coffeejunk

SEEKING WORK | Europe (UTC+1) | REMOTE ONLY (happy to travel)

I'm a software developer with over a decade of professional experience — the overwhelming majority of that time working with Ruby / Ruby on Rails. I've shipped significant amounts of code in C# (ESRI ArcMap & ArcPro), Java, Go, Python, JS. I prefer dealing with the backend but can work throughout the stack. Over the years, I've had the chance to work in several different industries (government, education, energy, real estate), both with small startups as well as large established enterprises. My code makes thousands of professionals worldwide more productive in their day to day work.

email: hi@coffeejunk.dev

Don't kill yourself.

Call a suicide hotline right now: http://mefiwiki.com/wiki/ThereIsHelp

It is easy to see _why as "the crazy ruby guy who wrote some scripts and created all this drama around his persona". Even though _why did indeed write some (very useful) programs, I think this view of him misses the point and probably explains why so many people seem to be puzzled by his newest endeavour.

Yes, he wrote some Ruby code, but the code was his least important contribution.

_why was the first person to actually create art around and about software. Others before him have used software as a tool in their artistic process, but to my knowledge no one has ever taken coding as the subject of a performance art so intricate and beautiful as the character whytheluckystiff. All his scripts, all his writings, even all his quirky animations and songs show a love and passion for coding as a recreational activity that defies our conventional beliefs about software as a craft & industry.

We often hear people in this community talk about elegant code, beautiful code, even code as art. But all these sentiments usually mean art in the form of craftsmanship: We want a shorter way to write the same web app, a more expressive way to create our tests, a more concise DSL for data manipulation. While all of these are worthy goals, they are only a tiny, tiny fraction of what coding really is or at least could be. If something doesn't help us build our MVP faster, it's useless to us. Isn't there more to software than that? Sure, there are people focusing on more esoteric stuff in their free time, writing their own Lisps, exploring different data structures, etc. But all of these activities still follow the same tenets: More efficient is better, smaller is better, better is beautiful. We are in love with perfection and purity, because that is what we (necessarily) strive for in our daily work.

_why was different.

Similar to how the decadent and symbolist movements of the late 19th century popularized "Art for Art's sake", _why devoted his whole opus to "Code for Code's sake". His work as a "freelancer professor" showed how much he cared about children learning programming as an enjoyable activity, not as a way to increase the supply of professional programmers. He also satirized our obsession with exactly this professionalism that tends to creep into our thinking and permeates our culture. In short, he used his character to show us aspects of software that were largely underrepresented or ignored in most mainstream discussions.

Personally, reading the poignant guide was the first time I read a piece of code not to understand the code, but to understand a wonderful story. I still don't know how to program in Ruby, but that doesn't matter. In my opinion the poignant guide never really was about Ruby. It was a wonderfully quirky book that happened to be using Ruby as its language. _why's style is absolutely unique and reflects his approach to coding: It doesn't have to be (what we normally consider) beautiful or clean, but it nevertheless forms a great and intricate experience for the reader.

Similarly, today was the first time that I regretted not owning a printer. To see new pages suddenly arrive in the tray to form a crazy and beautiful story must have been magical. Even using only a virtual printer it was wonderful to read the new parts of the book as they arrived and this experience alone made it worthwhile for me. The content itself deserves more than just this quick HN comment though.

So, if you want to know why so many people seem to enjoy the works of _why, set aside some time and start to dig through his estate of old stuff. Don't try to find something useful, just let the whole strange collection sink in. As is often the case with art, the subjective experience is hard to put into words as it depends so much on your personal context and the context of the artwork. I have definitely done a shoddy job trying to describe what makes _why special for me, I am not even sure it can be adequately put into words. But if you like things that are absurd, sometimes useless, yet strangely beautiful, then take a closer look at this works.

Thank you for everything, _why.

--

A friend asked me to post this for him.

Direct link to the pdf: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/8z6j7bju8qx7g7o/WHY_FULL...

A friend of mine put together the full book as a pdf: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5575707 / http://www.scribd.com/doc/136875051/-why-s-complete-printer-... / https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/8z6j7bju8qx7g7o/WHY_FULL...

The only thing worse than LEDs on monitors is the cheap power supply attached to it. I had to sit in a room with ~30 monitors all blinking at their own intervals and every time one LED get's turned on, the power supply does a high pitch whistle. A cacophony of high pitch whistles. I was so close to burning the whole thing down.

Germany: $30.65 in the US Amazon Store and EUR 24,94 in the German Amazon Store

"Your password can't be longer than 16 characters." really?

would greatly appreciate a copy mxhaack@gmail.com

he also released his beacon performance as an audio download.

at least for mastercard this is true: as per my banks tos i have to take care that nobody gains access my 'securecode' and i am liable for any unauthorized charges. (because the 'securecode' is supposed to guarantee that it is me who is using the card)

i highly enjoyed 'introduction to algorithms' http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

what about monthly and discounted annual? this way you give the incentive to pay annually but leave the option for monthly commitment.

I use it everyday when I'm riding my bike: 'Play song x', 'call mom'..

Also for Germany: https://www.dkms.de/

Still a problem on safari (iOS)

I think it's ok that the person asking the questions is not visible, however the video feels a bit awkward because of the angle. It feels like you are looking down to him. I guess it would be less awkward if the camera and the head of the person interviewed where at the same level.

On the other hand, vimeo gives you the ability to download the movie (if you are a registered user) which is great, especially when you have a slow internet connection.

I'm pretty thrilled that chromebooks will be available in some european countries from launch on.

I had a Super Talent (UltraDrive GX) fail after 2 days and 2 different OCZ Vertex 2 fail each after about 3 months. All of them failed in my trusty MacBook Pro.

I'm now back to good old hard drives, sure it's WAY slower but the current state of SSDs seemed to be a bit too unreliable.

The Changelog[1] does a pretty good job at telling the world about awesome open source projects. Especially their new gig at the github blog (github reflog[2][3]) is always worth checking out.

[1] http://thechangelog.com/

[2] https://github.com/blog/837-github-reflog-v1-4-12

[3] https://github.com/kennethreitz/github-reflog

couchsurfing is always an amazing experience. not only because it's a free stay somewhere but because you get to know many interesting people you wouldn't meet otherwise.

worth watching is Brian Chesky talk at Startup School as he goes a bit more into detail: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383

they also have a dedicated site for the cereals (and a song!!): http://www.airbnb.com/obamaos

  * Fix multihead (>2 displays)
  * consistent ui
  * make the window resize area bigger. 1px is NOT enough

  - My trusty old Bialetti  
  - MacBook + OSX  
  - alfred (app launcher and more)  
  - iTerm  
  - MacVim  
  - git + github  
  - ssh  
  - hn  
  - GMail  
  - Google Calendar  
  - Google Docs  
  - Google Talk  
  - Google Chrome  
  - StayFocusd (Chrome Plugin)  
  - Skype  
  - Billings  
  - Skitch  
  - Dropbox  
  - VirtualBox  
  - a keyboard with us layout! the german keyboard layout is a mess!

A lighter.

have a look at gerrit[1] if you are a git user. it's a complete rewrite of rietveld (in java) and tied closely to git which is because the main contributor is Shawn Pearce (who is also main contributor to git[2]).

[1] http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/ [2]: http://git-scm.com/about

skype for mac has always been a pain but it seems they're trying really hard to make it even worse. <irony>besides of course coverflow for profile pictures, which is a huge improvement in usability.</irony>

good to see progress in the libraries, however i find it really sad e17 never quite "made it".

and they fund you for 1 year, not 3 months.