Nathan at Work

It seems that my coworkers, even my boss have gone a little bit soft today, in a very unexpected but reassuring way.

While considering the beauty and love in life, both chris and shri have ended up reverting the subject back to code, even bringing it right back to the same coding subject; one which was ultimately on my mind most of the day and last night, infact it’s always been there and very much defines why I am a coder.

On the subject of love, and more specifically how to deal with a certain woman, chris was debating two different approaches. The approach he took, and has always taken, was the right one I’d say.. simply because the reason a relationship ever get’s to a certain point, is because of the way both people are, to suddenly change the way one of you is and do something different can’t possibly work; it’s breaking one of the foundations on which the relationship was built.

Anyways, as developers do chris brought this back to the fact that there’s often two or more approaches to most problems, then went code specific; the most common way being to wade right in and wrestle the code in to submission, get it to work perhaps without understanding why, and assume or hope that it will continue to function that way.

The other approach chris pointed out, is to take it slowly, take the time to fully understand the problem, read, study, learn and finally work out the root cause of the problem, taking the correct path to write a beautiful, elegant and stable solution.

Meanwhile shri.. well there’s no way of putting it other than to quote..

I invite you to think about this problem as a rose… a once in a lifetime chance to appreciate something beautiful. Don’t just hammer away at it, break out of your habits, out of your box, destroy your preconceived ideas and look at it differently, try something new…

At the very least, you will learn something new and you might appreciate the issues surrounding it better.

Why so reassuring? well it points to them both being problem solvers, not only that but also appreciating the chance to solve a problem, studying, finding out all about it, fully understanding the task at hand before carefully implementing the correct solution to the problem. You’d be amazed how many coders are not problem solvers, lacking the ability to think on their feet and discuss things at a conceptual level, often even finding and fixing problems before they have happened.

Perhaps vainly I see myself in the problem solving group of coders, I’ve always thrived on a good problem, specifically code wise, a broken website, a server that just won’t play nice, a task that seems impossible, a problem with technologies I have no prior knowledge of, even a task that nobody else dare take on; to me that’s gold dust and the reason why I do what I do. I love a good solution, and can find beauty in well written block of code. Love to learn, and love to try new things, infact I’d never met anybody who tried new (everything) as much as me until I met shri, tis great!

To know the people at the helm (as it were) are of a similer mentality is massively reassuring; Primarily because every post I write, every peice of code I do, every job I’ve done for many years, my whole career even is pointed at analysing a single big problem, and finding the solution (which I think I have..). There will be a post soon about it, called The Broken Internet, it’s going to take me some time to finish writing as it’s a few years of research that needs to be made in to something easy to read; but it’s coming.. on the same note, the series of posts I’m doing on designing and developing this blog all lead to the same point, so I may as well skip to the end first.

@note
Kind of hoping that once Shri and Chris, and hopefully more of my kraya coworkers have read up on what I’m talking about, it’ll at best spur them on to help me implement or at least plan the solution, at worst I’m sure it’ll just niggle away at the back of there brains (as it does with me) and shape the decisions they make.

so ominous.

@context
I started this post at 1400, finished it around midnight; between I spent the day lugging furniture around the house; we had a problem you see, the kids basically overrulling the main floor of the house, we thought about it long and hard (Rachel and I) and eventually it came to light that the problem was because one of the kids bedrooms was on this floor, as was their toy room/living room. The solution was today, to move all the children on to the upper floor and remove the toy room; moving our bedroom on to the main floor of the house and thus making an adult only space in the house. Rather than kids running around us all day, we now have footsteps above, a great deal better. This ties in well though, as to get this fix I had to sacrifice my nice big bedroom with en-suite (not best pleased about that) but the simple feeling of freedom and space in the home is without a doublt worth it. So.. the correct solution isn’t always one you’d prefer, but to fully solve a problem you have to go for what’s right, not what’s easiest.

As everybody knows the first post in a new blog should always form some kind of introduction; to the author, to the content, and more often than not some declaration of what one will be blogging about. Tradition dictates then that this should be mine.

Trouble is, when I write these things I get some kind of nagging feeling that in some way by writing down a short definition of myself, I will infact be defining myself; defining myself as in forming a binding contract between the descriptive words and my residual self image. Therefore it’s safe to assume that I’ll be finding this a virtually impossible task.

