I've been fighting a cold since Wednesday, and took most of yesterday off to get some rest, after failing (despite the NyQuil) to get much sleep in the wee hours of Thursday morning. Last night, I was feeling a lot better, so I went to bed without taking anything.
...
Now here it is, the wee hours of Friday morning, and I'm back to square one.
Having taken the medication I should have taken last night, and needing something to do while I wait for it to kick in, I thought, "Hey, I'll get back to work on the Rails tutorial I am working through." Plus type out a blog post! You're welcome.
I had been working on the tutorial in my Ubuntu environment (I dual-boot using Wubi), but constantly having to restart my laptop to switch between Linux and Windows was getting old. So I decided to use VirtualBox to set up a virtual Debian machine and avoid that particular headache.
As I was doing that, I realized how far things had come since I first started working with Linux. Obviously the software itself is better, but the very fact that I could decide, on a whim, to set up a Linux machine and, through the magic of virtualization, have it basically appear out of thin air in a matter of an hour or so was pretty freakin' cool to me. The first few times I tinkered with Linux, it required a dedicated machine, or at least a dedicated partition on a hard drive, and lots and lots of trial and error to get it to work. (This was, of course, back when my PC had a hard drive with about half the storage that I now have as RAM.) If nothing else, knowing at all times that I could just blow the VM away and start again was very liberating, compared to worrying that I was going to bork the only computer in the house and have to spend hours recovering from backups, if I even had them.
Hard-core techies may be blasé about this stuff; as an occasional dabbler I know I am late to the party on just about everything tech. Having said that, maybe I have more of a sense of wonder about these things precisely because I am not immersed in it day-to-day. When you use something, then go away for a while and come back, you really experience the scope of the improvements in a way that you might miss if you're constantly absorbing incremental changes.
That so much of this stuff is free-as-in-beer (and often as-in-speech as well) is just icing on the cake. It just keeps getting easier and easier to get the tools needed to become a developer in a particular area. When I started out back in the late 90's, FOSS was growing rapidly, but it still seemed to me that you had to spend a good bit of money (at least, a good bit given my income at the time), and time as well, to even dip your toe in the pool. Now, I feel like I can get away with spending almost nothing and still learn first-class tools and technologies. Once I had my (free!) copy of Debian running in a (free!) VirtualBox VM, I was able to use (free!) git to pull my tutorial code down from my (free!) GitHub repository and have it up and running in a matter of minutes. Of course, I then realized the code in GitHub was about a chapter in the (free!) tutorial behind where I had actually gotten, but that was easily rectified.
I know that nothing is really free, and the ride may come to a stop one day. From where I stand, though, it's a great time to be a geek!
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Saturday, February 23, 2013
The "L" word
Towards the end of last year, I was on a conference call, discussing a system that I had a hand in building several years back. I hadn't had much interaction with the customers who used it since it went into production. I know it works pretty well, since I hardly ever have to do anything to keep it running. We were getting some other folks up to speed on what the system did. The customer who used the system the most was doing a demo, and I have to admit I wasn't paying that much attention.
That is, until she started saying things like "and this is the part of the program I love" and "[feature] is great, it saves me a lot of work."
My ears perked up at that. Love? I support several different systems at work, some built in-house, some from third parties, and a few that are a mixture. In most cases, the people who use these systems would describe them (on good days, at least) with words like "okay" or "fine." I had never heard anyone use the "L" word to describe a program they used at work!
When I first thought of launching this site, I thought it would be cool to reference one of my favorite Donald Fagen songs. I was fully invested in the cynicism and sarcasm inherent in that song, and that lyric in particular. Maybe my experience isn't universal, but in the IT shops I've been in (and many others that I have heard about), it's easy to get jaded about technology. If you don't snort in derision at the idea of "a just machine to make big decisions," then you must be new here.
So for me, hearing my customer sound so cheerful and positive about what I considered a fairly ho-hum system was a revelation. No, this system didn't "make big decisions." We hadn't built the next Google. But it made her job easier, and that, to me, was something. The experience reminded me of why I got into IT in the first place. A system I helped build not only made the company work more efficiently, it actually made somebody's life - at work, at least - a little bit better. And let's face it, with the amount of time most of us spend at work, making that experience more tolerable is a decent accomplishment, in my book.
So, although I decided to keep the site name (I had already paid for the domain name, after all), I decided to approach what I write about with less jaded cynicism, and with a more positive attitude. Less like The Daily WTF, and more like Hacker News. I'm going to concentrate on making myself better, because that helps me and helps the people I work with. And when it seems like nothing is going right, and the best I can hope for is for things to be a little less worse, I'll try to remember that day that someone told me, albeit indirectly, that what I do matters.
That is, until she started saying things like "and this is the part of the program I love" and "[feature] is great, it saves me a lot of work."
My ears perked up at that. Love? I support several different systems at work, some built in-house, some from third parties, and a few that are a mixture. In most cases, the people who use these systems would describe them (on good days, at least) with words like "okay" or "fine." I had never heard anyone use the "L" word to describe a program they used at work!
When I first thought of launching this site, I thought it would be cool to reference one of my favorite Donald Fagen songs. I was fully invested in the cynicism and sarcasm inherent in that song, and that lyric in particular. Maybe my experience isn't universal, but in the IT shops I've been in (and many others that I have heard about), it's easy to get jaded about technology. If you don't snort in derision at the idea of "a just machine to make big decisions," then you must be new here.
So for me, hearing my customer sound so cheerful and positive about what I considered a fairly ho-hum system was a revelation. No, this system didn't "make big decisions." We hadn't built the next Google. But it made her job easier, and that, to me, was something. The experience reminded me of why I got into IT in the first place. A system I helped build not only made the company work more efficiently, it actually made somebody's life - at work, at least - a little bit better. And let's face it, with the amount of time most of us spend at work, making that experience more tolerable is a decent accomplishment, in my book.
So, although I decided to keep the site name (I had already paid for the domain name, after all), I decided to approach what I write about with less jaded cynicism, and with a more positive attitude. Less like The Daily WTF, and more like Hacker News. I'm going to concentrate on making myself better, because that helps me and helps the people I work with. And when it seems like nothing is going right, and the best I can hope for is for things to be a little less worse, I'll try to remember that day that someone told me, albeit indirectly, that what I do matters.
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