Hopasaurus: September 2021

Friday, September 24, 2021

Code & Coffee 9/24/2021

Topic: Learning like a Nobel Prize winning Physicist (Richard Feynman)

My outline and topic notes.

Talked about antennas and Ham Radio

No nonsense study guide: https://www.kb6nu.com/study-guides/
Sealing coax: sealant tape link
Bruce's antenna and Helium setup is not performing as it was so wondering about sealing the coax

Adding step zero, gathering the information about the topic
Replace you words with diagrams
Also is this about "the need to show off"?

Is some of this "Do as I say not as I do"

Asciinema: https://asciinema.org/

My demo:
https://asciinema.org/a/WuGUIbTzYSX1buMLl1vyXmXwU
Talked about screen recording terminal sessions

mitigation techniques
mitigating mitigation techniques

Physics vs. Astro Physics vs. Quantum Mechanics

They are all a bit different
Use lots of diagrams and examples

Audio Book: Surely your joking Mr. Feynman

Link to Audible version

Using this in real life:

Bruce: has a presentation next week that can be refined.
Ryan: interested in using this to improve onboarding.

Learning styles

Veritasium: The biggest myth in education (You are not a visual learner)
Make sure to touch on each of these while you are presenting
"Inquiry Learning"
"Flipped Classroom"
"The best way to teach people is to not teach them"

Instead of the traditional tests and structure

Mastery structure
"This is a list of what you need to demonstrate that you have learned"
Choose your own adventure on how to demonstrate mastery.

General work banter

Sales are good and strong, back to 2019 levels

Trans is working Saturdays to drive pizza dough around
Supply chain is working to get back in order
Supply chains are resonant systems and there is noise in the system

Water filtering and putting stuff back into pure water

Need to put stuff back into filtered water to make you not demineralize

Watch out for illegal goat farms
Also walapini may be a good server celler.
Someone always takes the good ideas

https://akash.network/
but wait theres more... the idea isn't dead yet.

Lots of new people, and as usual lots of good discussion.

Code & Coffee 9/17/2021

We had Code & Coffee, but I missed capturing the notes topics varied a good time was had by all.

Learning like a Nobel prize winning physicist

Over several upcoming sessions of Code & Coffee we will explore The SOLID principles of object oriented design. To facilitate that we have a short intro in a future meeting. Today (9/24/2021) there will be an introduction to a framework for facilitating the learning and exploration.

Feynman technique for problem solving:

Pick topic
Write down everything you know in a note book

Add lots of illustrations and examples
put it into a rough outline

Present it

Are you able to present the topic simply, clearly and correctly?

If not you have gaps

Capture questions

Questions that you are unable to answer are gaps in what you know

Simplify

Revisit and revise your notes
Fill in the gaps discovered in the latest presentation
Simplify the language and illustrations

Repeat

In each iteration you will be able to discover new ways to distill the information and present it more clearly
Find a new group that you can present the information to and try again.

This technique works well when preparing for a big presentation. The first iteration can be presentation to the rubber duck on your desk as even when no other person is present you will notice things to be improved. Next iteration may be a local user group or in a work lunch & learn. Then regional and finally the national event.

Without knowing the framework this is how I prepared for presenting "Disintegration Testing" at QA or the Highway and The Agile Conference in 2014. Before presenting at the larger venues it was presented and refined at local groups. Even though it is a natural process and was use implicitly being aware and explicit in the process would have allowed the presentation to be even better. Also missing in that presentation was the focus on continual simplification of the subject.

Feynman's advice is to find a practical problem to apply the topic. His example for this is the flagpole problem in the "Problem Solving Techniques" video (link 2 in references) starting at about 8:00. This is something to look for when listening to Feynman talk in the links below, it is fascinating to observe the way he explains things knowing that his goal is simplification.

References:

Friday, September 10, 2021

Code & Coffee 9/10/2021

Topic: "What is clean code to you"

A data access layer that is actually tested

there is a thing called NULL
it is uncomparable
value.equals(otherValue) will make your life less fun

Sonar Cube would have caught that

yup :(

10 year old code may still have fun and interesting bugs yet to be discovered
Clean code is code you can trust

Clean code takes more time

and yet this saves time
Quick and dirty saves time

the cost is hidden in the future

When you are doing code in reverse

(dissecting code previously written to figure out what the code is doing)
The time taken is exponential with the complexity of the code.

Clean code is code that is acceptable to the maintenance team
Clean code is NOT ssdd

Shiny Stuff Driven Development
aka Resume Driven Development
This leads to somewhat hackish code as it takes time to learn how to cleanly implement a new tool or technology
Instead of resume padding seek to master the new tech and make sure that it is tested and that other team members are onboard with the new shiny stuff.

Clean code and testing

attitude has changed over time
used to be more militant
but over time you realize that people are trying their best but more understanding now
virtually nobody is deliberately lax on quality.
This is a sensitive topic but there are techniques for having these conversations.

SOLID and DRY

both are commonly misunderstood, misapplied and worthy of additional study.
For example Single Responsibility

... database and business logic can be side by side if their requirements will ALWAYS change at the same time.
You missed more examples because I don't type fast enough to keep up sometimes.

Is SOLID still the best we can do?

I wonder if part of the pain is friction from applying OO principals in a functional-ish style

Can you grok this code, can you read it and modify it and how long will it take to do so.
Postel's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
Clean code is not prematurely optimized

Communication

Sometimes it seems that people are using works from the same language

but entirely failing to convey meaning

It is good to be able to recognize when this is happening so that course corrections can happen

Linux distros

Manjaro - Arch derivitive

"easy mode arch"
Used this as it had the latest kernel at the time

Next up is back to Ubuntu, it caught up to the kernel that is needed for the fancy video card

Barrier for mouse sharing - required xorg, does not support wayland
Talked a bit about HATEAOS (pronunciation is left to the reader) and beyond.

Links about what is beyond and how it to make it more useful:
http://amundsen.com/talks/2015-04-codepalousa/semantic-gap.html

As presented at Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkAt9XSOfaE
Slides: http://amundsen.com/talks/2015-04-codepalousa/gap-slides.pdf
On O'Reilly Learning: https://learning.oreilly.com/videos/rest-hypermedia-and/9781491936511/9781491936511-video219221/

better audio if you have access.

I have not looked deeply into this yet but it looks to have some very interesting potential.

Code & Coffee 9/3/2021

No topic today
Talked about chatty queries and optimization

Some queries prompt many many other queries and how to tweak these to make them less "chatty"
Stories about queries past

Talked about profile pictures

Why not just use Gravatar?

But wait, how does Gravetar make money?
Talked about security and privacy implications of Gravetar
links pending more research.