I came across this insightful article today, and have further thoughts on it.

Diversity comes from people with differing interests, not only those who love to hack late into the night. While there are such ‘flow’ days, 4–5 hours of deep, focussed work generally is more productive and leaves one happier. Being present during a core set of hours is better than half-working through many more hours.

Really liked the example in the article where dress code does not equate to diversity or lack thereof. Though, I personally would have trouble with terribly stringent dress codes! To me it is just another form of assumption: that professionalism is not possible without dressing stringently. Certainly, dressing like a slob is another extreme.

If people are having to work longer because there’s too much work, or the work is not spread out well, that’s a deeper problem, and working longer hours is, at best, a band-aid solution.

We might lose a certain depth by diversifying, but the breadth gained in an overall more inclusive team, internally, and a product reflecting this externally often makes up plenty, and in time, a different sort of depth is gained.

Digressing a bit on working longer hours: besides looming or unrealistic deadlines, the one constant reason, in my experience has been the existence of too much non-core work (e.g. meetings!) taking up most of the day, forcing one to do actual work later in the day.

People in managerial roles who spend most of their day facilitating work through mechanisms like meetings tend to forget that developers still have to actually do the work that came out of meetings. Their day is not yet over.

I said I was digressing, but the lack of understanding by managerial staff of this phenomenon, in a sense, is also a form of accidental non-inclusiveness. It is an assumption that everyone works the same way. The coin has two sides, as usual. :-)

TL;DR

Derived a Docker-wrapped Hugo with Pygments binary.

Documentation can be found on the github page.

Rivetting Long Story

I recently switched this site over to using Hugo, a static site-generator.

On Debian, even running a mix of testing and unstable, the packages are out of date, even worse, some combination Hugo and Pygments stopped working. Completely the opposite effect of simplifying my writing, argh.

Why yet another container? As the author whose container I forked points out, there are a lot of stale Hugo/Docker containers. Here’s another one that may go stale – but unlikely, while I continue to use Hugo.

I’ve been using Kotlin the past few weeks, mainly to write JustLogIt!.

I very nearly thought Kotlin was missing a feature that Java has: multiple bounds or constraints on a type parameter. In Java, one can do:

interface A {}
interface B {}

// constrain the type parameter T to be a subtype of both A and B
class Foo<T extends A & B> {}

A feature I occasionally find very useful. The syntax is nowhere near the same for Kotlin, and only a very small example right at the end of the Generics documentation is provided:

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/generics.html

Some discussion around the syntax can be found here:

https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/why-the-scattered-generic-types/1917

I had a more involved use-case:

class FragmentCanRequestPermissions<out T>(val fragment: T) :
    CanRequestPermissions, FragmentCompat.OnRequestPermissionsResultCallback
    where T: Fragment, T: FragmentCompat.OnRequestPermissionsResultCallback {
  ...
}

Thus, where defining constraints occurs at the end of other declarations.

Let’s see the more general syntax for when we have multiple type parameters, each having multiple bounds/constraints:

interface A
interface B
interface C
interface D
interface E
interface F

class Meow<ABC, CDE, DE>: A, F
where 
  ABC: A, ABC: B, ABC: C,
  CDE: C, CDE: D, CDE: E,
  DE: D, DE: E
      

In fact, as you might infer, the order of bound declarations does not matter:

class RandomOrderLikeAirportRandomChecks<ABC, CDE, DE>: A, F
where 
  ABC: A, CDE: D, ABC: C,
  DE: E, CDE: C, ABC: B, CDE: E,
  DE: D

// "Random". Yeah. Right.

Yes, I am on a plane.

After nearly 10 years of hosting with Dreamhost (including this site) with mostly okay service — it had its bad days! — I decided to migrate everything over to Webfaction (affiliate link) which I have been using since around 2014 for a few things.

In the words of Dreamhost’s billing:

You are not within our 97 day money back guarantee (it has been 3585 days since 2007-05-25)!

Woot!

The following points tipped me over:

• The ability to deploy long running services (called applications) that run on a port
  • This port can be exposed if needed, though rarely do you want this.
  • Instead you deploy websites whose requests are proxied through to these internal applications. With this, even on a shared host, I can (and do) run a memory-bounded JVM application on Jetty, for example. You can also run high-performing, low-footprint web servers to host your applications, and save memory.
  • Your stock standard static/php/cgi application also exists.
• PostgreSQL Support by default! Seriously, Dreamhost, it is stupid how you don’t yet have this for shared hosting. Sticking with MyOrac^H^H^H^HSQL is most unsound.
• A generous 1GB guaranteed memory for applications in the base USD 10/mo plan.
• Like Dreamhost, it has SSH access. A crucial facility for developers, even on shared hosting.

I’m only on Webfaction’s basic plan, so have no comment on how they scale. But it’s a much more flexible, and competitively-priced shared hosting option.

Most of my work is done either on a Macbook Pro, or my Linux desktop. As much as macOS is a Unix, with supporting tools like MacPorts, Linux is still richer as far as commandline utilities go.

Prior to native Docker support on macOS/OSX, you would resort to running Linux in a virtual machine, and having a share directory.

