Who is the happy idiot? It’s the person in class who shrugs off fears of looking dopy and raises their hand. It’s the person who, in an architecture meeting, isn’t afraid to be wrong in asserting that a new bottleneck is quickly emerging in the design. It’s the person who gives presentations on topics they’re really only 75% comfortable with, and announces as much to the audience, inviting corrections and more input. It’s the person who invites feedback and asks questions that seem trivial, even if it exposes their ignorance.

We need more happy idiots.

I wholeheartedly accept this role, even though there are circumstances where it might be easier to keep my mouth shut and keep up appearances or it might seem beneficial to not put a dent in some perceived reputation or something like that. The problem I have with doing that is that appearances are, in my experience, largely bullshit. Reputation, in my experience, comes from doing, not from merely being perceived as smart, or good, or whatever. Execute. The rest comes from that.

Furthermore, once you enter the realm of keeping up appearances, you wind up in this horrible vicious cycle where eventually you just always have to clam up to seem smart about everything. Purposefully keeping quiet when you have no idea what’s going on – indeed, *because* you have no idea what’s going on is a close relative to lying, and has the same consequences. Eventually you’ll be cornered to execute and you’ll have no idea what to do. The fear that this will happen will eventually take over your waking hours, causing stress, and it’s all downhill from there.

On the other hand, being the happy idiot means filling in the cracks in your knowledge. It means you’re conscious of your own ignorance. It means you’ll be able to execute more effectively. This starts a positive cycle: you learn more, you execute more effectively, you begin to be perceived as smart, good, whatever, and it’s not completely unwarranted, because you’ve actually asked questions that took guts to ask and as a result you executed in smart ways. Eventually, your dumb questions aren’t perceived as being dumb anymore. Eventually, when you ask a seemingly trivial question, people stop reflexively thinking ‘how does he not know that’ and start thinking about what your brain is about to do with that little tidbit of data.

Further, it means people will trust you more. Think about it. Would you rather give a critical project to someone who absolutely never asks questions and “seems smart”, or the person who asks intelligent questions and executes?

So, I say be the happy idiot. Put yourself out there. If you’re perceived as being dumb for taking steps to be less dumb, then the problem isn’t yours, and you shouldn’t make it yours.

PICC ’11 Slides Posted

I gave a Python talk at PICC ’11. If you were there, then you have a suboptimal version of the slides, both because I caught a few bugs, and also because they’re in a flattened, lifeless PDF file, which sort of mangles anything even slightly fancy. I’m not sure how much value you’ll get out of these because my presentation slides tend to present code that I then explain, and you won’t have the explanation, but people are asking, so here they are in all their glory. Enjoy!

I Made a Webapp Designed To Fail

No really, I did. WebStatusCodes is the product of necessity. I’m writing a Python module that provides an easy way for people to talk to a web API. I test my code, and for some of the tests I want to make sure my code reacts properly to certain HTTP errors (or in some cases, to *any* HTTP status code that’s not 200). In unit tests this isn’t hard, but when you’re starting to test the network layers and beyond, you need something on the network to provide the errors. That’s what WebStatusCodes does. It’s also a simple-but-handy reference for HTTP status codes, though it is incomplete (418 I’m a teapot is not supported). Still, worth checking out.

Interesting to note, this is my first AppEngine application, and I believe it took me 20 minutes to download the SDK, get something working, and get it deployed. It was like one of those ‘build a blog in -15 minutes’ moments. Empowering the speed at which you can create things on AppEngine, though I’d be slow to consider it for anything much more complex.

Systems and Devops People, Hack With Me!

I like systems-land, and a while back I was stuck writing some reporting code, which I really don’t like, so I started a side project to see just how much cool stuff I could do using the /proc filesystem and nothing but pure Python. I didn’t get too far because the reporting project ended and I jumped back into all kinds of other goodness, but there’s a github project called pyproc that’s just a single file with a few functions in it right now, and I’d like to see it grow, so fork it and send me pull requests. If you know Linux systems pretty well but are relatively new to Python, I’ll lend you a hand where I can, though time will be a little limited until the book is done (see further down).

The other projects I’m working on are sort of in pursuit of larger fish in the Devops waters, too, so be sure to check out the other projects I mention later in this post, and follow me on github.

