To do that, I end up with a bit of an odd commute. Once a week I make the haul up to NYC, which is a pretty easy 1:30 hours (Amrtak) or 3 hours (SEPTA -> NJT). Once I’m in NYC or in PHL, my commute is by subway or bike, and only :20 max. It’s a pretty decent commute, and the NYC -> PHL leg is a good chance to code and write.

By all measures, it was better than when I was driving 1: each way to work in a Philadelphia suburb on uninspiring work. When working at burb-firm (to remain unnamed) my commute was pretty usually 1 hour, but way. And it drove me insane. I tried listening to books on tape. I tried listening to music. But nothing could dull the daily annoyance and stress of 1 hour of concentration wasted every day. There is an Interesting New Yorker Article on commuting. It has a tag line People may endure miserable commutes out of an inability to weigh their general well-being against quantifiable material gains.

I was bummed the article didn’t get into that choice in more detail. How poorly do we judge our happiness? How do we make a valuation between being happy, and having cash in the bank? I think there is a whole section of self-value and self-evaluation we really do poorly, and I was hoping it would cover that in relation to commuting.

Because of this, in the back of my head I have learned an internalized a set of rules, guidelines, and best practices to find good people quickly, sort out the awesome, from the boastful, and in general figure out who is the best developer, collaborator, and creator out of the throngs of excited applicants.

One things I’ve avoided, is getting into personal topics beyond ‘oh! Where are you originally from?’ I grew up without as much privacy as I wanted, and as a result I’ve become a privacy minded adult. I think America as a culture have lost a sense of privacy, but in my personal culture, it persists. So it was delightful to read a fake resignation letter about a tech lead quitting due to Facebook intrusions into personal lives.

As a professional, I’ve left jobs I’ve found abusive. I’ve walked away from good paychecks when it was clear management was incompetent, or abusive. Why? Well, first off because it’s not sustainable. A department (or whole company) that is incompetent or abusive isn’t sustainable. You can get by a year, or maybe a couple of years, but that’s not growth. In the end you will end up burnt out, or looking for another job with a wasted timespan under your belt.

And trust me, you can walk away! As hackers, we are (lucky) in demand. If you got a job in the first place, you can get the next job. That next job is pretty certain to be good, or better, than the problematic one you are leaving. I’ve done it a few times, and can give suggestions or encouragement if you want to hear that. As someone reasonably dedicated to their craft, I think anyone on the track to mastering a vocation needs to have the moral fortitude to walk away.

TLDR Version is My ability to select the best candidates for our positions has been irreparably compromised by looking into their private lives.Change your company. If that fails, change companies.

Wise words on both accounts.

Humans exist as a species based on two skills, as best I can tell. Our ability to work as a team, and our ability to build tools. We are small, pink, tasks omnivores. Unlike racooms, or dogs, we don’t evne really have sharp bits. To make up for that, we hard to learn to get smart, collaborate, and make tools.

And one of the most amazing things about our tools, is how they shape us. As a species, once we have developed a tool, it shapes us. From the paper-based ideas of the US Constitution, to the suburban obesity of 21st century Americana, once our tools are in circulation, they shape what we do. Due to neotony and neural plasticity, I believe we are shaped ever more and more by our tools. Humans continue to learn later and later in life, and it’s more and more necessary to reshape and learn as we grow older. Our tools become a selection mechanism in an every weirder, less understandable cycle of human evolution as a species.

We actively reshape humanity, through selection of our technologies, tools, and ideas. I believe that by making tools that work better, tools that reflect a growing a sane order in the universe, we can make things that are not only fun to use, beautiful to behold, but these tools can move our very species forward and upwards. I also think that any humans should have access to all of the knowledge and tools they need to improve their own state of things.

Developing faster than you think is one of those good problems to have. Like selling more products than you can manufacture, or typing faster than you can think of new things to say, it’s a sign you have a lot of things going well. But it’s still a problem. There are several ways this can unfold, a few of them more catastrophic than others. The most obvious ones that come to my mind are:

1. Make promise, but you can’t deliver.
2. Adding the wrong exciting feature.
3. Losing focus, and multitasking.
4. Ship everything, but ship it poorly.

Make promise, but you can’t deliver:

This is a problem for the ambitions of all types, ages, and categories. From individuals to giant companies, if your reach exceeds your grasp, you can easily promise something you can’t deliver. The best thing to prevent this is the forced honestly of tracking projects, and making realistic deadlines and goals. It’s easy to promise or take on projects you can’t complete when you don’t have time to reflect, triage, and consider the big picture.