With Docker, we basically emulate the same, but obviously, native Docker on the Mac, or Windows 10 for that matter, is far more lightweight than a VM. Note that this is not a very container’ey use of Docker where everything you need is ready to deploy right from the image.

The approach I’m taking for this use case is basically to treat a Docker container as a lightweight VM, with adhoc tooling installed — essentially a rolling-release style VM, occasionally taking snapshots, and pushing up to the docker registry so it’s shareable across machines.

The overall approach is:

• Pull down an existing container, I went with ubuntu
• Tag it as your own and push to your docker registry. Follow instructions here on this step.
• Pull down your tagged image
• Create a script that will mount your home directory as a volume. Thereby providing you with a live workspace to execute your container utilities against. I have nearly all my work in my home directory, so this mount makes sense, but it’s simply a regular mount.
• Create a user in the container, so you don’t constantly log in as root.
• Commit and push the container’s changes as needed.

Your data is still in your host’s home, while the utilities are installed in the container.

Running docker commands is a pain if you do the above workflow often. Here I’m providing the scripts and utilities I wrote. Replace with your custom values as needed.

My Docker utility run script. Note that it’s already using my tagged ubuntu image. So the tagging and pushing step is a prerequisite.

#
# ubuntu-docker-start.sh
#

HOST_HOME=/Users/xdyme
CONTAINER_HOME=/home/xdyme/data
TZ=Australia/Melbourne
HOSTNAME=ubuntu-container
CONTAINER_NAME=ubuntu
IMAGE="kva1966/ubuntu:latest"

docker run -dt \
  --name ${CONTAINER_NAME} \
  -h ${HOSTNAME} \
  -e ${TZ} \
  --volume ${HOST_HOME}:${CONTAINER_HOME} \
  ${IMAGE}

I also added a bunch of utility aliases for common container tasks in ~/.bashrc:

#### Local Shell Container ####

alias d=docker
alias ubuntu-deploy-container='~/projects/checkouts/desktop-scripts/ubuntu-docker-start.sh'
alias ubuntu-commit='d commit ubuntu kva1966/ubuntu:latest'
alias ubuntu-push='d push kva1966/ubuntu:latest'
alias ubuntu-stop='d stop ubuntu'
alias ubuntu-start='d start ubuntu'
alias ubuntu-run='ubuntu-stop; d rm ubuntu; ~/projects/checkouts/desktop-scripts/ubuntu-docker-start.sh'
alias ubuntu-delete-container='ubuntu-stop; d rm ubuntu'

ubuntu-login-user() {
  username=$1
  homedir=/home/$username
  if [ -z $username ]; then
    username=root
    homedir=/root
  fi
  
  d exec -it -u $username ubuntu bash -c "cd $homedir; exec ${SHELL} --login"
}

alias ubuntu-login='ubuntu-login-user xdyme'
alias ubuntu-login-root='ubuntu-login-user'

#### END Local Shell Container ####

Some very basic .bashrc and .profile can be found when you login to the xdyme user on my container. Mainly git completion, and a nicer looking default shell.

Corporations often talk about values. Expected behaviour and human traits that the corporation deems necessary to achieve its goals as a whole. It is expected that all levels of the organisation will display these traits. Of course, anything involving people is bound to have its own challenges. It is very difficult to instill values in people; more so adults.

The idea behind value statements is legitimate, and having this framework of character is certainly a step in the right direction. When the toplevel folks consistently display these values, employees down the chain either fall in place, or leave. I am, for the moment, ignoring matters of hiring the right people, a non-trivial problem worthy of its own post (many, many posts).

In effect, it is people that bring values and traits to life. Without enough people making these values pervasive, they mean nothing. Words on a corporate brochure.

Very few places I can think of — in fact, just one, my extended family, the BKC — have values so tangible, that, it would seem even if not one human were left in the place, those values would remain alive, palpable. One gravitates to the promoted values nearly by osmosis. Such places are the exception rather than the norm, of course. Given this, I have come to the epiphany, that for most other corporations, I cannot possibly work for the company. I work for people at the company. Together, we progress the organisation. The latter is nearly a side effect. But it is very much akin to having money as a side effect of providing value, not a particularly big idea by now one would hope.

Management experts like to use terms like “restructuring”, as if an organisation is a malleable construction of easily replaceable lego blocks. In 2016, that many places do not recognise just how organic, just how alive, and how cellular in nature corporations are, is a cause for sadness. Until the importance of people takes precedence, and not just as lip service, everything tends towards disorder, or at best, mediocrity.

One must consider that to start a company, to drive it to provide value and derive profit — the beginning — takes a huge amount of energy. Most company founders are smart and driven. To me, a state of mediocrity (or perhaps, complacency) is when only this initial impetus moves the company in, essentially, auto-pilot mode. When no more of the same drive and energy is applied to achieve continuous innovation.

I recall a Yow! event I attended recently, the speaker — I believe from Netflix — mentioned that execs from other companies often mentioned how they could not hire good people. To which the speaker responded that many of Netflix’s engineers were hired from these execs’ companies. The phrase “damning evidence” comes to mind.