Python Meetup Group in Princeton NJ

I started a Meetup group for Pythonistas that probably work in NYC or PA, but live in NJ. I work in PA, and before this group existed, the closest group was in Philly, an hour from home. I put my feelers out on Twitter, found some interest, put up a quick Meetup site, and we had 13 people at the first meetup (more than had RSVP’d). It’s a great group of folks, but more is always better, so check it out if you’re in the area. We hold meetings at the beautiful Princeton Public Library (who found us on twitter and now sponsors the group!), which is just a block or so from Triumph, the local microbrewery. I’m hoping to have a post-meeting impromptu happy hour there at some point.

Python Cookbook Progress

The Python Cookbook continues its march toward production. Lots of work has been done, lots of lessons have been learned, lots of teeth have been gnashed. The book is gonna rock, though. I had the great pleasure of porting all of the existing recipes that are likely to be kept over to Python 3. Great fun. It’s really amazing to see just how it happens that a 20-line recipe is completely obviated by the addition of a single, simple language feature. It’s happened in almost every chapter I’ve looked at so far.

If you have a recipe, or stumble upon a good example of some language feature, module, or other useful tidbit, whether it runs in Python 3 or not, let me know (see ‘Contact Me’). The book is 100% Python 3, but I’ve gotten fairly adept at porting things over by now Send me your links, your code, or whatever. If we use the recipe, the author will be credited in the book, of course.

PyRabbit is Coming

In the next few days I’ll be releasing a Python module on github that will let you easily work with RabbitMQ servers using that product’s HTTP management API. It’s not nearly complete, which is why I’m releasing it. It does some cool stuff already, but I need another helper or two to add new features and help do some research into how RabbitMQ broker configuration affects JSON responses from the API. Follow me on github if you want to be the first to know when I get it released. You probably also want to follow myYearbook on github since that’s where I work, and I might release it through the myYearbook github organization (where we also release lots of other cool open source stuff).

Python Asynchronous AMQP Consumer Module

I’m also about 1/3 of the way through a project that lets you write AMQP consumers using the same basic model as you’d write a Tornado application: write your handler, import the server, link the two (like, one line of code), and call consume(). In fact, it uses the Tornado IOLoop, as well as Pika, which is an asynchronous AMQP module in Python (maintained by none other than my boss and myYearbook CTO,  @crad), which also happens to support the Tornado IOLoop directly.

Why would you NOT date your articles? In almost every single theme for every single content management solution written in any language and backed by any database, “Date” is a default element. Why would you remove it? It is almost guaranteed to be more work to remove it. Why would you go through actual work to make your own writing less useful to others?

What happens when you don’t date your articles?

1. People have no idea whether your article has anything to do with what they’re working on.  If you wrote an article about the Linux kernel in 1996, it’s of no use to me *now*, even if it was pretty hardcore at the time.
2. Readers are forced to skim your article looking for references to software versions to see if your article is actually meaningful to them or not. Why make it hard for people to know whether your article is useful? The only reason I can think of is that you already know your articles are old, so not dating them insures that people at least skim enough to see some of the ads on your site. You are irreversibly lame if you do this.
3. It causes near seizures in people like me who really hate when you don’t date your work, as well as all of your past teachers, who no doubt demanded that you sign and date your work.
4. Every time you don’t date an article online, a seal pup is clubbed to death in the arctic, and a polar bear gets stranded on a piece of ice.

At some point, I will make an actual list of web sites that regularly do not date their work. A sort of hall of shame for sites that fail to link their writing to some kind of time-based context. If you have sites you’d like to add, let me know in the comments.

I’ve had a lot of time to myself this weekend, and decided to spend a few solid 1-hour blocks playing guitar. Oh, I still play around the house here and there, but usually if I can get in 20 minutes I feel privileged. Learning more kids songs is helping

But this weekend I wanted to learn a couple of songs in particular. I wanted to learn “Why Georgia” and “My Stupid Mouth” from John Mayer’s “Room for Squares” album. Although since that album’s release Mr. Mayer has gone on to do more produced and (to a guitarist) less interesting things on his commercial albums, Room for Squares contained really wonderful textures and sounds while somehow keeping the guitar front-and-center.

John also uses a lot of cool chords and fingerpicking techniques that I knew I’d have fun with if I ever had the time to sit down with the songs and my guitar at the same time. I’ve been playing for almost 25 years, and knew a lot of the chords and techniques, but it’d be great to be able to use them in songs that people under 30 recognize rather than having to explain (for example) who James Taylor is.