Adding the wrong exciting feature:

A lot of great features of The Replicator were ‘Well, we could just add X in 3 hours’ ideas. And a lot of necessary maintenance of code happens in slices of ‘Geez, this is so busted, let me take :15 to fix it’. For the most part, that is the fun of being in a start-up, and a shop that trust programmers to make the right judgement call. But that work can and does turn into wasted time. It’s a skill, and a whole blog post in itself, how to draw the line on those issues.

Losing focus and Multitasking:

It’s easy for a team or a project to crack under the stress of ‘Oh, we need to also do Z’ and shatter into tons of little tasks, or new projects/products. Very very easy. Like trying to browse the web while reading email, the lure of more with less is easy to fall for. But it’s a false sense of productivity, and most studies agree, multitasking slows you down, even if it *feels* faster.Not only are you wasting time task switching, you are wasting time *managing the task switching*. It’s a waste, and a meta-waste

Ship, but poorly:

Yes, you can ship a minimum viable product. The key word there is viable. One of the signs of writing code faster than you think is skipping QA. Any reasonably complex piece of software takes days to weeks to QA. QA is not a constant effort of bugs every few hours. It’s hours of doing some lower priority task, interrupted by annoying questions, and occasional humiliation or ‘duh’ moments as bugs appear. A lot of fixing QA doesn’t come from quick bug fixes, often it takes some reflection. Many ‘bad’ bug fixes appear as a quick fix, when in reality a little though would highlight other similar edge cases that could all be fixed at once. Doing external beta or QA? Then you have to deal with better coverage, but need to work with a community. You can get away with a bugs or problems for a small window when dealing a fan group or dedicated community, but if you want to grow, you have to take time in your schedule to squash bugs and let the system shake out.

So how do you keep those problems from happening? The quick answer is either hire more developers* , or Just Say No. But even that is a knee-jerk reaction. In reality, it takes time to think, plan, and know how much you or your team can carry. Track your velocity. Know your skills and problem, and your teams skills and issues. Seldom say ‘Yes’, but instead go for ‘I’ll get back to you on that later today’ or ‘let me check the schedule.

* P.S. Work with me! MakerBot is hiring great engineers, hackers and makers.

That article was especially interesting after reading Zuckerberg’s pro-Facebook PR piece ‘The Hacker Way’ that was part of the S-1 filings for Facebook’s IPO, which I’m going to refer to as ‘Zuckerberg’s Way’ for this article, since there are a lot of ‘Hacker Ways’ that are very much counter to his claims.

What annoys me is the ‘If it’s so right, why isn’t it easy’ tone that I hear from Scobel, and from a lot of Americans in general. Folks, Good isn’t always easy. Good doesn’t always pay the bills, get the girl, or even walk away from the firing squad. Even in the small cases of what social technologies we choose to use in sharing our ideas, there can be a difference between what is easy/fast/good for one person, and what is easy/fast/good for the larger system(s) and the bigger picture.

Capitalism is not just trade, it’s just just exchanging things of value, or specialization and exchange. Those concepts and patterns are much much older. Capitalism is (roughly) the combination of trade, accumulation of value, combined with competitive markets and wage labor. Capitalism is pretty new in human history, most historians agree it only really started in the 12th and 13th century, and really 19th and 20th century.

One of the things I find amazing is how many cultures and religions saw (or still see) capitalism style accumulation as immoral. Which is a pretty big contrast to Americans ‘civic religion’ of capital success. Usury was a sin, and the ‘pray and grow rich’ culture of American Christianity today is in stark contrast to the original christian traditions against capital accumulation.

Capitalism. It’s not trade, it’s not banking. It’s even not freedom to have a competitive market. It’s a set of behaviors and interactions related to those practices, where people put up capital, invest in wage labor, in an attempt to make surplus value. I beg my fellow Americans, please get yourself educated, and stop mushing all of those ideas together like a bad 8th grader homework assignment.

• I am excellent at starting things. Flip side: If there isn’t a definitive deadline or goal, I have trouble finishing them.
• I make an amazing executor of community vision, and can grow them well Flip Side: I’m often fragile with my own personal vision, and if it has to mutate as it grows, I often get discouraged or stop liking it.
• I am great at building community and collecting/filtering input Flip Side: Sometimes I let 2nd rate ideas or bad actors get away with things, because I don’t want to kill open feedback.
• I am great at building community and collecting/filtering input Flip Side: Sometimes I let 2nd rate ideas or bad actors get away with things, because I don’t want to kill open feedback.
• I am very honest about estimates and expectations. Flip Side: I can be too honest about problems or drawbacks, and have people use that against me.
• I want to be a craftsman of several things Flip Side: It is unlikely I will ever reach mastery of any one thing.

