My Notes from Dubai: A DaedTech Digest

I’m on vacation right now.  But here I am, bringing you content anyway.  I’m just that dedicated.

Actually, when I was younger, I was in the habit of writing trip journals of my travels.  Later, I turned these into the slow travel digests.  So, really, I’m just kind of continuing that tradition, which is actually fun for me.

I thought some of you might like to read about our most recent adventure.  And it’s kind of fun for me to write about it.

I’m in a plane at the time of writing, on my way from Dubai to Phuket, Thailand.  So, lacking anything better to do, I’ll describe our experience in Dubai.

A Sort of Accidental Trip to Dubai

Amanda and I have been itching for a vacation.  Now, given our slow travel lifestyle, I imagine a lot of folks reading think our life is sort of a perpetual vacation.  But, it isn’t.

Truth be told, we haven’t taken a full-on, “don’t check your email,” type of vacation in something like 2 and a half years.  Sure, we’ve had a few days off here and there, and we’ve gone places.  But there are always client or personnel issues to address.

Not this time, though.  This time, we planned and arranged to unplug completely, in the form of a 2 week vacation on the beach in Phuket, Thailand.

We booked a flight with Emirate Air, which had us laying over in Dubai for about 9 hours: just enough time to die of boredom in the airport.  On a whim, I asked the travel agent if she could extend our stay there to something like 2-3 days, and she said, “sure, I can do that.”

And so, just like that, we found ourselves booked for 3 nights in Dubai.

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Reader Question Round-Up: School Side Hustles, Freelancing, and Who Writes the Code?

Alright, I had a recorded video in my back pocket for a bit.  So over the weekend, I edited it and published it as the 6th installment of the reader question round-up.

That’s posted below in a frame.

But followers of this blog may have noticed that I’ve taken a hiatus from doing slow-travel themed digest posts.  We’re currently staying at a house we own for the summer, which means that I’m not slow traveling.  And the well of questions that folks ask me has run dry, besides.

If you’d like to see more of these, by means, ask questions and let me know.  But I’m going to interpret the lack of questions about it as a lack of immediate interest.

Still, this leaves the digests out.  And, I figure readers of my blog and consumers of my content might have interest in where else I create content.  So I’m going to do the digests and picks along with my reader question round-ups now.

Picks

• I’ve been enjoying Prime Music a lot over the last few months.  If you’re thinking of getting Prime for the fast deliveries (or some other reason), this is another perk that you should factor into the mix.  There’s a lot of variety.
• I created a profile on dev.to a while back and have recently been posting/syndicating content there.  I’m really enjoying the community in general, but I think I’ve already talked about that.  One thing you might not realize is that they have support for organizations, so if you have a business or work for one and would like to post content under its umbrella, you can do that.
• And, finally, I’ve been using this tool, Tube Buddy, to help with creating Youtube videos and doing keyword research there.

The Digest

• Here’s a live blog post I wrote for Sonatype during the Nexus Users Conference.  The talk was about Nexus Firewall and defending against open source as a vector for security problems.
• We recorded a Facebook Live video a while back about what it’s like to run a remote business.
• Here’s a Facebook Live I recorded myself, answering basic SEO questions.
• And, finally, an episode of the Freelancers Show podcast where we discussed personal finances for freelancers.

The Reader Question Round-Up

DaedTech Digest: Analysis Rules, Singletons, and Log Aggregation

Happy Friday, DaedTech readers!  Time for yet another installment of the DaedTech Digest.

I didn’t do one last week because of the US holiday.  For those of you not from the US, there’s this holiday called Black Friday that everybody celebrates by getting together and eating turkey the day before and then subsequently bludgeoning one another in retail stores the next day.  Out of respect to this noble tradition, I held off on making a post.

At any rate, it’s been a busy couple of weeks in my world.  We’ve migrated south for about 5 weeks and are living in a beach town on the Gulf of Mexico.  This photo below is a shot of where I’m working from today as I type this post.

So life is good.  With that in mind, let’s get to picks.

Picks

• The jury isn’t totally back yet on this, but we’re trying out FreshBooks for managing Hit Subscribe‘s books.  And, so far, it’s great.  And it integrates with other favorite Gusto besides.
• I’ve been listening to an Audiobook called How to Measure Anything, and enjoying it.  Any consultant worth his or her salt spends a lot of time figuring out how to quantify problems and solutions, and this is definitely helpful.
• The folks at a site called Data Camp reached out to me about the study I’m doing over at the NDepend blog.  They seem to be developing a cool offering for teaching people about data science using Python and R.
• I also pick time off.  I work very much on my own schedule and generally not full 8 hour days anymore.  But I also do tend to work 7 days a week.  Last weekend, Amanda and I played tourist and did nothing but explore the Gulf Coast, buy fresh seafood off of piers, dine out, explore new cities, and walk through state parks.  This was nicely restorative.

