create (thank you Ella and Bloom’s Taxonomy!). I’ll get those runs back into my calendar and actually stick to them! Balancing this will allow me to continue to work smarter, not harder, and most importantly, bring back some much needed peace and balance.

What things do you do to relax, recharge, and reboot? I’m looking for all the advice I can find!

The Challenge

The challenge at hand was how we were going to allow users to upload their custom brain to the bot to test. That in turn raised even more questions about how the user was going to interact with the platform as a whole. We had a small LCD display, capable of basic text input, with two buttons and a small joystick controller for navigation. All of it is running on a Raspberry Pi, which gives us a lot of flexibility for providing dynamic updates. How were we going to let the user “hack” on the system?

A more important question arose from this: Who are we building this for in the first place?

The quick answer is “everybody”, but the complexities and the timeline of the release made this impractical. We needed to identify what kind of user would be using this platform so we could setup our processes and interfaces accordingly. It’s okay to be opinionated at times. In talking through these processes and interfaces, we came up with three fun user types to guide us through this process.

Elvis

Our Elvis type has little to know technical knowledge. They want to come in, have some fun with the bot, grok some of the core concepts, and move on to the next thing. Supporting Elvis would require heavy documentation, potentially some how to videos. We would also want to provide a web interface or a well designed command line tool to allow Elvis to update things. This would reduce the complexity of the back end, since the infrastructure would be setup for one or two specific paths to execute.

Bean

Did you know that the actor who plays Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) has a masters degree in Electrical Engineering?! If Mr. Bean were to work with the system, aside from the potential mayhem, he would be quite familiar with the notion of secure copying a file over from another location. Some documentation would be nice, but detailed documentation wouldn’t be necessary. Mr. Bean would likely be a light hacker as well, so having some powerful scripts or a configuration file to tweak things and see the result would be great. We would still need to put a few guard rails in place to prevent Mr. Bean from “bricking” their bot, such as making it difficult to update the firmware.

Hedy

More than just a famous actress, Hedy Lamarr co-invented an early version of frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication, amongst other things. For someone like Hedy, with a deeper knowledge and a knack for tinkering and inventing, she would want full access to the system. She would most likely know several ways to transfer a brain to the bot and while documentation would be nice, specifications (the power limits of the servos), access to the source code, and other “low level” features would be ideal. The greater challenge in this system would be in making sure it is “open” and structured enough to allow Hedy to do whatever she wants.

The Verdict

For our initial release, we decided to target the Bean type user. We tried to support the Elvis users of the world by allowing them to attach a thumb drive to the bot an have the custom brain auto-updated, but there were too many security/process complications to smooth out. We also were a little hesitant to allow the Hedy users to “brick” their bot by experimenting with firmware updates, given the support needs it would raise.

More importantly though, we decided that the Bean users were the perfect fit for this platform. We wanted to introduce hardware engineering types to the power of reinforcement learning. On the flip side, we wanted provide a simple use case with reinforcement learning that has an impact on an actual thing, not just simulators.

In the end it also helped shape our mindset for software infrastructure and process in light of the targeted user. I’ve started to ask this question when I start other projects. Our UX people call these “personas” and while it always made sense from a user interface type perspective, it never really thought about it affecting the entire stack of a system until now, and I’m all the better for it.

In reflection, it’s hard to think about where to begin. Probably the most poignant thing that pokes at me daily is that we’re still learning how to build software and what to use to build it. I like to joke [:: or am I ::] that by the time you’ve gotten to this point in reading, two new JavaScript frameworks have just come out, both claiming to be the new paradigm in how to build things. The thing it reminds me most of (for any young budding programmers out there) is that the “semantic”s of coding (algorithms, data structures, processing, etc.) are the more fundamental aspects of coding that won’t change. The “syntax” of coding (the language or framework used) is constantly in flux, but easier to adapt to once you know the “semantics”.

When I first started coding, Web 2.0 hadn’t even arrived yet. HTML and table layouts were the lay of the land. There was this thing called WAP which was supposed to give you web pages or content on your mobile phone [:: supposed is the operative word here ::]. I wrote some pretty sweet Perl scripts to handle form processing and image uploads in the cgi-bin of that first project. Heck, JavaScript was still a toddler and a beast to work with, but it was a heck of a lot better than Java Applets if you ask me. [:: ugh, that Java… ::]

It’s interesting to see how the “fat client / thin client” web page/app cycle continues. Early web forced a thin client, since you couldn’t use JavaScript to do much and you needed the server processing to tell you what to do next. Then when JavaScript finally started getting decent, you could make the pages more interactive and rely less on the back end. Maybe this was the cause for the “cram everything into a page with minimal spacing and 10 point Arial font: and it was a wild ride. The clients got fat because we could do more and bandwidth was still slow. I wrote an entire bible app with chapter navigation and verse searching (that preserved the verse’s context by showing the entire passage) thanks to this.

