nathanallen

> We must address ourselves seriously, and not a little fearfully, to the problem of human scale. What is it? How do we stay within it? What sort of technology enhances our humanity? What sort reduces it? The reason is simply that we cannot live except within limits, and these limits are of many kinds: spatial, material, moral, spiritual. The world has room for many people who are content to live as humans, but only for a relative few intent upon living as giants or as gods

-- Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

Now showing at a theater near you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=602xKn3G1TI

I love swimming in the Bay. It's exhilarating to get into the cold water, especially when you get into a rhythm. And you feel great afterwards. Just make sure you've got a plan to warm up after wards (read up on "after drop")!

Almost anyone who is swimming for more than 15-20 minutes will be wearing a neoprene wetsuit and cap to keep warm (maybe a fur coat counts). The water temperature is 54F right now, and mid 60s in the Summer/Fall. There's a real risk of going into hypothermia at these temperatures.

The first time I tried it, the shock of the cold winter water made me swim faster in panic, which quickly winded me, and I was glad to get out of there! I had to learn to slow my breath and ease into my swim stroke.

I also found the open water disorienting. It's hard to swim in a straight line when the tide is pulling you, or the wind is pushing you, or the sun is in your eyes.

But if you want to give it try, there is a protected cove at Aquatic Park [0] with a dedicated swim lane and a great community. An informal group meets in the bleachers every day around 1-2pm (sunniest time of day), with everyone taking turns to watch your stuff.

There are also two (private) clubs that organize events (like the Alcatraz swim): the Dolphin Club (1] and the South End Rowing Club [2]. The clubs are nice because they have lockers and a sauna to help you warm up after.

It's not always fun (maybe it's type 2 fun?). A lot of the time it's frustrating. Like, why do my goggles keep filling with water? or why can't I get into a flow today? Or why do I keep having this intrusive thought that I can't see what's under me? (There have been a few seal bitings). Or sometimes it feels like I'm barely moving and I don't know why I'm dragging so much. Did the current/tide/wind change? If I don't sleep well, I feel it immediately in the water. It's a good gauge of your health/mood on that day. I got a lot out of it.

[0] https://www.nps.gov/safr/learn/historyculture/aquatic-park-p...

[1] https://serc.com/swimming

[2] https://dolphinclub.org/swimming/

Congrats on building and releasing this passion project! I love the hand drawn aesthetic. You had a vision and made something totally unique on your sabbatical. I hope you don't get bogged down in making it more "accurate" and "comprehensive" (unless you really want to!).

Similar to you, I worked in bike shops for years before getting into web development, so naturally some of my first toy-projects were an attempt to combine what I was learning with what I knew about bikes -- for example, a diagnostic tool based on the sound your bike is making (http://nathan.codes/showcase/#bikegnosis). It will be imperfect, just like your bike, but it will be totally your own!

It does strike me as thinly veiled virtue signaling. It can be summarized as:

Earnestness is a virtue that I, in my benevolence, recognize in others ("nerds").

I too am earnest.

Sincerely, PG.

This is my approach as well. It's probably not great for the drives since they have to spin up every power cycle, but it's a lot more energy efficient than having a server running 24/7!

Reminds me of this anecdote about Salvador Dali:

> In the 1940s [Salvador Dali] was commissioned by Max Factor to create a brand name and a bottle for their latest perfume. Dali accepted the commission but refused to follow any of the procedures most designs would consider useful in achieving a successful result. He refused to meet his client. He showed no interest in developing an understanding of the product itself, its target audience, where it was to be sold or how it was to be marketed. ... Four weeks later, the world's press descended up the Astoria Hotel on Fifth Avenue, flashbulbs at the ready.

> Dali arrived nearly an hour late, visibly bereft of any object resembling a perfume bottle. As he strode towards the lectern, journalists fired questions while flashbulbs were discharged all around him. Just before he reached the lectern, Dali conjured a handkerchief from his pocket and bent over to pick up a still-glowing expended flashbulb. He pressed the bulb gently against the lectern to flatten its tip and paused to allow it to cool. Once the bulb was cold enough to handle, Dali held it aloft and announced, "Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Max Factor's Electrique!"

Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=PJYk8PFtZf8C&pg=PT86

> According to the framed Beagle Bros. "Peeks, Pokes and Pointers" chart that hangs above my desk and reminds me that technical writing should be wondrous, useful, and fun (but not always in that order)...

