The Technician

At its core, SOPA represents a universal, base desire of men to protect what they own. To some degree, it’s valid, something that anyone can respect. However, as with most things, ideas mean precisely shite, and execution is what really matters. In the case of SOPA, a misguided, poorly informed government is attempting to execute an idea in a way that could do the most damage possible. Let me count the ways SOPA is fucking stupid.

SOPA threatens free speech. This has been said by many folks who are much smarter than I. Any bill that allows the silencing of voices should not see the light of day. ‘Nuff said.

SOPA will starve and fracture an industry. A measure that could be taken against an “infringing” site is forcing advertising networks to stop serving ads for said site. For many sites, advertising is their meat and potatoes. An equally despicable measure is forcing payment services (can you say paypal?) to stop accepting transactions from the infringing site. Any site that relies on e-commerce is now proper fucked. Any service that provides a payment gateway or ad services is now unreliable. There will be a rift between providers that cooperate with SOPA, and those that don’t.

SOPA will break the one thing that makes the Internet accessible to humans, DNS. DNS is the system whereby domains names are translated to network addresses. Assigning IP addresses easy-to-remember names is one of the reasons the Internet has become a viable medium. As an extreme measure, SOPA will alter a site’s DNS records to point somewhere else. This last measure make is pretty clear the authors of these bills are complete dipshits.

While altering DNS will render the site inaccessible to most, it does not remove the existence or accessibility of content from the Internet. This very post is available here, whether DNS is up or not. To cope with a broken DNS system, the Internet will respond, and it will not be pleasant. Hardware vendors will ship with host files set up to protect their own interests. Rogue DNS resolvers will pop up. The Internet will turn into Bartertown. Two browsers will enter, neither will find Facebook.

The internet industry and e-commerce have proved to be the country’s highest growth sectors in the past few years. One of the main contributors to that growth has been the availability of honest, reasonably reliable, interconnected services. They’ve given the classic humble entrepreneur + code monkey team the tools to build a business that yields riches. Compromise those tools, and you will destroy an industry, not to mention perhaps the last golden vestige of American opportunity. Creating a market-based system to punish violators will only destroy the system. To help combat SOPA, contact your local congressperson, or go here. To read the bill, click here.

Normally, I’ve considered New Year’s Resolutions to be for whiners, people who never actually accomplish anything, people who are normally on the whhhaaaambulance. Most resolutions fall somewhere in the “stop being fat” to “be fluent in mesopotamian glyphs” range. They’re vague, completely un-actionable, and just describe a slightly unattainable goal / end result / dumbass want. This year, however, I’ve discovered a few serious problems in my life I need to fix. So, in the spirit of actually doing shit, I’ve provided a list of non-whiner resolutions + ways to actually make them happen.

1. Go to bed early(ish). This is a tough one for me. I’m naturally a night owl, but I might be able to fool myself to getting to bed early by showering early(ish). I love me a good shower. I’ve even been known to drink a beer in the shower. I also really like being in really warm, comfortable, if slightly embarrassing, PJs. All these things put me in a good mood and generally make me want to relax, which is not all that far from being asleep. Action Steps: Just get in the fucking shower, don’t look at the mail / email / dirty dishes / messy apartment / email / Twitter, just get in the shower (bring a beer).

2. See some doctors. I’ve avoided doctors for awhile, mostly because my lifestyle is a cross between Denis Nedry from Jurassic Park and a barfly. I consider this pretty simple. Action Steps: Make appointments with the following: dentist, general physician, eye doctor, nutritionist. Do it. Do what they say, even if it sucks. Follow up as often as the quacks say so.

3. Go to the gym regularly. OK, this one is, without a doubt, the most cliche, whine-tastic resolution evar. I know, because I have been to the gym in January. I’ve also been to the gym in April, when all the kids who were at the gym in January are nowhere to be found. Also, since the gym is a #creepy and #gross place to shower, resolution #1 should be even more important. Action Steps: Put that ish on the Google calendar with the following reminders; 2 hours, 1 hour, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, and 5 minutes before. Keep gym clothes in the office. Don’t care how bad they smell.

