So after 20 years of doing this, I've learned a few things about the interviewing process. One of those things is the concept of a reverse interview.
For my example, I am going to use the interview I did for a company called Recurly (in San Francisco), they were based in the Mission near where we used to live and I was excited to finally get one of those 'warehouse' dev jobs, like I used to pine for in LA when I used to live east of Hollywood with my view of the downtown skyscrapers. So I get the interview, I talk to Scott, their lead dev, my prospective 'boss', and we hit it off like gangbusters. Seriously. I was super-excited to work for this guy.
And then he says, one last thing - we need our boss to sign off on you. He's going call you tomorrow. He's going to do an online 'code' interview. We'll call Scott's boss Steve. So Steve gets on the phone, hey how you doing, I am going to ask you how to code a binary tree, we need a left method and a right method and some sort of object. Pick a language. We were using a screen-sharing service, it might have been a shared google doc or something. I could type and he could see it. And I'm saying to myself, 'sweet! I just learned about data structures at Stanford - this is going to be easy'.
I had just finished a class about structures and algorithms at Stanford with Cynthia Lee, and although we used C++ for that I decided to write something with Ruby, because that's my go-to. And I decide to write an implementation using recursion, because had just finished that section with Cynthia and I was excited to show off.
ME: Ok, well the first thing we need is a base case.
STEVE: can you start with the left and right methods?
and it all went downhill from there. Basically, if you don't understand recursion, it can't be explained to you in a few minutes. It's like the concept of limits - you need some time to wrap your brain around it. And it became clear that Steve did not really understand recursion, or worse yet, thought he did but hadn't put it into practice.
I did not get that job, and for a while I was angry because I really liked talking to Scott, but then I realized, that Steve guy is running the ship. And he was a mess. Put simply: he decided to veto a candidate that his own manager had already approved, based solely on his own limited understanding of Ruby, and recursion, and his inability to see his own limits (pun intended).
So that's what the reverse interview is - if you are not paying attention, as an interviewEE, to all of the details available to you in terms of what kind of culture exists at the company, then you are missing a huge opportunity to vet the organization before you are tied down. I believe great organizations are easy to spot - as are uneasy ones. Most of the time all we have to do open our eyes, and pay attention.
EDIT: I was shooting for something like this implementation but I didn't think to rope in the enumerable module.
Very often, I promise myself that I will write more. I am a writer, after all. That's my qualification. Sure, I've been writing software for web apps since the invention of the internet, but my degree is in Creative Writing. Go figure. So I go round in circles, because I want to create things, and I want to SHARE, but I can't just talk candidly about the people in my life, because that is a violation of privacy, and I am a pretty private person. But I also don't want to write things that no one will read. And as far as I can tell, unless I want to be a 'real' writer, and start my first novel, I am stuck being a blogger, and bloggers live and die by page views. Plus, my life revolves around a 4 year old and a 1 year old, and I don't feel right posting lots of photos and talking about them online. So it's quite a waste of time. I don't really even want particularly to be a successful blogger - I just want to feel like I am writing.
So what is there to talk about? Two things, really. The last few weeks were spent vetting new BI platforms, and although Tableau Online and Mode Analytics were both close, it became pretty clear that the only option for us is to continue with Periscope. They look the best, and they make my life the easiest. Sold. So here is a good example - my proof of concept was basically to recreate part of the main dashboard, and see how easy that is.
which as you can see is brutal, mostly because MySQL has no native ranking function, but to be fair that is before you even handle the presentation using python.
So it just quickly becomes a mess. I love the level of control, but I also need a simple workflow, and for Periscope you just click the damn checkbox. Yes please.
So it is nice to feel like I put us in the right direction. I hope that we can work with Periscope for a long time.
I just have not been writing. I can’t believe it’s March. These last few months have flown by. We had a flood in the basement, which is stressing me out a bit, and I had to postpone doing my taxes this year because Wells Fargo screwed up my paperwork, so that’s a bummer.
And I spent a few weeks prepping my laptop for a trip to San Francisco, and we had to cancel because everyone got sick. But we are heading over this weekend instead, so that’s good.
I guess I’ve just had a lot on my mind. My friend Mike passed away sort of suddenly from cancer, and that is just a tough pill to swallow. I feel super guilty because the last time I saw him he had his guitar out behind The Hotel Cafe, and was playing the blues, I was there for Sally Jaye’s release for Amarillo, and I just felt like he was going to be there forever. And now that was 10 years ago and that is the last memory I have of him. So sad.
And after looking at our finances for last year, we really needed to pull in the belt a bit. So when I was looking at getting a new laptop, for the first time ever, really, I seriously considered getting a Windows laptop instead of a MacBook because the price differential is pretty much out of control.
I settled on a Lenovo Flex 4 / Yoga, which ran me just under $600. The cheapest MacBook with the same specs would have been close to triple that. I just couldn’t justify that expense.
I set it up in about 2 days, and now it is running a Rails 3.2 stack and it is a fully functional work laptop. It’s amazing how far things have come.
So if you want to do your Rails Development on a laptop that is not a Mac, perhaps this list of steps can help you a bit.
1 - Windows 10, or nothing. You need Windows 10, because it is the Anniversary Upgrade for Win 10 that introduced something called WSL (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/) ‘Windows Subsystem for Linux’, and that is what makes this all possible.
3 - Apps. You might be worried about what apps are available, but it seems like a decent environment at this point. I love my Mac apps - Fetch, Sequel Pro, Textmate - but there are perfectly decent replacements available. And for any old Textmate people, like me, you might want to take a look at Atom. The auto-complete works really well and reminds me of my old Visual Studio days inside the Microsoft machine.