How I Learn Songs: First Phase

I learn songs by first listening to them either with headphones on, or at a relatively high volume, about 20 times. I want to become intimate, at a subconscious level, with every detail of the song. I want to feel the tension build, recognize cues from all of the instruments, and understand how they’re playing off each other. This is wildly important to a one-man musician, because often I try to embellish the final piece to try to put hints of the entire song into the final piece — not just the guitar part.

Of course, I *start* with the guitar part, because it’s a bridge to the rest of the song. I learn it as close to note-for-note as possible (where there are solos, the same goes for the solo. I’m sick that way).

Once I can play the song through along with the recording and not hear anything going awry, I practice it that way several times. Maybe 10 times.

Then the fun begins.

Having Fun Learning: Second Phase

When I was a kid, my mom and her sisters liked to go to flea markets. I was not a big fan of these huge collections of what looked like garage sales, until I came across a group of tables with what must’ve been 1000 cassette tapes (that was the popular audio medium of the day). When I scanned the collection, I noticed an unusually large collection of Jimi Hendrix tapes. I figured they were compilations, but after picking one up, I realized it was actually a random collection of live and unreleased recordings.

Over the course of months I collected as many of these as I could, because Hendrix was an artist that always sent me running to the guitar. All told I had about 6-8 versions of Red House, a classic 12-bar blues jam. I had 3-4 versions of Foxy Lady, another 3 of Purple Haze, and lots more. Going through and picking out differences between the live and recorded versions was a great primer on how you can alter and embellish while staying within the same basic framework of a song without totally destroying it.

From then on, whenever I learned new songs or started studying a particular guitarist, I tried to get as many different versions of different songs as I could, to see how the guitarist thought about the piece. Guitarists on the road forced to play the same songs night after night get bored, and often try to make things interesting by altering different parts of the song, or even by changing the guitar’s role in different parts of the song. Fascinating stuff.

Making it Your Own: Third Phase

I would learn lots of this stuff, again, note-for-note to the best of my ability. I was blessed with a fantastic ear and good sense of rhythm, and that along with practice and constant exercising of those talents made me able to pick out and play even some rather complex stuff in no time. By the time I was 14, I was able to play simple things like Led Zeppelin’s “The Lemon Song” in about an hour (not counting the solo), and most of the stuff on the radio I could begin playing along with accurately before the song was even over.

Even better, there were plenty of “solo acoustic” variants of songs, or songs where the live recording happened to pick up the guitar and drums more than the bass and keyboards, or it emphasized the bass and drums more than the guitar. These imperfections are absolute gems for learning more about what’s going in the song… or what *could* be going on when you play it!

Once I learn a song and work in some of the original artist’s own embellishments, some of my own embellishments, and some of my musical personality and influences, it more or less becomes “my own”. I can still play a variant faithful to the recording, but it seems boring when you’ve heard all that can be done with it.

What’s Better Now?

Well, it’s not like I used to pick a song, spend a weekend with it, and all of a sudden it was my own. While I could easily learn decently solid renditions of songs in a weekend, it would take me months to find different recordings of a particular song, to read magazine articles and sometimes books about guitarists, scouring the words for descriptions of how they played things and thought about them. It would be an ongoing process that sometimes also involved figuring out the players’ influences and tracking down *their* recordings… ugh.

Today?

*Literally* today, I decided to learn “Why Georgia” by John Mayer (I learned a decently solid version of “My Stupid Mouth” yesterday). While I was listening to the song in iTunes, I also checked out YouTube and searched for the song there. Boom! 5000 hits. In about an hour, I had heard (AND SEEN!!!) about 10 different performances by John Mayer himself, and I spent about another 20 minutes browsing videos others have posted either covering the song, or providing a tutorial on how to play the song!

Of course, some of the covers and tutorials are horribly wrong, but it’s easier to pick out stuff that’s not going to help you on YouTube than it is actually having to play through badly written tablature to figure out it’s wrong (and the internet, I promise you, is absolutely flooded with bad tablature).

The point is, I was able to learn this song, and work in Mayer’s embellishments as I went. Watching him play it in live performances, I was able to rely in visual cues and his body language to help me figure out how he thought about the song as he was playing it. Seeing him play in solo acoustic settings vs. live with a whole band was enlightening. In the end, I have learned a version of the piece, in one day, that would probably have taken me months to put together in the 80′s.

Thanks, Internet!

The material in the screencast is slightly adjusted, because different training clients want to see different things, and some just can’t afford to spend a lot of time on the boot process in their training classes.

I welcome any feedback anyone might have on it.