Category Archives: mind

Two Questions

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Recently I was talking with a friend about coaching and specifically the act of helping younger developers improve themselves. I had a sort of microepiphany when I realized that I’ve been improving myself for over two decades with the same pair of questions, originally unconsciously and only recently in my active consciousness. The next time you do something you want to get better at, ask yourself these two questions:

What about this makes me feel good? This is a VERY specific question, and it is NOT “what do I like about this?”. It’s often hard to answer. You are not allowed to say “I don’t know”, and you are not allowed to settle for answering the much easier question “what about this do I like?”—although that can be a great guide into discovering what it is that makes you feel good. If you wrote an elegant passage of code, or did something clever, or shipped a really nasty hack but saved the company (thus buying them time to refactor your nasty hack) by shipping on time, that’s what you like. But go beyond this. What about that makes you feel good? Did it make you feel smart? Did it make you feel artistic? Did it make you feel like a hero? Did it make you feel like somehow, against all the odds, you might just be starting to “get it” as a programmer?

Take a moment and really just let yourself feel good about what you did. If you can find that and tap into it, you have just found a well inside yourself that you will return to again and again in the future. Congratulations, you’ve just found the reason you’re going to spend the rest of your life getting better at this.

If you can’t answer this question, don’t sweat it. But don’t be surprised if your life ends up going a different direction. Find something else that makes you feel good, and do that instead.

What about this could I do better? Most days, you’ll think of something right off. There was some duplication, or a lack of symmetry in the code, or your variable names were kind of awkward.

Other days it’s a bit harder. “Writing this bit felt a bit grindy, like I was pushing out lots of boilerplate. I don’t see how to fix it, but does it really have to hurt this much?”

The best days are the days when you try and try and just can’t answer it. Important: this doesn’t mean you did something perfect. Far from it, and far better: it means you’ve actually managed to see your blind spot. “This”, your brain is telling you, “this empty space, here… is where more knowledge will fit.” Those are the days that herald “getting it” on a whole new level.

So, them’s my questions for you. What made you feel good? What could do better?

Felt any good or done any better recently?

Donkeypunching Ruby Koans

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Do you want instant enlightenment? Sure, we all do.

And now you can have it!

Tonight I presented Ruby Koans at URUG. It started out simple enough, but then we got on a weird quirk about trying to make the Koan tests pass without actually satisfying the test requirements. We monkeypatched Fixnum, then started playing with patching Object#to_s… basically we were looking for TMAETTCPW: The Most AEvil Thing That Could Possibly Work. I spelled Evil AEvil because it’s extra evilly.

Mike Moore had the bright idea to just break off all the assert methods in Test::Unit; after that it just became a challenge to discover how to get the rest of the koans to run at all.

With sincere apologies to Matz, Jim and Joe, here is the result:

https://gist.github.com/1108850

Tourbus 2 is Out!

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I just released Tourbus 2.0! You can get it by cloning the tourbus repo in that link, or by simply installing the gem from rubyforge.

What’s TourBus?

TourBus is a ruby framework for stress-testing a website. You define “Tourist” classes that “tour” their way through your site, and then tell tourbus to send a load of them at your site.

What’s New

Better Syntax, and tested support for most rubies. TourBus 2.0 has been tested and found worky on:

  • JRuby 1.6.0 <– strongly recommended, as it has better threading
  • MRI 1.8.7p334
  • MRI 1.9.2p180
  • REE 1.8.7-2011.03

Upgrading from Tourbus 0.9

  • Your tour classes will change; they are now called tourists and they go on tours, instead of being called tours who run tests (which really never made sense anyway)
  • Open your tour class, and change it to inherit from Tourist instead of Tour.
  • Change before_tests and after_tests to before_tours and after_tours.
  • Rename all your test_ methods to be tour_ methods. E.g. “def test_simple” => “def tour_simple”
  • That’s it! Tourbus should now run normally.

