Tracing an upward curve

Posted on by kung
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Shit’s so boring when it’s going according to plan.
-me

Yo! It’s been a long time. I haven’t updated because I felt like nothing that eventful has happened. Nothing has surprised me, and I haven’t disappointed myself too much lately, which I’ve found is a great reason to start writing – so that other people don’t make my mistakes. Everything is pretty much on track.

I guess a few updates are in order:

Teaching

I seem to keep acquiring people eager to learn programming, and it’s exciting and scary to be guiding them toward…toward what, exactly? For those who are motivated and interested, I want them to achieve their goals. That generally means a job in the industry, which, while I don’t think is as difficult as many make it out to be, as developers are in such high demand, I find myself wondering who actually can do it. There is probably some truth to both statements: that some people just can’t program, and that everyone can program.

It’s the play between the two that’s scary. At least, when it comes to helping people achieve their goals of entering the industry. But, I live to serve. I will continue to be a resource for as long as I can.

Aggrego

Work is still awesome. It is a great, relaxed environment, built by programmers for programmers. I am organizing a hackathon in April, so stay tuned!

Speaking of which, I think the cool thing about work is that I am relaxed enough so that my personality bleeds into the company culture. My coworker, Erick, made a powerful comment when we were visiting another company, something along the lines of the fact that, as a young company, each of its members is crucial for the formative company culture. It’s true, and it’s incredibly empowering. But it’s also effortless. It will become who we are. That said, I think it’s still important to keep an eye on what kind of company it becomes.

I think I’ve been the most active in the Chicago development community, and I’m thinking about leveraging that activity into ways that helps Aggrego/Wrapports out. We’re hiring, for instance, so if you’re a Rails dev or a User Experience person, you should email me at brian.kung AT wrapports DOT com to say hi and get the ball rolling spacer

Life

The opening self-quote and the title of the blog post are really what I was supposed to write about – about how I am basically on track and things are proceeding as planned. I am being challenged, personally and in career, but I feel like these are challenges that I anticipated. These are learnings that I knew would happen. I’m building up a nest egg for launching into my own startup and building up my technical skills.

No surprises. Just tracing a slow upward curve.

Posted in Recap | Tagged aggrego, chicago, life, teaching, work | Leave a reply

Building a Tricker

Posted on by kung
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Last week, I got a membership at the UIC gym and managed to go not once, not twice, but three times in the early mornings. It was a runaway success (save for the part where I didn’t run at all). It actually reminds me a lot of the good old days when I lived in my car on the UIUC campus. Up early in the morning to shower and workout, and then a full day ahead of me.

This time, though, my goal is different. I am not merely abusing the hell out of an included gym membership in order to shower. I am here to rehabilitate and regain my wings.

(A quack doctor once told me that we were meant to crawl around on all fours, and while I understand where she was coming from in an evolutionary sense, besides being a) wrong for all of bipedal humanity, she also b) clearly did not know me. She may have been meant to crawl around in the dirt. I was meant to fly.)

To that end, I am going back to the basics with tricking. I never trained to be a tricker and never felt like a tricker. I think it was Kevin Lawler who told me I was a tricker upon finding me practicing at the gym in college. I didn’t know tricking was its own discipline, I just happened to have a good deal of skills that overlapped with tricking. This past week means that is changing.

This past week means I’ve started a journey toward rehabilitation, training and conditioning, and cross-disciplinary movement study. I’m taking all the pieces of my life and I’m using them to build a tricker.

01/12/2013

time in gym: 1:20

Nutrition:
- Raw meal (1/2 serving)

Kicks, 10 of each (both sides):
- front snap kick
- roundhouse
- hook kick
- high roundhouse

10x combo (both sides):
- front snap → roundhouse → hook → high roundhouse

Stretches:
- Wrist stretches (cambered)
- Calf raises
- Dancers’ stretches

Swimming:
- breast stroke 3 laps
- kick board 1 lap

What gets measured gets managed.

I’m past my prime, but these things only get harder as you grow older. I may never do a triple cork, but I am dedicated to improvement for the sake of health and happiness. That’s Why Bodybuilding at the Age of 93 is a Great Idea.

It’s so good to be able to take care of myself!

PS, I’d love any tips on fitness/nutrition/technique: swimming, kicks, tumbling, before/during/after workout nutrition, conditioning for gymnastics, martial arts, or other explosive activities, and for joint stability and maintenance. If you can think of anything else, let me know!

Posted in Recap, Thinking Out Loud | Tagged gym, meant to fly, physical conditioning, rehabilitation, strength, tricker, tricking, UIC | Leave a reply

Let it fade

Posted on by kung
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Heads up – this is another rambling post, a collection of random thoughts orphaned of any context and therefore undeserving of a full on blog post. Similarly, the title. Let’s see what happens.


