That Puerto Rican Rubyist

I’ve been living in the Bay Area for two years now. One of the main reasons why I wanted to move over here is the large population of tech people that exist in this area. From Computer Science students in U.C. Berkeley, to developers in San Francisco who are working on the latest website / app that everyone will be using a year from now, to the super-smart engineers who work on some of the world’s largest companies in Silicon Valley, there’s a lot of people who are just like me.

Of course, it’s pretty cool to be able to meet people who are like-minded and enthusiastic (sometimes too enthusiastic, but that’s another story for another day), with a broad range of tech interests. It’s fun to hear what others do for a living, and most tech people just love to tell you all about what they’re working on. I have learned so much in my two years living in California than I had for the rest of my 29 years living elsewhere, which is pretty awesome.

However, something became apparent to me in my first few months living here – I really didn’t want to hang out with tech people all the time. Not that most of people I met were dull or socially awkward (usually, I always think that’s what people think about me when they meet me). But I’m the type of person who enjoys the company of people who think very differently than I do. It sort of gives me a chance to study others, if you will, and get a better sense of perspective in my life. Because of this, it had been quite a while since I hung out with others and talk tech, outside of work.

That brings me to a couple of weeks ago. A co-worker – who’s not a developer – told me that a few of his programmer buddies were getting together for a weekend of hacking up something in hopes of being able to get a working website or app out there in 48 hours. Although I’ve been in California for so long, I had never gotten together with anyone just to build something for fun. I wasn’t going to do anything that specific weekend, so I agreed. It was an interesting and really fun weekend, but since it was everyone’s first hackathon, there were a few things that we could have done better, which I wanted to write about.

Have an idea before the weekend

I was informed of the hackathon on the Sunday before we were going to build the app. The guys who were planning to participate had been shuffling emails back and forth with app ideas so we could decide on one to work on. By Friday evening, we had a list of a lot of solid ideas. So we decided to get together and pick one that was feasible to build in two days. We spent more than two hours on Friday night going through the ideas and by the end of it, we still had no idea. So on Saturday morning we went into the hackathon without knowing what to do.

I think this set us back at least 3-4 hours of real work that day. If we had picked an idea and decided to work on it before hand, we could have done a bit of work beforehand to get some stuff up and running, like setting up the services we were going to use and make sure everyone’s development environment was set up for whatever we were going to build (which surprisingly, for a few, it wasn’t).

Clearly define what needs to be done, who will do it, and make it visible

Because we had no idea what we were going to build going into the weekend, we didn’t really know what the scope of the project was going to be like. Our plan was to have a minimum viable product ready to go on Sunday evening. However, we only were able to define what would be the minimum amount of work on Saturday afternoon, so it was just a lot of broad strokes and nothing clearly defined. Everyone chose what they were most comfortable working on, or what they wanted to work on, and we took off.

The problem with this was that at any given point, I had no idea where everyone was at with their work, and that made it difficult to know what I should have been focusing on next. For example, I had been tasked with building classes on the back-end to connect to different APIs and pass that data on to the front-end. By the time I was done, I didn’t know if the front-end was ready to go or not. So I had to basically interrupt everyone and ask what they were doing and how far along they were, and also ask what needed to be done next. Had we defined our tasks earlier and more clearly, and people were good with updating the status of these tasks regularly, I think we could have wasted less time and done more.

Bring more variety to the team

At the end of Saturday night, I quickly realized what was going to be the part that held us back – the user interface. In our group, all of us were solid developers, but no one had any decent design chops. So that left us with one of the guys hacking together an interface that, in all honesty, didn’t look good at all. A lot of the back-end stuff that we planned to have was more or less wrapped up on Sunday, but the design was sorely lacking a ton of polish, meaning that we couldn’t release our app.

I thought that at least one person in the team would be able to slice and dice any layout into usable designs for development, but we didn’t have one. Next time, I’ll try to get a designer on board for this task only. And if not, there’s always places like Theme Forest where we could get up and running rather quickly with a template, which we thought about too late.

