The Philosophy of Nate

Creativity in Coding

As a culture, we tend to have a difficult time seeing technical disciplines as creative. It can sometimes be hard to imagine engineering as something creative because it frequently comes in the form of exact results and is spoken of in terms that are sometimes difficult to understand. This divide is imaginary because the technical and the creative are perfectly capable of coexisting. Working within the constraints of an engineering project does not restrict creativity, it tends to encourage more of it. Engineering products are creative works even though it’s sometimes hard to see them as such.

Examining the technical/creative mix from a software standpoint, there is a lot of room for and a lot of need for creativity. Source code can be written many ways to solve the same problem. Developers frequently have their own style and their own method of solving problems. In fa...

Taking Time Off From Software Engineering

A lot of us in the software field live, breathe, and even dream software. We love what we do so we surround ourselves with it; we join massive groups of software engineers where we constantly ask for critiques of our websites and resumes and show off our new thing we’re building from something new we’re learning that we’re sure is going to change the world while we flaunt our startup ideas because we want to create the next big thing but often we put things on hold “to come back to” (except we never get back to them) to play with the new new thing so we don’t fall behind while the live stream of someone programming or the most recent Hackathon sits on our second screen so we can learn something else new or to look at the latest high stakes in competitive coding then we get home from work or school and immediately dive into our personal software scene so we don’t miss a beat while we’re awake and later we get woken up at 3AM by our phone because someone we once talked to online a ...

Journey to a Static Site

For the longest time, I was enamored by the idea of having a dynamic site. Everything remotely dynamic on my site was powered by external services such as Disqus or Blogger. Despite that, I imagined I would eventually come up with some cool, dynamic content to put on my site and that I should pre-emptively fill that void if and when I would ever need it. To fill this imaginary need I ended up building my own PHP web framework, complete with its own (really terrible) database layer. I learned a lot while doing it so it was a worthwhile project and it even worked fairly well for a while. Eventually though, it became too large, and debatably too broken of a project to continue working on alone, especially with much better frameworks out there.

I still wanted to push for that dynamic site. My PHP framework wasn’t working out anymore and I didn’t feel like dealing with Wordpress or figuring out another framework, so I turned to Django. I rewrote my site (in under a quarter of ...

Collecting in a Digital World

Let’s be honest. For the layman, there isn’t a real need to own media anymore. No matter what it is, the Internet makes it easy to find and easy to get no matter where or when you are. We’re lazy—someone else already did it and most of the time we’re willing to pay them instead of devoting our own time to finding everything we want. Despite that, some of us still choose to maintain our own collections. These media libraries often amount to dozens upon dozens of terabytes of media on an array of drives somewhere, that we stream with Plex or Emby or a similar solution. It eventually amounts to more media than one person is actually able to realistically consume. To add a little perspective, a collection in the low end of that consisting only of HD video would take over a year to watch in its entirety if played 24/7/365 with no breaks.

Looking generally at why humans collect anything digital or physical, collecting (not hoarding) is associated with positive emotions. There i...

Human Interaction Through Analytics

With social media, we have more people to talk to than ever and more ways to talk to them. However, our bigger networks do not translate to more meaningful social interactions. Everything we share is carefully curated and censored to show only what we think makes us look our best to the network we’re sharing with, removing spontaneity and authenticity from how we interact.

As our interactions become less genuine, we feel increasingly lost in the crowd and we get lonely. We expand our friend lists and gather followers to make up for feeling lonely, but this doesn’t make up for the human element that we’re losing. No matter how many hashtags we add to our posts, how much we post ourselves all over our profiles and other people’s profiles, we still can’t achieve the genuineness of speaking in person and being heard that we as a species need.

To counter the feeling of not being heard, we seek out statistics that make us able to feel like we’re getting noticed. The fir...

When to Bail and When to Sail

A couple years ago, I decided to learn PHP since I had a website and I felt that my knowledge of web development was lacking without it. I started off with a few simple PHP pages, and didn’t really intend to go much farther than that. I knew that creating my own web platform would be pretty futile, since as one person who didn’t really know anything about how frameworks worked under the hood, I likely couldn’t come up with something better on my own. The plan was to learn PHP, then switch over to something that was already an accepted solution. Always up for a challenge however, I kept going and a few pages written with a smattering of PHP evolved into an actual piece of software that did more than show a different greeting every time the page was loaded. I knew what I was doing, but I pushed on anyway because things were going pretty well - I had a simple blog, pages, a login system - and they worked fairly well. I kept thinking of ways to do it better so I improved as I went, a...

To Update or Not to Update

With the official end of life for Windows XP quickly approaching and some people scrambling to migrate to a new system, it’s interesting to look at the reasons for and against pushing through an upgrade. Upgrading to a new version of an operating system or a different operating system entirely can be a lot of work with migrating files and settings over. This is especially the case with XP, since there is no direct upgrade path from XP (which is 13 years old) to Windows 7 or 8 - or Linux/Mac for some.

Since upgrading to a new operating system is generally more of an ordeal than updating individual applications, there’s those who consider hunkering down rather than moving on when end of life comes around. There are always reasons against it - it takes time to get everything on the new system set up, there may be a learning curve, it might be expensive. The issue is that while these are valid concerns, choosing to stay with an aging system that is out of support is dangerous...

Tech Tasks to Start 2014

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Now that we’re on to the beginning of the first full week of the new year and we’re setting into 2014, it’s a good time to take a look at the technology status quo and see what adjustments can be made for a safe, secure, and productive new year online.

Change passwords. Although once a year is much less frequent than passwords should be changed, memorizing new passwords can be a pain. Once a year is better than never, especially when the same passwords have been around for a while. Take some time to come up with a good pattern for passwords that is easy to remember but difficult to guess then stick to it. Use a pattern that results in different passwords for each website without easily guessed information in it and has a mix of numbers, letters, and other symbols. Interestingly, though i...

Stuck in the Monkeysphere

Humans are a social species, so as a species we don’t like being alone for long periods of time, and we like the attention of others. The Internet seems like a great thing with the rise of various social networks that let us share our interests and thoughts with people across the globe and allows us to gather a large social following of like-minded people. Given that, it would seem that the Internet should make us all happy as we expand our circles globally and to people we may have never met in person. Social networking is now the number one activity on the Internet (displacing porn, which was at the top for quite a while).

As we spend more time online with our virtual friends, we start to lose some of our ability to manage real-world social interactions to the point where picking up the phone or meeting someone in person makes some people incredibly nervous. Research is showing that as our relationships increasingly move to the Internet, our satisfaction in these relati...

Biometric Badness

There’s nothing quite like the slick, high tech (when it works, at least) feeling of swiping your finger to unlock your devices. It’s fast, it’s convenient, and it feels futuristic, which explains why there are so many laptops that are capable of authenticating users via their fingerprints. Unfortunately, using fingerprints as a “more secure” login system should have been a short time fad. Although the technology continues to improve, it provides a false sense of security.

Why is this significant now? The technology has been embedded in laptops for some time - I have one too - but Apple is the first to put it on a phone which, if the past is any indication, will cause it to make its way into other phones as well. In terms of the implementation of it, from what I have read it sounds fairly sound. Fingerprint data is hashed (converted to an irreversible string of data that looks nothing like a fingerprint) and stored in a dedicated area on the iPhone. iOS has access to this...