Quick and Easy Setup

gem install tourbus

Okay, let’s say you have a website running at localhost:3000 and you want to test that home.html includes the text “hi there” even when being pounded by hundreds of visitors at once. Let’s install and set up everything all at once! cd into your project folder, and do the following:

mkdir tours
 
echo 'class Simple tours/simple.rb

That’s it, you now have a tourist ready to wander over to your site and request the home page. Let’s run him and see that everything’s okay:

tourbus

You should see a clean run followed by a text report showing what happened. If that worked, let’s make your tourist go through the website 10 times in a row. But let’s ALSO make 100 different tourists to the same 10 laps with him, all at once:

tourbus -n 10 -c 100

Happy server stressing! Check out the README for more info.

Bonus: Isolating Tourbus

Here’s how I like to install tourbus. I cd into my development folder, and then do:
rvm install jruby-1.6.0
rvm use jruby-1.6.0
rvm gemset create tourbus
rvm gemset use tourbus
git clone git://github.com/dbrady/tourbus.git
cd tourbus
gem install bundler
bundle install
gem build tourbus.gemspec
gem install tourbus-2.0.1.gem # (update version if it changes)

Next I cd into my project and do

echo 'rvm use jruby-1.6.0@tourbus' > .rvmrc

This lets me run tourbus under jruby and its own gemset, so even if my website is running rails on MRI, I can still get the lovely JVM native threads when tourbussing my site.

James Edward Gray: Associative Arrays and Ruby Hashes

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Yesterday I put out a little screencast showing some ways of Creating Ruby Hashes. James Edward Gray II pinged me on Twitter and basically said “Great screencast! Ooh, but you forgot this! Ooh, and this! And this!” and so of course there was nothing to do for it but invite him to do a pairing screencast with me.

This video is a bit of a weird hybrid. You get 7 minutes of podcall, then 18 minutes of screencast, then another 12 minutes of podcall. James shows off some of the “hot new awesomeness” of Ruby 1.9, and then points out that this awesomeness has been around for a couple of years and nobody’s using it, in spite of it having been in the current Pickaxe for nearly as long. Along the way we talk about regular expressions, testing dogma, and the importance of never squashing creativity in the open source community. All in all, an incredibly fun time for me. James threatened to come back and do another one with me on regular expressions, and I’m mentioning it here in writing so that everybody knows I plan on taking him up on that offer.

No podcast, because half of it is us typing into a shared screen session. But here’s the video. You may need to watch it on Vimeo or download it to see the font clearly.

Associative Arrays with James Edward Gray II from David Brady on Vimeo.

Single Responsibility Principle

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Pat and I are back with another installment of our weird little video podcast! Today we talk about the Single Responsibility Principle, which is at the heart of SOLID. SRP pushes everything out into little classes, and if you want to get anything complex done (like, for instance, you might find in any real program with more than 10 lines of code), you have to build a sort of aggregator object or manager class. Our key question for this podcall is “Even though SRP makes this aggregator class necessary, does the aggregator class itself violate SRP?”

As always we had a great time talking about it. Viewers will be happy to know that we kept the fart jokes to a minimum (I opted to go with Registered Sex Offender humor instead). Viewers distressed by the amount of airtime my cats got last time (and you know who you are, George S. from Utah) will be happy to know that my cat only farts in the microphone once, and she gets less than 10 seconds of airtime doing it. Fair warning: she really works those 10 seconds.

We Still Need a Name For Our Podcast!

Watch or listen to today’s podcast to find out what you can win if you suggest the winning name! Heck, you can win something just by listening! Congratulations to @trptcolin for winning the FIRST copy of Eloquent Ruby we’re giving away. Want to win the second? Listen to the podcast to find out how! Or reread the first sentence of the paragraph extra carefully!

Here’s the audio version: Single Responsibility Principle

And here’s the video, embedded for your viewing pleasure, or head over to Vimeo to download the full-sized 1280×480 version.

Single Responsibility Principle from David Brady on Vimeo.

Monkeypatching and the Open-Closed Principle

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Ah, the Open-Closed Principle. In static languages like C++ and Java, classes by default are Closed-Closed. In dynamic languages like JavaScript and Ruby, they are Open-Open. In Java you have to add design pattern ceremony in order to open for classes for extension; in Ruby you have to exercise discipline in order to keep them closed for modification. Yesterday Pat Maddox and I spent 80 minutes kicking the can around talking about Monkeypatching versus the Open-Closed Principle. Along the way, we talked about everything from Rebecca Black to RSpec, from Cognitive Load to watching my cat try to claw open my office window.

