Matt O’ Rama

My Long Walk

Awhile back I was inspired by a post on a local Albuquerque group blog called Duke City Fix about a guy who walked across town, taking pictures along the way. I’ve always liked walking and thought it would be cool to do a similar walk. Every place I’ve worked at I’ve taken my lunch hours and walked around, sometimes taking pictures but mostly just exploring. You find a lot of neat stuff walking since you’re moving slow and you’re close to the ground. Even if you’re in an office park or urban area I’d encourage you to try walking around and seeing what you see. You might be surprised.

For my walk I decided to go on Montgomery since it goes basically from one side of Albuquerque to the other. It also goes across the river and through our Bosque / North Valley area which is by far my favorite walking area in town. I started at Tramway, the east side of the city, and walked all the way to Coors on the west side. It’s 10.9 miles according to Google Maps and with a couple of small detours I made I think I pretty much did exactly 11 miles. This is far longer than I’ve ever walked before but I did it. :)

My Long Walk Route

Google said it was going to take 3 1/2 hours, which is about 20 minutes per mile. I thought this was doable but I didn’t factor in the heat. It was 81 degrees an hour or so after I started but it got up past 91 a few hours in. This meant I needed to rest and refill my water bottle more often than I anticipated (thank you McDonalds for having cold water, air conditioning, and 3 locations along my route!). It ended up taking me 4 1/2 hours with rest breaks.

I did a sort-of live tweeting of the walk, which you can find on my Twitter stream. The tweeting was fun for me, and helpful with the nice encouragements I got from my friends on there. That’s another nice thing about walking, you can do other stuff at the same time. It’ s hard to tweet from a bike. :)

The other part of the walk was taking pictures. I decided against taking my regular camera with me on this first walk since I was already carrying a water bottle, so I took some pictures with my iPhone camera instead. It’s cool to be able to upload the pics to Flickr while walking too. The whole set can be found at Flickr if you’re interested.

I’m very glad I did this walk, even with the heat and pain my poor legs felt later. I’m already thinking of how I would do a similar walk going North/South across town in fact.

For now though, here’s a picture of why the North Valley of Albuquerque is my favorite walking area. Right on the other side of this wall is one of the city’s busiest streets and you’d never know it.

Must Be Questioned

Indexed » Blog Archive » The world used to be flat.

I’ve been following Jessica Hagy’s work on Indexed for a long time and I’m always glad to see her getting more and more popular.

Eye Candy IS A Critical Business Requirement

Great presentation. Goes very fast too, don’t be scared of the number of slides.

My Persona and The Other Matt Grommes

Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman

This is a very interesting data visualization art piece from MIT. You enter your name and it looks for everything online it can find about you. For reference, here’s mine:

Although I should say this is different than the first time I put my name in a few days ago so I’m not sure what they use to determine that picture. There’s nothing behind the scenes I can see about it either. I’d like to be able to click on the bar and see the inputs but that doesn’t appear to be possible.

There is one weird thing about this project though, and it illustrates the problem with googling for people for job interviews, dates, etc. A few months ago another guy with the name Matt Grommes was involved in a car accident where the other driver died. This has nothing to do with me but it shows up in this bar and in any searches for my name, if you go past the first page of results. The legal section of the bar is not about me at all but it shows up pretty prominently. As we use these type of tools (I can see something like this being regularly attached to resumes by the HR department in the near future) more and more, they’ll have not only include more data, but be able to filter out “other” Matt Grommeses. My name is not very common and I still have another guy’s data in my Persona. Imagine what he thinks if he were to put his name in.

Book Review: Release It!

Get Release It! on Amazon

A few weeks ago I heard an interview on Software Engineering Radio with Michael Nygard, author of a book I hadn’t heard of called Release It! My wife had been reading Ship It! and I had heard good things about Manage It! so I was happy to hear about this new book. Over the course of the hour or so interview, Mr. Nygard made one heck of a case both for the book and for his way of thinking about writing software.

Mr. Nygard is a operations guy. That is to say his job is to help big companies maintain the software they use. The focus of the book is pointing out ways developers can engineer their software to work better with operations and be more maintainable. It’s an unfortunately seldom seen topic in programming but at least now we have a fairly thorough book to reference on the topic.