4. Blog more. Writing has been a great way to get me to collect my thoughts, find some hindsight, and maybe, just maybe, help some other folks who have the same demented thoughts / stupid problems. As a technical guy, “the inspiration” doesn’t hit me so often, and when it does, I’m often busy, y’know, actually doing shit. However, as I’ve noted to myself more than once, keeping track of my day and journaling how I spend my time is something incredibly important for introspection. Action Steps: Write that thought down. Write down what you did 30 seconds ago, especially if it was different from regularly scheduled programming. Keep a sticky on your monitor to write shite down. Ask the dude next to you (@bossjones) to remind you to you write shit down. Lastly, a glass (or 7) of white wine, the notebook in which all your shit is written, and wordpress should convene regularly. Google Calendar #ftw, again. Lastly, check Google Analytics on posts. The un-monitored blog post is not worth writing.

5. Read more. Once upon a time (yesterday) I didn’t know nearly as much as I do now. Most of that knowledge came from reading shit-tons of blogs, books, bathroom graffiti, articles, and whitepapers related to web development. I read everything with a goal: How can I use, or leverage this to help me / my business work a little better? The Action Steps here are a bit tougher, and slightly conflict with non-whiner resolution #6: Keep Google Reader open. Curate my list of feeds with relevant sources. Prune feeds that stopped providing useful information. Lastly, and perhaps most important, find tidbits of information that make a difference in my life and / or business.

6. Don’t be distracted by bold numbers in parentheses. Simple (kinda). Action Steps: close Gmail, close Twitter. Try, and #fail, to delete my Facebook account.

7. Stop playing so much fucking air guitar by myself, alone in my apt, and start playing some real guitar, and actually learn the songs I normally rock out to. Action Steps: restring the Epiphone, buy a new amp, find tabs for shit I want to learn. If I’m feeling really frisky, get back into a band.

While flying to Austin for sxsw, I had a small programming task. Take a string of a few search terms, break it apart and highlight those terms in another string. It’s a straightforward task, and probably a wheel that’s been reinvented thousands of time in the history of computer science. I approached it as an exercise, to see if I could add another squeaky wheel to the pile. My goal was to do it without using any 3rd party code or any resources. I had no access to documentation, google, stack overflow, or any of the other resources I use constantly to get my job done every day.

The code that I produced was bloated, naive, and horribly inefficient (I suspect). While writing it, i knew I wasn’t really on the right path. When I got back to New York, I took a look at it, and more or less decided I had wasted my time. Then I realized I had written it on a plane, and had nothing better to do. I simply got myself into the zone, and wanted to work through a problem until it was solved. After I got over my initial disgust, I wondered what aside from boredom and stubbornness had prompted me to complete the task.

I never really came to any conclusions until a few days later. I was going about my day normally, fixing bugs, writing emails, troubleshooting. As I hit a hard spot, something I couldn’t figure out, I gave up staring at the code, and turned to Google. Then I came across a builtin php function that was giving me a strange result. After puzzling for a few seconds, I dropped the function into Google. A little while later, I was examining the results of an EXPLAIN statement in MySQL, and the output was something I hadn’t seen before. I found the answer on StackOverflow a few minutes later.

Then it dawned on me. Maybe I don’t actually have the skills to be a web developer, and I’ve faked it all these years. Maybe I don’t know all that much about MySQL, and perhaps I only know enough about Linux to cause problems for Rackspace. Whether or not that’s true, I did realize that I’m pretty good at finding solutions to problems from the collective experiences, wisdom, and flames of the Internet. Maybe it’s not entirely fair to say that I faked my way through several years of a career. After all the code that I’ve put together over the years to answer various questions, or sift through or collect data serves a purpose, performs relatively well, and is serving people everyday. Also, that disgusting snippet of string highlighting code works pretty well, despite that fact that I hate its face and want it to die.

After I got myself out of my existential development funk, more questions came to mind. First, how the F did anyone get any answers to tough questions before the Internet? Secondly, how did programmers back in the day find any sort of direction? Books on technology and programming are great, don’t get me wrong, but you can’t get answers to complicated questions. After having these thoughts crop up, I spent a little bit of time looking over other devs’ shoulders at the office. What I saw was very reassuring, as the Google machine was often hard at work for the rest of the team. The php site, StackOverflow, and QuirksMode were in browsers constantly.

Which begs yet another question: what exactly does it take to be a web programmer? Based on my experience, it seems to boil down to an Internet connection, Google, tenacity to the point of stupidity, and decent search skills. To back up even further, is it possible to take on a job you know nothing about, and learn how do it via the Internet?