We’re Starting a Podcast!

Pat and I are gonna start doing this regularly. And we need a cool name for our podcast! Help us out! The giver of the winning suggestion will get something cool. Not sure what yet, but I promise it will be something cool.

But for now, just watch the rest of this post’s space for the video. Because I’m embedding it in 3… 2…

Monkeypatching and the Open-Closed Principle from David Brady on Vimeo.

I Accidentally Spoke at MWRC 2011

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I found out the night before the conference that one more speaker had canceled than the conference had backup speakers in reserve. I found this out because I was rooming with the conference organizer, Mike Moore, and BOY did he call in the favor of not asking me to split the hotel cost!

So, I spoke for about half an hour about Monkeypatching Your Brain. All while dressed in a Hilton Hotel bathrobe:


Photo by Jeremy Nicoll of Smashing Shots

It’s currently up at Justin.tv, here: http://www.justin.tv/confreaks/b/281745310 I am the second speaker, about 38 minutes in. It’s the livestream from the conference and I don’t know how long the link will be valid. Confreaks is in the process of making “proper” videos of the conference. I’ll post a link once those are up.

Palindromic Powers of Two

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Huh, that’s odd.

Just farting around, reducing the set of Integers to their prime factors—typically Friday-night stuff, amirite?—and I noticed an interesting pattern.

  1. Start with a keyspace of 0 and all of the integers in order as your available keys.
  3. Write a 0.
  4. You’ve exhausted the keyspace, so get another key, 1.
  5. Write the entire series so far, add the new key, and write the series (minus the new key) again. You should have 010.
  6. You’ve exhausted the keyspace again, so get another key, 2.
  7. Repeat: 010, 2, 010 -> 0102010.
  8. Repeat with 3: 010201030102010.
  9. Repeat with 4: 0102010301020104010201030102010.

And so on.

The “Huh!” moment is this: you’re writing the exponent of two in the prime factorization of the list of integers:

1 20
2 21
3 20 * 3
4 22
5 20 * 5
6 21 * 3
7 20
8 23
9 20 * 32
10 21 * 5
11 20
12 22 * 3
13 20
14 21 * 7
15 20 * 3 * 5
16 24

Sudoku: Math Is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping

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I’ve been researching others’ techniques for generating sudoku puzzles, and I have come to the conclusion that nobody actually knows how to do it.

Seriously, if you Google for “generating sudoku puzzles”, most of the methods boil down to “randomly throw numbers at the board and see if it’s a sudoku”. Oh, there’s some cleverness you can do to try to intelligently preserve the randomness of a partially-complete sudoku puzzle (like not randomly putting a 9 into a column that already has one) but at the end of the day all of the solutions basically amount to bogosort.

I promised yesterday that I’d reveal the identity board math. I had planned a big reveal here with lots of mathy explanationing, but the math just isn’t that exotic. There’s a trick to it, but that’s about it. Here’s the math:

A Sudoku board of dimension n is n2xn2 digits, and has nxn sectors, each with n2 digits. Let’s write a function to find the number at position x, y on the board. The whole trick to my F(x,y) math is simply this: the numbers in every sector other than (0,0) are rotations or shifts of the numbers in sector (0,0).

Make sense? Here. The numbers in sector(0,0) are simply the digits 1..n2, arranged in a grid, so that’s easy:

F(x,y): y*n+x

And the math for every other sector is simply a selection into sector 0, 0. Specifically, for F(x,y) outside of sector (0,0), choose the F(x’,y’) IN sector 0,0 such that

x’ = ((x+y/n)%n

y’ = ((y+x/n)%n

So at the end of the day the whole function looks like this in ruby:

def idfx(x, y, n)
  if x<n && y<n
    y*n+x
  else
    idfx( ((x+y/n)%n, ((y+x/n)%n )
  end
end

I should point out that I am operating under the belief that a sudoku puzzle is like a Rubik’s Cube: that a set of transformations can be performed on a valid puzzle that leave the puzzle changed but always valid, and that you can turn any sudoku puzzle into any other sudoku puzzle via these transformations. If I am right, I can take my identity puzzle board and shuffle it using these transformations, and just like scrambling a Rubik’s Cube I will be left with a unique and interesting puzzle that is, most importantly, still valid.