Let It Fade

Last year it was my left elbow. This year it’s my right foot, possibly my lisfranc ligament, a tiny piece of cartilage responsible for holding my foot together in one piece. I am seriously endangering my ability to do touchdown raizes.

Which brings me to my tricking ‘career,’ whatever that may be. I think it is time to accept that my physical capacity for tricking has passed its zenith. I may be able to condition to overcome my injuries and even learn new tricks, but the truth is that I would have been able to more easily do so prior to my injuries. I have to acknowledge that I am on the way down.

A renowned tricker named Dogen, one of the first, quit tricking for similar reasons. My friend noted that by the end, he could barely walk, but he could still double corkscrew. I, meanwhile, am still limping from my injury. I hope I can regain a normal gait and even start running again with aggressive rehabilitation, but it does remind me of him.

This does not mean that I will stop. This just means that I have to work harder to fight the fade, even while acknowledging that it is happening. If or when I give up this Sisyphean struggle may hinge on gaining what peace of mind I can from the process of building and rebuilding my broken body.

We are human. It is as it is. We fade.


The Sun Also Rises

But for the unfortunate incident involving my foot, I have felt like an eagle about to fledge. I am employed, moving into the city, and ready to rehab and dance my ass off. Moving into the city gives me 15 more hours on weekdays, hours that I can turn toward my own use – investigating a new idea, learning, chilling out, swimming, dancing, tricking, or otherwise. An income means more flexibility in some ways, and less flexibility in other ways.

I’m excited.

Oh, it’s also my birthday.


Ideas suck

But they are, in fact, still all I have. I am working on my ability to execute, but I think my graduating from a thinking of myself as a beginner programmer will depend on my ability to execute on my concepts in a test-driven manner.


Werk it, gurl

So, working at Aggrego. I’ll fess up – in prior posts, I’ve mentioned it only as a source of income. This is due to some severe mental partitioning between work and personal life that’s reflected in my github accounts – one for personal, one for work.

Work has been great.

I am surrounded by really smart coworkers, a boss who programs and doesn’t just manage, in an interesting industry, in the best city on Earth (I am a bit biased). It’s a young company, so, as a friend said, everyone counts. I feel like my contributions, beyond simply code, have a chance to become part of the company’s DNA.

Nifty.

Posted in Miscellany, Thinking Out Loud | Tagged birthday, chicago, downtown, physical conditioning, rehab, woohoo, work | 1 Reply

Forgetting Joy

Posted on by kung
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I had begun reading The Walking Dead comics upon settling myself on the train, having just installed a comic book reader on my laptop. About halfway through the ride a thought percolated through my brain:

This series isn’t even done.

I paused before loading up the next issue. I thought of Naruto and Bleach, both comics that I had begun reading in High School, one of which I was still reading. I rolled my eyes in exasperation.

I don’t want to do this forever, too.

I closed my laptop, magnetic latch closing with a note of finality. I had just quashed my inner child under a mountain of skepticism and disappointment.

As I stared out of the train into the landscape whirring by, I realized that I had forgotten what joy was. It wasn’t about calculating returns. It wasn’t about the past and it wasn’t about the future. A few years ago I would have jumped, stumbled, or cautiously crept into a new show, book, or comic, but I would have done so without any such premeditation. Joy was in the moment rather than the payoff.

I thought back to all the things that I had been denying myself lately – dance, books, art – and it came down to joy. It came down to experience for its own sake. I had forgotten it, and now I was intent on rediscovering it.

I’m getting so old.

I got on the train the next day with a sci-fi book in hand.

Posted in Thinking Out Loud | Tagged books, comics, entertainment, jaded, joy, love | Leave a reply

How to Get a Job as a Web Developer in Chicago

Posted on by kung
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I’ve sent this email out to a few friends already. I thought it might be helpful to more people, but I’m too lazy to organize it into a proper post, so I’m splatting it out here.

Here’s a few things I’ve written:
  • How I Became a Web Development Intern with Zero Experience
  • More Employment Tactics

My friend Nikhil sent this list my way:

  • TreeHouse
  • Trunk Club
  • Hashrocket
  • Dept 11
  • Kohactive
  • Bill Float
  • CME Internship
  • Tribune Company
  • FounderCard
  • buyouapp
  • Sleepy Giant
  • Enova
  • thoughtworks

I’ve added some. The ones above may or may not have openings in Chicago. I’m almost certain these have openings in Chicago:

  • Belly
  • Groupon
  • Brain Tree
  • Boomerang
  • National Collegiate Scouting Association
And, of course, awesome smaller development shops/apprenticeships:
  • 8th Light
  • DevMynd
  • 8 Bit Studios
  • Doejo
  • Pathfinder Software
  • TableXI
And design firms for the hell of it (this is quickly becoming a list for my own purposes):
  • someoddpilot
  • Manifest Digital
  • gravity tank
  • IDEO

And don’t forgot the job boards:

  • Built In Chicago
  • Chicago Ruby
  • 37 Signals
Don’t talk to recruiters unless they are also programmers! Recruiters that seem legit:
  • MirRoR Placement
  • The Sourcery
That was fuckin’ long. Hope it gets you some career.
Posted in Pretentious | Tagged career, chicago, job, web development | Leave a reply

My Father’s Hands

Posted on by kung
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Are cracking.