DaedTech Post Digest

• In my consulting (and even long-ago salaried) travels, I’ve encountered a lot of myths about code reviews.  I wrote a post for the SubMain blog in which I looked at some of those.
• I wrote a post for NDepend, in which I explored a topic probably not many have.  What’s the role of static analysis in your testing?   These things might seem orthogonal, but I think they actually have an interesting relationship.
• Also for SubMain, I did a post in the CodeIt.Right Rules Explained series.  I examined why you should avoid single line if statements, why you shouldn’t base your enums on weird underlying types, and the problem with explicit rethrows.  All of this in C#, BTW.
• In a post that went a little viral and predictably resulted in people calling me a know-nothing incompetent, I wrote about what the singleton design pattern costs you.  This was for the NDepend blog, again.  (But I’d have the last laugh later, when I would actually study it empirically and prove myself mostly right — stay tuned for that in a future digest.)
• In a much less controversial post (because they don’t enable comments), I made the business case for unit testing on the ASPE blog.
• For Scalyr, I wrote a post about log aggregation.  What is this, why would you want it, and how does it help you?

And, that does it for the digest round up.  Have a great weekend!

The Programmer Skill Fetish, Contextualized

I am currently considering something of a content pivot for DaedTech.  I haven’t really decided anything for sure yet, but I’m leaning toward putting cross posts into digest format once per week and then doing fewer posts, but ones that are more focused on developer empowerment and the efficiencer dream.  Your feedback on this is entirely welcome in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook or anywhere, really.  I’d honestly like to know what you think.

I mention that because I think I need to refocus a little on some hypotheses that underpin all of this.  In the time between writing Developer Hegemony and now, I’ve found myself distracted by changing my lifestyle, selling a house, starting a couple of businesses and, well, life.  But throughout that time, I’ve given some thought to what I ought to offer people with this site.  Should I continue (against the advice that I offer everyone else blogging with purpose) to keep the blog as a chronicle of my many thoughts?  Or should I orient it around a theme in which I help people solve some kind of problem.

And I’m leaning toward trying to solve a problem.

So back to the hypotheses.  First one that I’ll mention is that programmers should specialize and seek options outside of full time employment.  (Not as in immediately making it your goal to escape the rat race.  Rather, make it your goal to have options outside of serving at the pleasure of some single employer.)  The second one, following from that first, is that we focus on programmer skill to the point of fetishizing it.  And, we do this to our detriment.

The Known, But Unheeded, Career Wisdom for Programmers

Let me lay out a few points that surround the issue.  None of these will probably be especially new to you, but taken together, they’re interesting.

• You often hear some variant of “part of being a great developer is knowing when NOT to write code.”  In other words, being really good at writing code helps no one if you code up a useless product.
• Successful “entreprogrammer” John Sonmez, in promoting his “Soft Skills” book, often talked about how he wasn’t successful because he was the best programmer, but because he learned the material that he was communicating in the book — strategies for business and dealing with other people.
• In most organizations, it’s not necessarily the “best” programmers that wind up with higher pay and vanity titles like “senior,” “tech lead” and “architect.”  It’s generally the longest tenured ones.  Long time readers will remember my writing on this subject.
• Businesses and non-technical people often don’t listen to the “best” developers, often because those developers take pride in spewing jargon and being indecipherable.
• We can’t even define “best” programmers.  Do a google search on it.  Page one alone promises more than 100 answers.  These include technical knowledge, but also things like “positive attitude” and “good communication skills.”

Put all this together, and you have an interesting picture.  The business world and the greater non-programming world in general values one thing.  Programmers, when we get together, value something different.  We’re fully aware of how outsiders value us, but we just can’t resist the impulse to compare ourselves to others with code competitions, programming challenges, data structure interviews, and claims that we’re “10x” better than others.

The Skill Fetish, Explained Indirectly

This brings me to what I think will be the fun part about writing this post.  I want to use a metaphorical story to help bring context to why we do this, and how shotgun-blast-to-our-own-feet it is.  It’s easy enough to sit there in the waiting room of GiganTech, waiting to see if they deem you better at O-notation than the other 430 applicants, and get caught up in all of this.  It becomes normal.  So I’m going to draw a parallel to a different line of work.

I did this to an extent in Developer Hegemony, but as part of a larger point about journeyman idealists.  Here, I’ll get more direct.

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