The book starts out with a pretty scary tale of a post-mortem the author did on a huge outage at a major airline. It’s a very interesting look at a huge failure that ended up being caused by a pretty small programming error that any of us could make. He also talks here about getting a thread dump of a Java process to find out where it’s having trouble which I had occasion to use in real life right after I finished the book.

The structure of the book is to introduce a topic, then do a section on Patterns and Anti-Patterns around that topic. The first section is Stability. He talks about different types of failure, and defines stability in the first place which ends up being harder than you’d anticipate. Having spent most of my professional career so far writing internal corporate applications, this was the first place where the book veered off from being specifically applicable to my life. Not to say we corporate developers don’t have to worry about customers or uptime but it’s a different set of concerns. Nobody is going to switch to another billing system because the one we work on is down. But still, it’s useful stuff.

The 2nd section of the book is Capacity. Admittedly, I skimmed this section since I’m not working on anything right now that requires accounting for massive amounts of users or fine-tuning my Ajax requests. I will revisit this section for sure when I get onto something more relevant.

The 3rd section is General Design Issues; split into sections on Network, basic Security, Availability, and Administration. Section 4 is Operations. Both of these are very valuable. Just about everything is illustrated with real examples and specific recommendations, which I like to see.

I like reading about Anti-Patterns because I’m always on the lookout for not only ways to do things but ways not to do things. The Patterns are, of course, good things to keep in mind whether you’re developing a website or a corporate integration program. In fact the Patterns in this book are probably the highlight. Things like using Timeouts, Circuit Breakers, and Connection Pooling are timeless and useful all over, hallmarks of really being Patterns and not just quick fixes and bandaids.

Overall if you’re developing any kind of serious software that’s going to have to serve users and be maintained over time, this book should really be on your bookshelf. It’s the rare book that works first as a read-through and then as a reference to be returned to later. Especially if you’re not the one who has to maintain your code, the focus on Operations is a very valuable way of thinking. If you’ve read the book I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts in the comments.

Get Release It! on Amazon

Tr.im and The Short URL Conundrum

I had been writing a post about how my new favorite URL shortener, Tr.im, was shutting down and stranding all my precious links when just this evening they apparently decided to keep the service running. I should be happy about this but I still feel weird about the whole thing. So in place of the original boohoo post about Tr.im, I’m going to think out loud about the URL shortener business/ecosystem for a bit.

I’ve been thinking for awhile that Google should play a role in this URL shortener ecosystem. They’re big enough not to go away and they maintain such a central role in the web anyway I think they’d be a good default choice. But they’ve shown no interest in getting into the shortener business as a competitor to Tr.im, Bit.ly, and the rest so I was thinking they should take the role of a shortener warehouse. If a service like Tr.im goes away, they transfer the list of links and short codes to Google and the URLs keep working at a minimum. Apparently Bit.ly is trying to get something like this going but I have a feeling since they’re in the business, their competitors aren’t going to sign on. And I fear Tr.im has helped sow some amount of distaste for Bit.ly with their blog posts about Bit.ly’s favored status with Twitter so that isn’t going to help.

But narrowing this down to Tr.im, I’m trying to decide if I should start using them again. I like them much more than Bit.ly, but this incident hasn’t helped them at all. They said originally they couldn’t make a business out of Tr.im if Twitter was going to explicitly favor Bit.ly. This is obviously still true. They’re not on firmer ground now than before, they’ve just made a bunch of noise. The tempest-in-a-Twitter they caused with their frankly somewhat offensively curt shutdown messages may end up causing Twitter to rethink their One URL Shortener To Rule Them All stance but if the favoritism really comes from their VCs and board members personal connections, I doubt it. They have to know if they starve out Tr.im and the rest, people will grumble but in the end we’ll all move on.

According to some stats I saw, Tr.im was a minuscule percentage of the number of links on Twitter. I think the brouhaha about Tr.im shutting down was really a reaction to the realization that one of these services could just evaporate almost overnight. And that isn’t going to help them survive but it may kick some kind of warehousing service like I mentioned above into gear. They may have been tricked by feelings of importance when really they were just the canary in the mine, in the end serving only as a warning to everybody else.