He comes home clenching his fists, unclenching, clenching, unclenching and then shakes them off. They have borne decades of twisting bulbs, cabling wires, fixing and lifting and placing and crimping. He massages the base of his thumb, first one, then the other, and gingerly peels off the tape – his nails are coming off from working at his temp job, and the tape keeps them attached – and sprawls out on the couch to watch TV. Some things have stayed the same.

My father’s hands have built walls and torn them down, subdued criminals and coddled babes. For nearly 30 years, his hands have held the roof over our heads. Now, they are working as hard as ever, but they are also older than they have ever been.

I drove up to the train-station one February night to pick him up and waited. The likeliness of his being there rated somewhere among the geese flying south for the winter and the sun rising tomorrow. He kept to his schedule. The sheer silver wall of the train trundled off with a huff and he emerged, as I had known he would, from between the train tracks and the building.

The first thing I noticed was his hands and the plastic grocery bags they held. For years, I had helped him throw out trash in bags like them. He shuffled toward the car, opened the back doors and placed the bags in them carefully, settling them with a pat. I readied a joke as he got in the car but he paused before shutting the passenger door and it died in my throat. He looked deep into the dashboard, his hand still on the door.

“I got laid off.” Then he looked at me to make sure, as though my hearing his words made them real. They were. They settled into my stomach like tossed trash. There was nowhere to put them so I just turned to the wheel and drove.

“If I had a choice,” he would often tell us, “I wouldn’t do anything! I would just watch TV. But I gotta work.” He commuted 3 hours a day to make sure we could attend school in good districts. He gladly worked overtime to pay for our college tuition. Thirty years of service at the Merchandise Mart had come to an end.

My father’s hands are tough, thick from work, and dexterous. But they are cracking.

I work so my father doesn’t have to.

Posted in Creative Writing, Recap, Thinking Out Loud | Tagged commitment, dad, dedication, faith, father, hands, love | Leave a reply

Copyediting *is* refactoring

Posted on by kung
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“What the fuck do you mean by that?”

I shook my hands at my computer in fury, hands clawed in frustration. I was copyediting an article for the International Game Developers’ Association mailing list and the first piece was riddled with run-ons and circumlocution. I’d had a better time editing a submission from a Japanese gentleman whose English, though stilted, was at least charmingly direct.

I considered the last two sentences of the essay carefully, trying to figure out how to reword them and yet capture all their nuances. The first lumbered in at hefty 46 words. Then I glanced over to the last sentence and almost jumped with excitement. In a concluding paragraph two sentences long, the author’s second sentence all but duplicated his first, but with more clarity. I gleefully obliterated the first sentence.

I settled back in my chair, pleased with the simplicity of the solution. It was half the length, captured the major points, and, without the muddle of the first sentence, the author’s analogy didn’t seem overbearing. In fact, it served quite well as a concluding sentence. I was drunk with self-satisfaction.

Then I thought about all the poor programmers forced to read my amateur code and I sobered up. In that moment I realized how much copyediting is truly like refactoring – and how similar code is to literature. Whether it’s code or prose, brevity and clarity are beautiful to behold. Whether code or prose, the author’s intention must match the outcome, and a certain amount of empathy must be had for its audience. And, whether code or prose, it can be a source of great insecurity or great hubris.

My impatience with the essay and its author now seemed rather small-minded. As an author of code, I had surely committed worse crimes and would no doubt do so again in the future. Humbled, I returned to my task: skinning punctuation, paring off words, and chopping whole paragraphs, knowing that others could just as easily dissect my code.

Posted in Creative Writing, Software Craftsmanship, Thinking Out Loud | Tagged Art, code, copyediting, craft, literature, programming, prose, refactoring | Leave a reply

Energy Management

Posted on by kung
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I write this after a long day at work, hammering away against problems that I know have been solved, and in more elegant ways. This is not unusual, just the end of the first week of my attempting to do so. I am learning a great deal at Aggrego and everyone is awesome. I do my best, but it is exhausting. I am learning about energy management and what persistence means.

I’m used to having 12 things going on at once, so it feels peculiar to note that most of my time is spent reading about programming, coding, or teaching other people to program. Even in my writing, programming has taken precedence (Rails for Canadians, heyo!). Besides the commute, I’m not complaining; it’s just unusual. This singular focus will change, to an extent, when I move into the city and I have the time and money to rehabilita