Come to think of it, I’ve created many personal site’s over the years, and I don’t think any of them have lasted more than a few weeks, to be honest the majority have never even made it as far as the internet.

Now I realise that this is due to numerous reasons, one though is that they all lacked the introduction, the binding contract, and thus they carried no weight with me; or with themselves. Moreover, this led to them missing the vital substance that gives meaning to the overall site and every sentence within, that ties one post to the next, convey’s personality; and ultimatly gives a site life.

Without this contract between author and blog it is doomed to become nothing more than an unloved and short lived collection of disjointed and seemingly random posts. [ subthought ]

I analyse everything, often make statements of thought as if they were fact and frequently my thoughts get side tracked into something possibly more interesting.

an irishman once said to Jeremy Clarkson:
“you are the only man I know who confuses his own opinion with fact..” – nice

After spending the past half hour writing this post I’ve already noted several things I don’t like about wordpress, or should I say several features I’d like to see implemented:

1. An easy way to make the home page only display posts from certain categories.
   I remember making a wordpress site last year that did just this, I’m sure one of the template tags can take include or maybe exclude (list)category-id to do this..
   @todo research and implement.
2. Sub-posts or notes on a post, little snippets that should not be in the main body but are visible / easily accessible and can be written in the same interface, snippets that give context to the text, or even off-topic tangents that could be viewed both seperately as posts and along side the post.
   @todo build the above
3. A button to insert a named anchor not just a hyperlink (old school wordage there)
   @todo don’t waste your time doing this
4. Some kind of javadoc style annotations to allow you to tag strings and format the dislpay of them differently.
   @example like this
   @todo perhaps quickly create a css style first
   @todo create a plugin for the above
   @todo fix ironic typo of the word display above
5. This “write” admin page should really be fluid instead of fixed width, I’m only using half of my nice new monitor here..
6. Being a blog it should really have an alternative journal or diary type view which shows all posts in ascending chronological order so you can read it like a conventional book rather than read it all backwards.
   @todo make this

I’m a developer who spends far too much time in work mode, analysing, thinking of ways to improve, making rash decisions to increase my personal workload to an unfeasible amount at every given opportunity, oh and I work at kraya.

It’s quite plain to see that I’m not really content with the functionality of wordpress or wordpress mu out of the box, so obviously you can assume that I really don’t like the standard templates that come with it; so dull, uninspiring and really a terrible use of space. I’d say the main priority is to get this thing looking more like I want it, or at least designed so that it efficiently displays the content it holds. Now I’m not a web designer but I do have a great interest in digital art, and after building several hundred websites over the past decade I’ve done a lot of GUI work so quite comfortable in this department.

@tangent
Over on shri’s blog he was discussing the fact that for many years he would make his desktop pure black and remove all icons from it, not only that but he’d also change his terminal windows so they were white on black, rather than the black on a white background linux default that so many stick with. I was rather pleased to read this, as snap – I’m the same and to this day have always ensured a white on black terminal (makes me feel comfortable, possibly from the msdos days or from having a permanent putty window open on my windows boxes so I feel reassuringly connected to a real os) and my destop is perma-black with a black theme to boot on all my systems. BTW Shri is my boss at kraya.

For now this blog is going to be all about improving this blog / wordpress by web development and design, perhaps in the future it’ll be more about projects at work, interesting tid-bits, links etc etc; but tbh (I say that a lot at the minute) most of those extra bit’s will probably be added as contexts to each post.

@context
While writing this post I’ve eaten 3 packets of chewits that I’d got for the kids because they are very more-ish, and listened to a little mix I did approximately 5 times on repeat, followed by a brilliant mix of my darlings (other half rachel) who’s a “proper” dj, with her own radio station and a lot of music based websites which I also do a lot of work on + look after the servers. It’s a friday night late on and just chilling at the end of the week. Rather.. (@todo insert a word more descriptive than good here) spending a bit of time relecting and planning, anything that gets or keeps you focussed or commited is always good.

I’m happily in a long term relationship, got X kids, an addictive personality (see chewits+song), an interest in all things creative including a lot of music, and as mentioned previously, tend to analyse everything often.

Should probably get on with this blog now.. *ponders if that constituted a binding introduction*

Oh and I’m Nathan. I write nath as i prefer how it looks on paper/screen but kind of frown at people when they call me nath out loud in real life..

last chewit gone, so finished.