General Commentary – Page 6 – Software and Other Shenanigans

The stock market is a bull**** engine

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Jun 292018

Almost every time I see a report on how a company’s stock is doing, or why the price did whatever it just did, I become more and more convinced that there’s no actual rational behavior or logic going on in stock trading anymore. Companies will report a great quarter and the price will tank. A company will announce plans to expand as well as what they did to complete that plan, and the stock price will drop because they had a large expense that quarter. It used to be that it was considered good advice to have a lot of your stock portfolio consist of “blue chip” stocks – the price would be largely stable and they paid dividends regularly. Now everyone wants to get in on “unicorns” (startups valued at over $1 billion dollars, which is generally insane to begin with), or focus on high growth stocks, with an insistence that they always be high-growth stocks. More and more I’ve become convinced that the stock market is largely a BS engine driven more by hype than actual economics.

GDPR – there’s a nugget of something good in there

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May 252018

If you work in any industry that makes use of other people’s data, and odds you’ve been hearing a lot about a new European Union law going into effect called GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation if you’re curious). I’m not going to get into the law’s requirements – if it applies to you then odds are the attorneys working for or retained by your company have already discussed what you need to do to be in compliance, that’s not what interests me here (besides, I’m neck deep in implementing the things my company’s lawyers said need to be implemented to say we’re in compliance). After hearing people say that Facebook’s latest scandal could/should result in GDPR-style regulation in the US, I thought I’d take a closer look at the ideas behind GDPR, and see how well they stack up as well as take a passing look at how good or bad they’re likely going to be.

Facebook, data sharing, and ad targeting, oh my

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Apr 272018

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Facebook’s been in the news recently, specifically around the exposure of millions of users’ worth of data to a firm called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica allegedly used this to help various Republicans, including Donald Trump, during the 2016 election cycle. And to hear a lot of people talk about it, that’s the last sign before the start of the apocalypse, or something like that. To be honest it’s been hard to find a calm take on the whole thing, which has been part of the problem. People are shocked at how much data Facebook has on them. They can’t believe that Facebook lets people use this data to target ads to others. Or that companies may use this targeting for political advertising to try to swing an election. Or Facebook was “breached” (everyone else’s word, not the correct one) and this data leaked out. The truth is that while there were some problems with Facebook, and some bad actors at play, we’re focusing on the wrong things here, and it’s inspiring us to hysterics instead of reasoned analysis and reasonable responses.

I’m going to pause here and just make a note that I work for an email marketing company that emphasizes segmentation and targeted marketing. I’ve also written a Facebook application to create custom audiences on Facebook and keep them synced with their source mailing list. None of this requires data from Facebook users, so I don’t capture any sort of profile information, and all the opinions I’m writing here are my own, but it’s probably worth bearing in mind that my employment revolves around targeted marketing and I have done work to help marketers sync some of their “targeting” over to Facebook, so clearly I’m not as bothered by the concept of targeted advertising as some people may be.

Minimum viable products – the most difficult products to build

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Mar 262018

Probably 1 of the most difficult juggling acts in software development is scoping a minimum viable product. I’m pretty sure a lot of that comes from the juggling act and judgement calls that constitute defining said minimum viable product. It’s not easy to do, mostly because defining a minimum viable product involves balancing 2 mutually exclusive terms. That said, I think you can find the best set of tradeoffs en route to the minimum viable product by examining the principles behind each part and then combining them back together once we understand what we’re looking for to satisfy each keyword.

A few thoughts on public speaking

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Feb 262018

After attending a few different software conferences, I’ve begun to appreciate the skill involved in giving a good public presentation, and just how rare it is to encounter. I’m not claiming to be an expert, the extent of my formal public speaking “training” consists of a half-semester course in college, and I wouldn’t rate my ability as anything beyond “competent enough to present something to the office.” That said, I think we’ve all seen enough bad presentations to have noticed a few things they all have in common. My goal here is to offer some things that I’ve noticed from good presentations in the hopes of encouraging people to start emulating some better habits.

Social and community applications

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Jan 312018

There’s a line that I wrote in my recent post on social networks that’s been sticking around my head ever since I typed it: “Venmo is a much more creative social application than Mastodon is.” That line got me thinking about just what makes a social application…”social”, and I’m starting to think that a lot of what we term “social” applications aren’t really “social,” but something else entirely.

Building out a media operation of the future

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Dec 302017

I’ve been thinking about just what it would take to create the type of media operation I described in “The future of journalism won’t look anything like today’s journalism” – specifically what pieces are still needed to get this type of operation off the ground, what pieces already exist, etc. As I think more on it, the more it seems that most of the individual components, with the exception of delivering content in a format other than the article, already exist. The biggest impediment to adopting these tools is likely attitude, namely organizations being so used and attached to how they’ve been doing things that they’re not thinking about approaching this from a completely blank slate.

My experiences with OpsWorks

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Nov 272017

Following what’s probably a very predictable course of operational maturity, my team at work started out manually uploading jars onto VMs, maybe with a few simple services, scripts, and setup tricks to keep the manual steps for deploying software to a minimum. As the amount of code we wrote and maintained grew, we started to focus on automating more and more of our code deployments, with an emphasis both on rolling deployments (so there’s no visible downtime to users), and on increasing reliability by reducing the number of steps we could possibly mis-type or forget. Since our code was heavily deployed on AWS anyways, OpsWorks seemed like the perfect setup for us. So far, while it isn’t actually perfect, it’s been a good tool for getting our app deployments and instance configuration more automated, which is what we really needed.

Revisiting my thoughts on social networks

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Oct 222017

So a while back I had a fondness for ranting about social networks on this blog. Lately, I’ve had the urge to revisit that trend and spend some more time ranting about social networks on this blog. Why? Well, I’ve been using Mastodon some recently, and that’s got me thinking about my whole concept of what social networks (and the apps built on top of them) should be. And while I’m not going to try to claim that a relatively minor (compared to the other social networking apps out there) app is the future of social networking, looking past the app to some of the design decisions show a lot of things that make me happy about the trend in how some of these newer apps are getting built.

A few thoughts on unit tests

General Commentary, Programming No Responses »

Sep 292017

Automatic software testing is an interesting thing. Books have been written on the topic, libraries have been built to try to bring the practice to traditionally hard-to-automate sections of testing, and in some places, it’s so important it’s the first code that gets written. There’s a lot of different philosophies about how it should work, but in my experience, it’s probably an area where the less religious you are about it, the better it’s likely to work for you.

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