I think this is the chart he's referring to: http://www.lazilong.com/apple_II/bbros/chart.jpg

I think we can add a few more genres to our list...

Popularizations

  - The Paradox of Choice
  - The Long Tail
  - The Shallows
  - Freakonomics
  - Where Good Ideas Come From

Podcasts

  - This American Life
  - Freakonomics Radio
  - 99 Percent Invisible
  - Stuff You Should Know

Aggregators

  - Hacker News

I'm being tongue in cheek: I grant you there's excellent content, above, but I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the following: WHO consumes this kind of content, and WHY do we/they/I find it quote-un-quote "interesting"? I distinctly remember a car trip I had recently in which I realized, after about 10 minutes of talking to the passengers, that we were all regurgitating podcasts! It felt genuine, but we weren't adding anything much of our own in the mix. Is it a class thing, a source of social cachet? What are we trying to signal to each other when we share it?

I have a sneaking suspicion that the smarter we get, the more gullible we are. That the world can be "counter intuitive" and that we feel good about ourselves and our intellects when we recognize this superficial fact, seems all very strange. Like a slight of hand. Come to think of it, there's a great TED talk about a pick-pocket...

This looks like it will be a terrific resource for beginners and will help to fill in a lot of knowledge gaps. Beginners face a dizzying array of resources, opinions, languages. Knowing where to look, what to google, and even how to read the documentation is a skill set that can’t be underestimated.

I’ve come to appreciate how far up the “literacy” ladder software development is: Basic Literacy, Digital Literacy, Computational Thinking, Programming Languages… Those of us who’ve managed to speak the language, and to do so with any degree of fluency, are a relatively rare bunch. But I don’t believe for a moment that this stuff is “hard” to learn, so much as “inaccessible,” and therefore, exclusive. I like to compare the situation we have today to the scientific community in the 17th century, when Latin was the “language of science”. What’s the language of computer science? Well it’s Greek to the lay person (even if it is Ruby). Technical fields require a precision, but the net effect of all that jargon is just as dispossessing. Add to this the fact that software itself is invisible, compiled, minified, obfuscated, socked away on some corner of the internet, hiding behind a slick GUI, turtle turtles turtles all the way down, tea cups stacked, all the way up… It’s no wonder that it’s such a struggle to learn.

The flip side of all of this is an odd kind of colonialism 2.0, where our technology, with our QWERTY keyboards, and ASCII character sets, and the programming language itself are all spreading the English language like smallpox. But I digress.

Thank you MDN for the quality resources! It will be fun to see what happens if/when computational thinking really takes hold.

Location: San Francisco, California (US Citizen).

Remote: Preferably not.

Willing to relocate: No.

Technologies: python, javascript, ruby, html, css, git, rails/sinatra, google app engine, heroku, firebase, selenium, testing

Let's chat! I love coding and I'm looking for a good-natured team. I teach front end and enjoy working the full stack. For fun I boulder, bicycle, and I like to slackline.

Résumé/CV: http://nathan.codes • https://github.com/nathanallen • https://www.linkedin.com/in/thisisnathan

I've enjoyed working with riot.js (https://muut.com/riotjs/). It's a "minimalist" front end framework, written in vanilla javascript. It's easy to pick up, and it's not super opinionated. You can read/absorb the library in one sitting -- so you'll have a good sense of what's going on under the hood.

Another great resource is You Might Not Need jQuery (http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/). Take what you need, leave the bloat behind!

"Expose your Ignorance" is a phrase I like from the book Apprenticeship Patterns. I think it cuts two ways: admitting to yourself what you don't know, and admitting to the people around you that you don't know. It's hard enough to admit to yourself that you're falling short and need to dig in and come to a better understanding of a subject, but it's way more discomfiting to confess this to your team/clients (especially if you're afraid they won't be receptive).

For this reason, I've come to love the phrase "developer". I am someone who develops, and keeps developing. I am not a fixed point. And this is why you hire me. [See Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset]

One of the best stories from the PGP saga is that Zimmerman worked with MIT Press to have the entire PGP source code published, in machine readable print. This allowed him to make the argument that his scary-dangerous-cryptosystem was in fact protected under the First Amendment as free speech.

> I’ve got a file of counterarguments to my own theory

Thank you for having scientific integrity. Falsifiability for the win.