Then AJAX came and we got thin again. Maybe you could consider the client fat still, but with AJAX, you could make a ton of small queries to the server to get what you needed. Your logic was reduced and early AJAX involved injected a huge blob of HTML rendered by the server into a div block you had earmarked for it. Things became nimble again and Google began to take over the world with suggested words as you type.

AJAX and browser wars made the web ugly for devs. You had this awesome way to prevent a full page post back / render, but without standards, each browser decided to implement things differently enough. Except for Internet Explorer, they decided to do their own gig altogether. Now you had browser sniffing scripts and 3 to 4 different versions of some of your code depending on what you wanted to do. CSS was growing in popularity for making things look pretty and each browser had their own way of handling that too [:: shakes angry fist ::]. Then jQuery and Bootstrap came to the rescue by doing all that for you! Our thin clients could reign supreme by not having to worry about browser specifics. That also enabled clients to get fat again.

jQuery allowed the web to get more sophisticated with its easy DOM manipulation, which led to more functionality getting packed in to your average page. This increase in data manipulation, partial results, animations, and more led the way to the modern single page application era we’re in now thanks to React, Angular, and a growing VueJS. All your backend needed to do now was be a glorified database, thanks to the JSON format [:: you can kick your DBAs to the curve too if you use GraphQL ::], with a little bit of rules enforcement. The prevalence of broadband made the amount of JS code the user downloaded largely irrelevant, especially since it was loaded (in theory) only once by the user. Fat clients will rule the day!

But maybe there is a shift happening again [:: are you still surprised? ::] There have been enough concern with heavy rendering and SEO that React has a server side rendering option for components. Angular supports this too. Additionally, if your backend is nothing but a data store, you can work your away around some of the HTML shenanigans to show that admin button if you haven’t done things right and nothing is protecting you on the backend. The rise of IoT and wearable with limited front end power may be pushing things back to a thin client again. At the same time, web assembly is looking to double down of the fat client by letting you use your favorite backend language (C#, Node Rust) to build even more functional apps in the browser. [:: wait, did you just take the cycle within 1 paragraph?! — yes, yes I did ::]

Alas, I haven’t even gotten into database technologies, mobile, IoT, cloud, containerization, ML/AI, and a plethora of other nuances of code that still fascinates me and gets me excited for the next day. Oh yeah, and bitcoin… [:: smiles ::]

Oh, and that most important lesson I learned way back when? Communication is key. Never stop doing it and never stop refining it. I was fired from that first gig because after delivering the 1.0 (agile was still growing) I went on vacation and never bothered to tell my client. He wasn’t too happy given that he was ready to build more features. While one may be able to code in a vacuum, eventually that code will speak to others, and documentation, or collaboration, or hand-offs will require a conversation with somebody else and doing that consistently will lead to the best results. Learn to balance “how much” to communicate with your peers, mentors, advisors, or clients, but never stop doing it and never stop refining it.

So here’s to 20 years of a wild ride in code and another 20 years more of it if my fingers will allow me. Then again, voice recognition and rapid application platforms will probably reduce that need, so I’ll be safe. [:: smiles ::] Let’s see what comes next!

Gaming

…particularly of the Minecraft and Dungeons and Dragons persuasion. These two games have really given the family something to connect over, plan for, even without considering all of the self-quarantining we’ve been doing due to COVID-19 (a year for the books). I have also seen my girls grow in their own unique gifts and personalities as they make custom characters, navigate tricky situations (both online and in print). Plus they’re teaching me things, which is amazing to experience!

Health

Admittedly this one may sound a bit odd. My girls continue to struggle with Tourettes and the OCD it brought. We’re still finding the right balance of therapy and meds. My wife continues to find her own balance with her thyroid meds and deals with some ugly swings of fatigue when things get out of balance. And yet, we are all here together to celebrate today. Nobody is isolated in a hospital, nobody is completely debilitated, and that is huge because we can be together. After losing one family member this year and having a few friends get really sick, our continued health is especially relevant this year.

Our Home

I won’t bore you with the full details again, you can read the recap of our home/sanctuary here. Last night, as we were cleaning up some mess from pie making, while also cooking dinner and running around in a Minecraft server the family likes to hang out in, things finally exited the realm of surreal and there was a long exhale of peace, contentment, and thankfulness. Our family has a home, a space truly ours to spend the upcoming holidays, and my thankfulness to God knows no bounds.

Et Vous?

What are you thankful for this year? It is more important than to find even the small things in your life and name them as we approach the grey of winter and cold it brings. I’d like to hear them!