Have people who can be there

One thing that really killed us was the fact that out of seven people who had agreed to be part of the weekend hackathon, five showed up on Saturday morning. And on Sunday, one of the five had to bail, leaving us at four people – one of them being my non-developer co-worker who couldn’t really do much outside of doing wireframes and helping with project management. And to top it off, everyone called it an early night both days because of prior engagements. All of this set us back quite a bit, for obvious reasons. I think we could have finished our app in a usable state had we been at full strength for both days, and we had hacked until the wee hours of the morning, which is what I expected. I mean, come on – it’s a hackathon! I was fully expecting to barely sleep during those 48 hours, but it wasn’t to be.

Despite some things not going as smoothly as planned, and that we technically ‘failed’ reaching our goal, which was to release a working app by the time Sunday wrapped up, I personally considered it a success. Not only was I able to meet new people and expand my network (one of my goals in 2012), I also came out of that weekend reinvigorated, and with a very strong desire to spend more time developing and learning code in my spare time again. Since I had somewhat tired on tech and started filling my time with other non-technical interests, as I wrote a few months ago, I really hadn’t been doing any coding or learning more about the new hotness in my spare time. After the weekend hackathon, I’ve been wanting to code all night long after getting out of work. I even started planning another hackathon for another app I want to build, too.

It’s amazing how taking something you do on a daily basis and doing it in a different setting can reignite your passion once again.

For the past ten years or so, even before I graduated from college, a large chunk of my spare time has been dedicated to studying. More specifically, it’s been dedicated to studying technology. Everything from programming languages I’ve wanted to use to new frameworks that look shiny and new to electronics and Arduinos and everything in between. I’ve spent lots of time and money reading up on anything tech. It’s really my passion. That’s why I got into Computer Science to begin with. I love this.

But after all those years, I’ve been getting burned out doing this. There’s just a lot of little things that lead to me feeling this way. The biggest reason, however, is the following: I’ve read and studied about a lot of cool things that I never got to do at my current day job, making it impossible to retain anything long-term and making me eventually lose interest. This would then spiral into me feeling guilty on spending so much time on something and not use it. To compensate, I would jump to some other tech-related book or project that excited me, only to have the same thing happen again. It was a vicious cycle that I hated and was desperate to get out of. But I didn’t want to dump tech at all. I love this stuff.

Finally, I decided to just hold back on all the new learning. I stopped buying books and trying to jump on the bandwagon of the latest hotness out on the streets. But that made me even more miserable. I felt like I was getting left behind. Like a drug junkie, I yearned to get my fix, even though I knew it was slowly killing me inside. So I had to focus on something else, far away from the things I’ve been doing for the past ten years. And oddly enough, shifting my focus away from tech was just what I needed to get my focus back on tech.

First off, I finally decided to go to a gym. Before last year, I had never stepped into a gym before in my life. Outside of walking around town or visiting a new park from time to time, I never really made an attempt to make physical activity a part of my routine. So at age 29, my electronic scale at home read 298.8 pounds, and a recent blood test showed my cholesterol levels a bit on the high side. I knew I had to do something. Since my current office is located right next door, literally, to a gym, I signed up and started going.

Going to the gym and exercising regularly has been by far the best decision I’ve ever made in my life. Outside of weight loss and other physiological benefits, I never really believed the mental benefits of exercising, but they’re very, very true. I feel much more alert during the day, up to the point where I don’t need a caffeine boost during the day. I also got much better at retaining new things I’ve learned. Work seems to come out effortlessly, and I think the quality of my code has gone noticeably up in the last couple of months, since I’ve been going to the gym more often. Finally, I’ve noticed myself in a much better mood every single day, with rarely any “bad hair days”, as I used to have periodically. Seeing the benefits of the hard work put at the gym helps with that a lot: Yesterday I weighed myself using the same scale that mockingly showed 298.8 over a year ago, and now it ready ’258.8′. Suck it, electronic scale.

Besides the gym, I wanted something else to focus on, but nothing related to technology. So I decided to take up learning a new language – a natural language, in particular, Japanese. I’m already fluent in English and Spanish, so I wanted to take something that was totally different, something not a Germanic or Romance language. I thought that Japanese was one of the most difficult languages outside of those groups, so I signed up for a class to feel challenged by something new. I’m about to finish my introductory class next week, and I loved it so much that I’m planning to stay at the language school for at least a full year, and then I’ll be taking a few weeks to actually visit Japan.

