Always have a Plan B

It's really important to plan for the unexpected in life. Sometimes, when it is least expected, life can pull out the rug from underneath even the strongest and most prepared of us. However, with a little planning it is possible to be prepared for the unexpected and weather all but the worst of storms.


1) The Nestegg
The wisdom in having a bit of extra money tucked away should seem obvious. When you become ill, you can get treatment even if the insurance company gives you a hard time. When an unexpected opportunity knocks at your door you can afford to follow it even when it requires some start-up capital.

It's important to be able to weather a pretty serious economic crisis with your nestegg. I would think three months of pay would be the minimum reasonable size. Less than that and all you've got is a medium sized vacation fund.


2) Honing Your General-Purpose Knowledge
Everyone knows the importance of staying up to date in your field of work, especially in the world of Software Engineering. You must always be learning and growing your knowledge in order to be prepared for future opportunities and projects. However, it is unwise to focus your learning too narrowly. To quote one of my favorite movies: "It's simple. Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death."

Even if you are an expert on, for instance, Java. It's entirely possible that at some point in the not altogether too distant future the entire platform will be abandoned. If you don't have sharp general purpose skills you will be relegated to the job of maintenance programmer for older systems. You may say that, because Java is now open source, you don't need to worry about that happening. Well, that is both arguable and beside the point. Computing, like so many fields, is an ever-moving target. You have to keep both your specific and general skills sharp in order to be prepared for the future.


3) The Alternate Career Path
We are entering a time of potential serious economic crisis in the United States. Soon many of us could lose our jobs. Even those who are lucky enough to be able to keep employment in times of economic crisis may find themselves at the mercy of a financially stressed employer who in order to stay in business must demand long hours for crummy pay. This is why it's important to have an escape route planned.

For some this escape route may be a quick entrance into a graduate program facilitated by having low debt and already taken the GREs. For others, having some side work outside of your main job can help act as a parachute from a difficult situation or a cushion when things fall apart. In the worst case, a person should develop strong social bonds with people who can help you find alternative work and maybe even put you up for a little while if you run out of money. No man is an island.

A Programmer's Personal Infrastructure

Programmers do it because they love it. A Software Engineer does it because it's their job (although, they might still love it).

At my job as a Software Engineer working on Atalasoft's .NET Imaging SDK, we have a fantastic continuous integration system. It takes much of the pain out of the day to day problems involved in software development. Unfortunately, this type of system is too expensive and difficult to maintain for a single programmer. Fortunately, there are some decent and mostly hassle free solutions available.

To enumerate what a programmer needs to be productive, in order of importance:

1) The Right Tools and Environment
Most hackers have this figured out already. Having your computer set up so you can jump right in and having a place to work where you can focus are equally important.

2) Offsite, Backed Up Source Control
How many times do you have to lose your work because you didn't back it up? Between hard disk failures, refactorings gone horribly wrong and malware munging my files... So many hours of lost work. With the advent of free public source control repositories and friendly gui tools there is no excuse for not taking advantage.

Some Free Options:
DevjaVu
Assembla
CodeSpaces

Here is an old (but good) blog post with a huge list of them.

3) Action/Planning System
One of the hardest things about getting going on a project is thinking about what to do next. I have found that by using an next action tracking system it's way easier to break my projects up into little bits and that makes it easier to get motivated ("I'll just do at least one thing a day").
I think bug tracking/ticket systems are a good fit for this because they are designed around priorities and projects. Thankfully most of these new, free, Source Control sites give you a free bug tracking system too. They can also be handy for, you know, tracking bugs.

Most free source control sites provide this service as well.

4) Some Way To Store Documentation or Ideas
I use a Hipster PDA for keeping track of ideas on the go (it works way better than my "smart" phone) but eventually physical things will get lost. That's why I think it's important to dump them to something digital with automatic backups asap. For this the best option is a semi-private wiki. They are fast for information entry and formatting and you can easily and cheaply get it web hosted at a place with automatic backups.

Some Free Options:
WikiDot
wikihost.org
WetPaint

There are tons of other options if you google for "free private wiki".

That's about sums up what I have in place. If you feel that I missed anything important please leave a comment.

Designing F# Programs

I've been working on a project in my spare time for a presentation I am going to give at Atalasoft this next friday. I am going to try to recreate Rich Hickey's Clojure ant colony simulation except in F#.

I have run into a number of issues along the way...

First of all, by default F# has no Software Transactional Memory. There is a non-integrated library for it, but i'm not sure I want to step outside of normal F# territory for this demonstration. I think I may just lock on the map nodes while an ant is moving or getting food instead. Although this may not demonstrate highly concurrent functional programming as well.

Secondly, at this point I think I have a good feeling for how to write small code blocks in F#. What I am struggling most with is program structure and message passing. My UMass Scheme course didn't really educate beyond how to write scheme in scheme and none of my traditional object oriented techniques are in play here. The best I can do is try to mimic existing programs.

Third, I'm not very familiar with the windows drawing calls. I'm not too worried about this though, there are tons of examples out there. The hardest part will be shoe-horning them into F#'s functional style.

-Rick

I Haven't Been Posting Much Here...

I intend to post more on my personal blog, but for now I've been posting quite a bit on my Atalasoft blog. There will be more to come soon.