I have proven the first half of my assumption–there are transformations that will change a sudoku without affecting its validity. What I haven’t proven is the second half. I cannot yet transform puzzles arbitrarily. It may not be possible at all, but right now I’m simply hoping that I don’t know enough transformations yet.

Sudoku: Creating Identity Boards

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I’m building a Sudoku generator. There’s just enough wicked math in there to make things interesting. One thing that caught my attention was that there is a sort of “identity” board that you should be able to build for any dimension of sudoku. For the standard 3×3 matrix, it looks like this:

+------+------+------+
| 1 2 3| 4 5 6| 7 8 9|
| 4 5 6| 7 8 9| 1 2 3|
| 7 8 9| 1 2 3| 4 5 6|
+------+------+------+
| 2 3 1| 5 6 4| 8 9 7|
| 5 6 4| 8 9 7| 2 3 1|
| 8 9 7| 2 3 1| 5 6 4|
+------+------+------+
| 3 1 2| 6 4 5| 9 7 8|
| 6 4 5| 9 7 8| 3 1 2|
| 9 7 8| 3 1 2| 6 4 5|
+------+------+------+

The way you write an identity board is this: You write the digits 1..9 in order in the top left sector and across the top line of the puzzle. If you look at it in terms of triplets, however, you build the top line by copying the 2nd triplet row (4 5 6) and then the 1st triplet row (7 8 9) across the top line.

The second row starts with (4 5 6) so you naturally continue with (7 8 9) in the next sector, and then roll around to the beginning to end with (1 2 3). The third row then follows naturally: (7 8 9) (1 2 3) (4 5 6).

You can build the entire board this way if you do the same thing vertically. Copying the first sector’s columns down the board’s first column, you get (1 4 7), (2 5 8), (3 6 9). Do this across the entire board and you end up with the completed puzzle.

The really neat part of this for me is that it works with any dimension of sudoku. For example, here’s a 2×2 and a 4×4 identity board built the same way:

+-----+-----+
| 0 1 | 2 3 |
| 2 3 | 0 1 |
+-----+-----+
| 1 0 | 3 2 |
| 3 2 | 1 0 |
+-----+-----+

+---------+---------+---------+---------+
| 0 1 2 3 | 4 5 6 7 | 8 9 A B | C D E F |
| 4 5 6 7 | 8 9 A B | C D E F | 0 1 2 3 |
| 8 9 A B | C D E F | 0 1 2 3 | 4 5 6 7 |
| C D E F | 0 1 2 3 | 4 5 6 7 | 8 9 A B |
+---------+---------+---------+---------+
| 1 2 3 0 | 5 6 7 4 | 9 A B 8 | D E F C |
| 5 6 7 4 | 9 A B 8 | D E F C | 1 2 3 0 |
| 9 A B 8 | D E F C | 1 2 3 0 | 5 6 7 4 |
| D E F C | 1 2 3 0 | 5 6 7 4 | 9 A B 8 |
+---------+---------+---------+---------+
| 2 3 0 1 | 6 7 4 5 | A B 8 9 | E F C D |
| 6 7 4 5 | A B 8 9 | E F C D | 2 3 0 1 |
| A B 8 9 | E F C D | 2 3 0 1 | 6 7 4 5 |
| E F C D | 2 3 0 1 | 6 7 4 5 | A B 8 9 |
+---------+---------+---------+---------+
| 3 0 1 2 | 7 4 5 6 | B 8 9 A | F C D E |
| 7 4 5 6 | B 8 9 A | F C D E | 3 0 1 2 |
| B 8 9 A | F C D E | 3 0 1 2 | 7 4 5 6 |
| F C D E | 3 0 1 2 | 7 4 5 6 | B 8 9 A |
+---------+---------+---------+---------+

The neatness of this pleased me, but when I tried to implement it in code it got hopelessly complicated very fast. On the drive home from work last week, I found an elegant mathematical function to produce this board. Can you guess it? I’ll post it tomorrow. If you can’t wait, dig around in my twitter feed–the entire function is less than 72 characters.