So Tr.im hasn’t been saved by this, the creators just caved and the service will limp along not making money like it wasn’t doing before. And on top of this, their willingness just to shutter the service with very little notice doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Until people start hearing news about money coming into the service or of a buyer swooping in where one hadn’t been willing to swoop before, users like me are going to switch if just to minimize the number of links a shutdown would endanger. They may have just doomed themselves to a more public death later with this resurrection.

Merlin on Getting Started

Challenge Vs. Skill diagram from Wikipedia via Merlin’s footnotes.

I was going to write a post about Merlin’s post on Just Enough To Start but I’ll just let him do the talking. As usual he hits it right on the head. His talk at MaxFunCon (linked to in his post) was one of the things that got me off my ass and trying to make a regular schedule for posting to this blog again. I don’t know if he would want to be called inspirational but he is, in just the right way.

Is The Digital Age Stamping Out Serendipity?

WE’VE gained so much in the digital age. We get more entertainment choices, and finding what we’re looking for is certainly fast. Best of all, much of it is free.

But we’ve lost something as well: the fortunate discovery of something we never knew we wanted to find. In other words, the digital age is stamping out serendipity.

via Ping – The Digital Age Is Stamping Out Serendipity – by Damon Darlin in NYTimes.com.

Sometimes I read something that’s so far out of my experience that I have a hard time processing it. This article is one of those times. I can’t decide if I’m misunderstanding the point of the article or if it’s really not a problem. The author of the article, Damon Darlin, is saying that the internet and ipods and in some weird way, Twitter, are taking the “randomness” out of finding new stuff. Balderdash, I say. :)

First, he says for some reason finding stuff on a friend’s bookshelf or album collection is “serendipitous” but finding new music on a blog or Twitter is “group-think”. Somehow if people online say something is cool it’s been “filtered and vetted” but finding the same thing via a friend isn’t. I don’t get it.

Not only does his argument not make sense, he’s looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. It doesn’t matter where you found something new because it’s new to you. No matter if you find something through a friend or via a review linked on Twitter or on a Top 10 list, it’s new to you. It’s still serendipitous if you like it.

Every year when the Top X Of The Year music, book, and movie lists come out I go through some of them and see if there’s anything interesting looking. I usually download whatever looks halfway good in the Pitchfork top albums list, then delete anything I don’t like and buy what I do like from Amazon’s MP3 store. I’ve found an unbelievable amount of great music this way. (Seriously, try it.) I don’t pay attention to radio or music blogs or magazines so this is my way of finding new stuff. Is this worse than finding an album though a friend? I can’t see how it is. But it’s still filtered in the strongest way, being a Top 10 list or whatever. When I first saw The Knife as the #1 album on the Pitchfork list a few years ago I thought it was them being willfully weird until I listened to the album a few times, then a few more times, then a few dozen more times until it became one I still listen to regularly. I found my favorite band, The Hold Steady, completely randomly when somebody on a podcast recommended I listen to some teenage girl’s music podcast long ago and Your Little Hoodrat Friend was one of the songs she played. I was hooked from the first 30 seconds of that song and if that’s not serendipitous I don’t know what is.

I really can’t even see what the heck Mr. Darlin is talking about, even if you cut out the mostly pointless but seemingly required paragraphs about Twitter. The internet / digital age has brought so much serendipity to my life this just seems like he must be talking about something else. But like I said, I don’t really care (and I don’t think it matters) where something new came from as long as it’s new.

(During this post I mentioned 2 bands you really should try. There’s some serendipity for you. And if you listen to them, you’re welcome. :))

Netflix’s Culture

Great, I’ve known Netflix was an awesome place to work for awhile and I’ve been trying to get in there. Now everybody’s going to be applying and I’ll never get in! :)

Rands on Reality

Reality is a constraint to be applied creatively.

via rands on Twitter

Rands is one of my favorite writers. His blog is great and he’s one of the highlights of my twitter stream. He’s consistently putting out really interesting, thought provoking stuff. I was in San Francisco during the last Apple conference and he was tweeting telling people to come hang out. To my eternal shame I chickened out of going and saying hi.