The thing is, since I’ve been spending a noticeable chunk of time with the gym and learning Japanese, I’ve noticed a surprising side-effect – I’ve been doing much better in the tech department. Taking time to study Japanese clears my mind and really energizes me, so when I go back to coding I put in a much better effort than I did before. And the physical and mental energy boost that the gym has given me helps me be able to learn and retain more than I ever did. It’s an awesome feeling, and I’m loving studying all over again.

As developers and engineers, our passion leads us to spend too much time on technology, but in the long haul that’s not sustainable. I’ve heard the phrase “sometimes we need to step back to be able to move forward” many, many times before. It’s totally true. Believe it.

Now that I live on the West Coast, I’ve been able to attend many of the wonderful tech conferences that are hosted in the Bay Area. Yesterday, I attended MongoSF in beautiful San Francisco. I’ve been using MongoDB for a while now, mostly for personal projects. I’ve written some projects on GitHub that uses MongoDB as the primary data store, and I have also migrated some existing MySQL tables in other projects to use MongoDB instead. Having read MongoDB: The Definitive Guide from front to back, and spending quite some time on the MongoDB docs, I feel like I have a good grasp on the tool. So I was pretty excited to go to this conference and discover some more things about my one of favorite pieces of tech.

There were multiple tracks in this conference, and unfortunately I still can’t clone myself in this day and age, so I’ll just briefly touch on those sessions that I was able to attend.

Monitoring & Queuing MongoDB: This talk, given by David Mytton from Server Density touched on some of the integrated monitoring tools and commands that MongoDB has baked in. He also showed a bit of Server Density’s MongoDB monitoring system, which looks to be incredibly useful. Overall, the talk was decent, but anyone who has MongoDB running in production should know most of this stuff already.

Evolving from relational to document store: Graham Tackley, lead for the web development team over at the U.K.’s Guardian news site, gave an interesting talk on how the site has evolved over time since the mid-90s (Lots of Perl / CGI goodness). Currently they are in the process of moving certain parts of the site to use MongoDB. Besides the history lesson on the site, he also mentioned how they are dealing with possible future changes in architecture, notably by building APIs around the site functionality. This talk got my gears running about some of my own projects, and how I might build any new projects I have in my mind.

MongoDB Profiling and Tuning: This talk was given by Kenny Gorman, who works as a data architect at Shutterfly. Kenny went through some of the steps used to profile MongoDB, like using explain() on your queries, and how to make things faster, not only on the software side, but also on hardware. He brought up Facebook’s Flashcache, and how it makes MongoDB speed up. I particularly enjoyed hearing the hardware side of things, as I feel like hardware is mostly overlooked by developers.

MongoDB’s New Aggregation Features – A Sneak Peek: Chris Westin is a core MongoDB contributor, and he gave us a sneak peek at a new framework for aggregating records in MongoDB. This framework is really not meant to replace Map/Reduce, which will still serve very well for massive data. But for people like me, who need to aggregate smaller amounts of data (thousands of documents instead of millions), this will be much easier and faster to deal with. Very cool stuff, and I can’t wait to use it.

Lessons Learned from Migrating 2+ Billion Documents at Craigslist: Former Yahoo! and current Craigslist employee Jeremy Zawodny spoke about how Craigslist is using MongoDB for their posting archive, and the lessons learned along the way, like the usage of replica sets even in development, document encoding, and how important data types are when migrating collections. He had a similar talk at MongoSV a few months ago, so I didn’t feel like there wasn’t much new information here. Still, a good talk about migrating a large amount of data from MySQL to MongoDB – it can be done.

Practical Scaling and Sharding: Eliot Horowitz is one of the main MongoDB contributors, and the CTO of the company that backs MongoDB, 10gen. He went through the features and usage of Replica Sets and Sharding, with a few use cases and live examples. This seemed more like an introductory talk more than anything else, so there was nothing groundbreaking here.

MongoDB at Foursquare: This talk was given by Jorge Ortiz, an engineer at Foursquare, who proceeded to mention briefly how MongoDB was being used at Foursquare, some of the lessons they’ve learned throughout the years with MongoDB, and talked about their Scala library for querying MongoDB called Rogue. Frankly, I was disappointed with this talk, as Jorge didn’t give much insight outside of a few numbers and oft-r