NOTE for MySQL - the 32-bit installer does indeed install a 64-bit version if you want. That was not documented at all that I could see, and if you are looking for a 64-bit installer you are not going to find one.
and I haven’t checked yet but I’m sure I can find a decent ftp tool.
I used this walkthrough as a reference.
and the last caveats are that, for ubuntu, only Rails 3.2 and 4.3 are available; and MySQL is only supported up to 5.6 (at least as of a few weeks ago).
All in all, I am very happy with my experience with Windows 10. It has been pretty great so far.
and then the occasional sudo apt-get upgrade should keep you running.
NOTE: This story was originally published on my old blog (from before I moved to Squarespace).
I would like to announce, to the media gods who are always keeping score, that this is the best I have ever looked on broadcast television. Remember me thusly when I am at the pearly gates.
I finally watched the dvd that I have had for 6 years now, and it is actually not a bad show. I remember how much empathy I had for her, she was such a sweet girl with so much going on and I can't imagine what it's like to have had so much success so early in her life. As turns out, I got on camera a little bit, which surprised me. My face was in the tag montage, which was cool. And the shot above is a screen capture of me walking on stage in Breckinridge, about to play keys and sing backup for CHEYENNE at our show there which was being filmed for an HD special. There are a few other shots of me in the earlier episodes, but this is far and away the biggest shot of me in terms of time and closeup level that has ever been broadcast on any channel of television. I have set my own bar in terms of media slam dunks.
And a plea to anyone who was at the show. I saw a few people taking video and one girl just right at the end of the show said how about one more for Grants Pass Live? - whereupon I played my new song Roll Easy, and it was pretty good. I'd love to see some of that video.
This is a shot I pulled from a GP travel website. This year it looked very similar, except I don't remember the tree being so big, and they had a little campfire squared off right under those lights, and I set up the music right behind where the tree is.
So anyway, the story is that I got called very last-minute to do a First Friday show in Grants Pass next to the Christmas tree which was just about two weeks ago now. And I thought it went quite well. I probably wouldn't have taken the show otherwise, but I had my show at Barnstormer's Theater coming up and I was trying to get more people in the seats. It was too last minute (and low-pay) to bring the whole band, but Jinnee was able to make it for about 2/3 of the show so I said why not. It turned out to be a really fun show. It went from 5:30p to 8:30pm and Jinnee had to leave at 7:30 if I remember correctly. And that last hour was pretty cool too.
My approach to this show was to use my looper pedal, which I bought earlier this year and tried to use once with the band at the Talent Evening Market to little success. The thing with using the pedal is that it forgives not at all, so all you can do is listen and follow. It will not move to you, you need to move to it, and as turns out in the band with the way we do monitors it's just not possible currently to have everyone hearing well enough to be locked to a loop. So it's a thing I can only do for a solo show, and honestly there is a lot there to explore. It's great because I can play new songs immediately, I can change stuff on the fly, and it is lot less work for set up. So I plan on incorporating more solo shows next season, hopefully to funnel new fans to the band shows that I do set up. Because the other lesson from last season is that band shows are expensive and seem to always introduce scheduling conflicts, often last-minute, which raises the stress level for my poor accommodating wife.
So we will just have to make the band shows count for more, less of the time. We still have a long way to go to establish any sort of solid reputation around the Rogue Valley. Perhaps ironically, we seem to be having more success in Grants Pass than Ashland so I'm hoping to land more shows up there because why not. I'm a big fan of Grants Pass.
Below is good example of what the new solo format will look like.
That's it for now. Our next show is in mid-March, so for the next few months I will be finishing up some new songs and getting ready for next season.
As always if any fans of the The River South have any contacts in the region for paid performances, especially daytime, please get in touch!
I suppose I'm in the habit now of taking a lot of photos. Ever since I became a dad I am pretty shameless with my camera. Life is too short to not get good photos of the fun stuff. That being said, I was a little over-cautious taking photos of some the 'insider' stuff, like Tito's secret backstage area, that had a Prohibition vibe and massage chairs and free vodka drinks. I still got some photos but it was even bigger than it looks. I did get a bunch of shots at Willie's ranch, because they bussed in the visitors and then promptly bussed them out so we had the place to ourselves a bit more than at ACL which was totally insane with crowds of people. The whole photo album is on Google photos if you want to take a look. Below are the highlights.
A big shout-out to my buddy Shawn Pander, who called me up to sit in on his ACL gig because his main keyboard guy was in Italy.
setting up at Willie's Ranch - called simply 'Luck'.
Food trucks! The lobster roll was delicious.
Most of the buildings were put up in the 80's for a movie that Willie did. The story goes that he loved them all so much that he had the script changed so that they wouldn't have to be burned down at the end of the movie.
After 2 great sets at Luck Ranch we started getting ready for our show at Austin City Limits. We performed on the Tito stage, who I met briefly and seemed like a very cool guy. He certainly takes care of his employees and his performers and he is quite rightly a big deal in the Austin music and business community.
I got a kick out of this Henry Rollins quote posted right at the entrance to the stage.
Tito of course has a killer backstage area set up for his artists and their friends, as well as his own entourage. It had a roaring 20's/prohibition vibe which was pretty cool.
Shawn and his wife Beth.
You know it's a big stage when you have to shoot a panoramic just to see the whole thing. Note the lack of crowd at the beginning.
People started showing up during the set and by the end we had quite a crowd.
Beth's sister got a few good shots of the stage before it got too crowded.
yes they had a craps table. Tito does not mess around.
Bloody Mary bar and finger food. Yes please.