Tag: a*

#A* Interview #19: Glyph Lefkowitz, Creator of The Twisted Networking Framework

George LondonLeave a comment

According to his Linkedin Bio, today’s guest’s name is “Glyph Not Looking Don’t Contact Lefkowitz” and he created a powerful, event driven networking library called Twisted. In this episode, he tells us how he got started, what his most painfulre lessons have been, and how trying to measure the merit of a programmer is a fundamentally flawed exercise.

To learn more about the A* interviews or to find more episodes, look here.

For the impatient or textually inclined, here’s a summary of our conversation.

What are you working on right now? Why are you working on it?

  • Working on “Mimic” for Rackspace.
  • Mimic allows testing of cloud infrastructure provisioning.
  • Saves you a lot of time and money confirming that your deployment will work as expected.
  • Also working on Twisted, where he has created an “egalitarian process” that’s in charge of it. He still contributes when he can.
  • The Twisted project was a really early innovator in being a heavily-process-driven, 100% code review, 100% test coverage, 100% docstring project (started back in 2004).

What are your main non-technical interests? Who’s your favorite musical artist?

How old were you when you started programming? What motivated you to start? How have your motivations changed since then?

  • Very young. Father was a programmer who taught him a bit of APL. Wanted to be a writer and build a text-based RPG like Zork so he taught himself to program…slowly. Spent a couple years building elaborate Hypercard stacks. After a few years, learned about if-statements (and a year later about variables.)
  • Eventually jumped in C++. Went to computer camp, learned Java and LISP, and filled his high school notebook margins with programs.
  • Really loved the interactivity of games; realized that he has attention deficit disorder and computers were the only thing that could hold his attention.

What’s the most painful technical or career lesson you’ve had to learn? How did you learn it?

  • Building a gmail-before gmail product called “Quotient” at a company called Divmod. All the changes they tried to make increased complexity and decreased maintainability, making things move slower and slower. So the most painful lesson was that if you don’t have a process in place that considers the “people factors” you’ll end up with an unmaintainable mess.
  • You have to write stuff down, in a place that people will see it. And you need a process for testing and maintaining quality standards. Need to build that into your project early on.
  • Read Extreme Programming Explained, Embrace Change

What is your favorite programming language? What is your favorite tool (e.g. emacs, Postgres)? Why?

  • Favorite in terms of design – Smalltalk. Few moving pieces, hangs together conceptually. But it has no tools…strange technology from the future and can’t really practically do much with it.
  • Python compromises with reality. But has commandline interactive interpreter. Has a simple C implementation people can hack on. Garbage collection semantics that sort of make sense. The community values readability and there is a great community.
  • Favorite tool is pip. Let’s you do the most important thing, which is split up responsibility into different modules. Twisted’s test runner “Trial”. Tmux is great for managing terminal sessions.

How should we measure how “good” a technologist is? What are the key “virtues” of a technologist or of a solution?

  • 10x is a toxic myth.
  • We should stop trying to measure goodness because the idea of “merit” leads to bad things in the community.
  • The only good metrics measure teams and they look at outcomes (how many features did you ship) rather than the product.
  • When evaluating, worry about how people will fit into a team rather than how “good” they are.
    *If there’s one defining characteristic, it’s a desire for consistent self-improvement.

How structured is your problem solving approach (e.g. do you use TDD? Do you always pseudocode before coding)? How much of your problem solving comes from intuition/flashes of insight vs. conscious thought?

  • Used to be all about flashes on insight. Has ADHD “hyper focus”; can stay focused super hard on one task, until he loses it and then can’t focus. He’s a 10x programmer in a short window of time, then nothing for a long time.
  • Then over-corrected to all 100% TDD all the time.
  • Then heard a talk by John Cleese of Monty Python about scriptwriting and the idea of “closed vs open mode” – open is creative, flowing, no fear of failure. Closed is tight, structured, about getting things done. The split should be about 50/50.
  • Don’t bash your head against problems. Try switching methods.

Any sites or projects you want to plug? (Feel free to plug your own business.)

If you could give one piece of advice to yourself at age 15, what would it be?

  • Learn abstract programming concepts earlier.

And that’s all for today

Follow me on Twitter subscribe to my Youtube channel for future episodes!

George LondonLeave a comment

A* Interview #16: StackOverflow’s all-time Python champ, Alex Martelli

Read some of Alex’s favorite monosyllabic books, Cod and Salt.

Listen to the Art of the Fugue on LinerNotes.

Check out Alex’s personal website.

And at his suggestion, sign up for Fitocracy and get yourself in shape!

Learn about the A* Series and see more interviews here.