In each of those cases, I learn and grow over the years. and those problems are less of show stoppers, and more of minor gotcha’s each year. I learn more and more how to lean into my skills, and lean into the blows dealt to me by the flip side of them. That wasn’t too hard to learn. The hard lesson is that when you try to fix the drawback, by definition you undermine the very skill the drawback counterpoints. Like a bad videogame skill selector, as you move one slider, the other magically adjusts too. Just due to time/space/brain constraints one can’t be everything, everywhere, or everybody.

I think it’s smart for everyone to ask themselves the two questions: ‘What skills do I have?’ ‘What are the shadows of those skills, the skill-inverse that is a drawbacks or can cause problems’? I think most people can answer the first. It’s obvious, and frankly kind of easy. It takes a lot more insight to understand the 2nd, and live with the implications of that answer. Of course, the real zinger of a question is then ‘So how do I setup situations, collaborators, and work to boost the 1st, and soften the threat of the 2nd.

Coincidentally, I rant into Capt’n Fourier at a cafe in West Philly today (despite everyone else being at shmoocon all weekend). Along with the usual crazy new social network ideas he had, he filled me in on quite a bit of the Brucon badge situation, and how that worked out. From there, it was off to the internet to read for a bit.

Brucon Badge: This looks like a great, and damn simple badge. At $2 for the main chip ( PIC16F688 ) and 2 layer, it looks like it could be rather easy to manufacture, cheap. Although it’s a tiny tiny badge, with tiny tiny space of code, no UART or SPI built in, so hacking on it will be a bit harder. The related PIC116F88X series looks similar, but has UART and SPI built in, but that gets up into the $4 range to buy.

r0ket Badge: I have a r0ket from CCCamp this summer. It’s a rocking badge with a great little Nokia LCD. However the total cost is a bit high, I heard as high as $45 a badge to produce (if a reader has exact numbers, that would be cool to hear). The core chip (LCP1313) are only about $4 each, so I’m trying to figure out how the cost of those boards ends up stacking up.

microtouch: Ok, these are not badges, but they are amazing little devices. A badge built around one of these things could really be a great con project to produce, especially if we could get some wireless going on. Maybe find a good way to interface that to a brucon based badge, and hack the pair?

EasyReader POE II: The EasyReader POE II are the pseudo-standard reader units from OpenBeacon, and can be run POE or run via 5V over mini-usb. However I don’t see gerber files or design files for that hardware. Either I’m not searching well, or the badges are open hardware, but the reader is not. Understandable, a little surprising.

What do you think folks? Any good leads or info on badge designs? And, more importantly, do you want to step up and join the totally unofficial RFID badge crew for Hope 9?

When did we lose that? When did Americans become suckers for the simplistic ‘us vs them’ and ‘right vs left’ politics used to drive us apart. I don’t know one person, left, right or center, who thinks this country is on the right track. I don’t know one person that thinks our schooling system is fair, that our business culture is A-OK, and that the US, or the world, in on a good track to prosper. Given the trade off of ‘what’s more important, our failing education system, or illegal movie downloads’ I can’t think of a single sane person that would say ‘why, movie downloads of course. But SOPA/PIPA is all over the news, and the slow and continual decline of our school system is not.

Folks, there is no ‘left’, there is no ‘right’. The difference between Republican and Democrat in most places is less than the difference between the Boston and Philadelphia accent. I’m disgusted by how many times I start to discuss something, and I get to the unhappy realization the other person doesn’t know socialism from capitalism, or does not know what a republic is, or what a democracy is.

Think people. Take a second, and think. Ask some questions. Read some wikipedia. But don’t believe *any* of the claims mealy-mouth candidates (including Barack Obama) without checking the facts first. And honestly, don’t trust the news sources. Go read the data for yourself. Find the expense report they cite, and see if they lied, or if it came from some dodgy regional India news report. After the 3rd dodgy or blatently wrong report, turn it off, unsubscribe, and don’t go back to that outlet again.

I know it’s a pain to do that kind of thing. I know it seems like a timesink sometimes. But so is brushing your teeth. They are both annoying hygiene tasks, that show no immediate payoff. Just do it, be smart, and know you’ll be better off than the suckers that don’t.

“Instead of sitting down satisfied with the efforts we have already made, which is the wish of our enemies, the necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that ‘if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.’ It is a very serious consideration, which should deeply impress our minds, that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event.”

-Samuel Adams (on SOPA/PIPA).