These are questions for wise men with skinny arms

I’m often torn between spending my time at work listening to senior engineers talk about complex subjects and just diving head down into a project that I can tackle with the skills I have right now. When senior engineers have a postmortem on a serious issue, I know I learn about system design, communication, and failure assumptions. These are great lessons I can’t quite appreciate because I don’t make these kind design decisions on a daily basis, but I still cherish the knowledge for later use and I know it will make me a better engineer to just accumulate those high level lessons.

So this starts with trying to instal the Dart VM on RHEL 6 only to discover that the gcc installed might be too old for it to work correctly. I might try anyways later, but the experience sparked this train of thought. I originally wanted to write a little game solver in Dart to get for it outside of the web-app environment, which is decidedly not what it is designed to do, thinking it would be like Node.

So I tried contributing a new feature to an open source project whose last release was in 2009. I didn’t know how many developers still monitored the mailing list, but I thought I would at least get a response to my emailed patch. It’s hosted on SourceForge, so I figured it probably wasn’t under active development. I don’t think my email even got through moderation, I subscribed to the mailing list before sending a message, but it seems to have binned me as Post by non-member to a members-only list.

Another brain-dump on things that have inspired me to write about techie topics. I kept reading about programming languages over the weekend instead of coding anything like I originally planned. I had a whole list of things I was looking forward to coding: Python - Complete feature for the BitPim filesystem view multi-select Dart - Compile from source for server-side use Go - Finish another round of optimizations for Boggle Go - Review the recent commits to Chihaya fish shell - Test bash source support for aliases None of these even got started, but it feels like I made progress here after transcribing my //TODO list from G-mail tasks.

Since the last post I’ve done read more on language design and usage, mostly around the “worse is better” and the political dichotomy of language features. I’ve started reading things on D, Haskell, and Clojure, just to get some perspective on the discussion. As a primarily C++ programmer, I’m well aware of the tradeoffs in style/politics/features that make a language popular vs powerful or fun. I’ve kept my experiences with Dart and Go in mind as I read these meta-language dissensions.

Universities come with a mythical mission. But they don’t fulfill it. This article covers many very common sentiments among my family and friends, and I think the article addresses the problem and the lack of solution very well. I think I’ll just riff on things that I feel are already incredibly obvious to anyone who has been through the system recently. I’m currently a mentor for a high-school junior, and as his high school pushes him towards applying for university admission, I question his motives to find out if that really helps him with his life goals.

Time to blah more about myself. Not any meaningful or personal information about myself, just random thoughts that cross my head who yearn to be communicated. More practicing questions of the “So how does that make you feel?” variety. Until now, my gchats have held the answers for questions like: “Why do you still have a flip phone?” and “How have you never made a Facebook account?” These make for great casual conversations, as I get to repeat it to multiple friends while I question my decisions and eventually justify my reasoning or abandon it with a wave of sarcasm.