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George LondonLeave a comment

A* Interview #15: Jeff Lindsay, Creator of Flynn, Co-Founder of Hacker Dojo, Executive Producer of “Indie Game: The Movie”

Check out Flynn, an open source Heroku. And Docker, a container-based deployment system. And use Jeff’s new employer DigitalOcean for some cheap, fast cloud servers.

For more Jeff, follow him on Twitter or check out his personal site.

Read about (one of) Jeff’s favorite musicans Animals as Leaders here.

Watch Indie Game: The Movie here or on Netflix. Buy Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants here.

Learn about the A* Series and see more interviews here.

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George LondonLeave a comment

A* Interview #14: Rob Ashton, Hacker / Soon-To-Be-Erstwhile Peripatetic

Follow Rob on Twitter or on Github or on his personal site.

Read about (one of) Rob’s favorite musicans Mark Knopfler here

Learn about the A* Series and see more more interviews here.

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George LondonLeave a comment

A* Interview #13: Daniel Peebles, iPhone Jailbreaker and Agda Wizard

Follow Daniel on Twitter or on Github.

Follow Daniel’s example and get started with Agda (because dedicated domains are for the insufficiently dedicated).

And if you want to step up your game, follow Dan’s advice and read some code from Edward Kmett’s Github.

Learn about the A* Series and see more more interviews here.

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The Books Behind Me During the A* Interviews

George LondonLeave a comment

Since I was asked on Twitter. It should be noted that that shelf is where I keep my queue of books I have purchased but not yet read.

Pro Django – Alchin

Ready Player One – Ernest Cline

Cracking the Coding Interview – Laakmann, McDowell

From Counterculture to Cyberculture – Fred Turner

About Face 3, Essentials of Interaction Design – Cooper

Four Hour Body – Tim Ferris

The Paelo Manifesto – John Durant

Permutation City – Greg Egan

Antifragile – Nassim Taleb

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol 1 – Richard Feynman

Surfaces and Essenceses – Hofsteadter

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms – Cassirer

The Elements of Typographic Style – Bringhurst

Universal Principles of Design – Lidwell

A Tale of Two Cities – Dickens

The Success Equation – Maubousin

In the Heart of the Sea – Philbrick

Masters of Doom – Kushner

Coders at Work – Seibel

Customers Included – Hurst and Terry

Godel, Escher, Bach – Hofstadter

Futility – Gerhardie

The Frogs -Aristophanes

Den of Thieves – Stewart

Modernism – Peter Gay

Dithyrambs of Dionysus – Nietzsche

The Last Tycoon – Fitzgerald

Essays in Experimental Logic – Dewey

The Magic Mountain -Mann

Speech and Language Processing – Jurafsky, Martin

Database Management Systems – Gehrke

Semantic Web for the Working ontologist – Allemang, Hendler

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law – Danchy

Much obliged to any commenter who’d like to provide the Amazon links.

George LondonLeave a comment

A* Interview #12: RavenDB creator Ayende Rahein

Ed Note: Ayende is understandably very enthusiastic about RavenDB. So his first answer about it is very technical and rather long. If you’d like to skip to the rest of the easier-to-understand questions, start watching at 34:50

My top two lesson from Ayende:

1) It’s a lot easier to push yourself to improve if you care enough about what you’re working on to wake up for it at 4am.

2) It’s a big mistake to not admit you have a problem. Acknowledging badness is the first step to getting better.

Read about Ayende’s current favorite singer, Lily Allen

Read Ayende’s favorite recent book, Spellmonger by Terry Mancour

Check out Ayende’s blog

Use RavenDB.

Ayende recommends you go read the lmdb codebase!

Read the story of the A# Interviews here. For future interviews, subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on Twitter.

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George LondonLeave a comment

A* Interview #11: Jon Skeet, All-Time Highest Reputation StackOverflow User

My top two lessons from Jon:

1) Most mistakes come from users not understanding their data

2) Great communication comes from a whole lot of practice, and it really pays off in your career

Some links:

Watch Jon’s screen casts

Read Jon’s blog

Read some reasons why Jon Skeet is the Chuck Norris of coding

Follow Jon on Twitter

And finally, go buy “C# in Depth”!

Read the story of the A# Interviews here. For future interviews, subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on Twitter.

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George LondonLeave a comment

A* Interview #10: Ning Liang, Co-Founder of YC-backed RentMetrics and co-creator of HealthSherpa.com

Check out HealthSherpa

Follow him on Twitter here.

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A* Interview #9: C# and ECMA Committee Alum, Eric Lippert

Items mentioned in the interview:

Eric’s blog: Fabulous Adventures in Coding

Eric’s current company Coverity

The Inform7 programming language

The book “Writing Solid Code”

The Joel Spolsky “12 Steps to Better Code” checklist

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