Things That Matter Most

Things That Matter Most

Developer Evangelism

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I absolutely love attending tech conferences. They’re great opportunities to reach out to friends in the community, make new connections, and catch the leading edge of what’s going on with the technology I use. Over the past several years, I’ve attended several conferences 1 and met hundreds of people. My favorites, though, are the tech representatives of sponsor communities who work directly with developers.

Developer evangelists are the representatives who come to the events, show off their companies’ technology, and are usually the first person we reach out to when there’s a problem. They’re on Twitter, linger in the conference Slack channel months after the event, and are both the first and last person many of us think about when we reflect on the event.

At one of my first events, I discovered TwilioQuest. This is an interactive, game-based tool to teach the Twilio API to new developers. It’s through this game that I’ve built chatbots, set up a forwarding service so I never have to list my real phone number on business cards, and first experimented programatically with WhatsApp. The Twilio API is great, and I love to use it as a solo developer.

As I continue to spread out through the enterprise space, though, I’ve started working with other APIs as well. Right now, I’m focused on better learning the RingCentral API as its product offering – particularly with machine learning integrations – is far more applicable to what I do these days. The RingCentral Game Changers program is a great way to learn the API – and earn prizes along the way! Like other organizations I’ve worked with, the developer evangelists from RingCentral are amazing. They’ve been at almost every conference I’ve seen over the past couple of years; they’re super friendly, approachable, and more than willing to both answer questions and work alongside you while you learn your way through the system.

Any tech organization that seeks to work with developers needs to hire at least one (but preferably several) developer evangelists. Work with the community. Partner with them. Teach them your system. Build a tool like TwilioQuest or or Game Changers to teach people along the way. It makes a world of difference!

Notes:

  1. I average 3 events a year, but for a time was attending at least an event each month! ↩

Context Managers in PHP

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These days, I spend far more time writing and reviewing code in Python than I do PHP. It’s been a refreshing change of pace, and it’s fun to learn the different patterns present in various programming languages.

If you haven’t taken the time to look around to see what other languages or frameworks are doing, I’d highly recommend it.

One of the nicer patterns in Python is the Context Manager. In Python, certain objects and functions can be wrapped in a with block used to provide specific context to the code running within it. Opening files, for example, becomes remarkably easy:

with open('output.txt', 'w') as f:
     f.write('Hello world!')

The beauty of this pattern is the automated resource cleanup. You don’t have to manage (and free) file pointers manually. You don’t have to initialize and disconnect a database session. The context manager handles things for you automatically.

A database context manager could manage creating and closing a connection to the database itself (or the connection pool it uses). Or it could be used to wrap a transaction and automatically commit the results at the end of the block. Either way, you don’t have to manage things on your own.

PHP doesn’t have a pattern like this natively. I think adding a with construct would be a huge value add for the language, but my lower-level coding skills are a bit too rusty to code up a quick proof of concept. Instead, I can abuse generators and loops to simulate similar functionality with an existing system.

The Python example above used the open() function to demonstrate context management as applied to files. We can do something similar in PHP with the following helper function:

function open($file, $mode = 'r')
{
    $f = fopen($file, $mode);
    yield $f;

    fclose($f);
}

Since this function is a generator, we can use it natively inside a foreach loop. The thing is, we only ever loop once, so foreach in this example is really a parallel to Python’s with.

foreach(open('output.txt', 'w') as $file) {
    fwrite($file, 'Hello, world!');
}

Since the generator only yields once, we only get a single item to iterate across in our foreach loop. The loop will also automatically return back to the generator after it iterates, which gives us the opportunity to clean up our context and scope.

It’s a bit more verbose than the Python, and we have to build our own context managers, but it’s a much cleaner way to ensure we’re cleaning up after ourselves.

Taking things a step further, assume we need to work with a PDO connection. We want to connect to the database, do some work within a transaction, and automatically commit the result. Doing so imperatively would look something like:

try {
    $dbh = new PDO($dsn, $user, $pass, $options);
} catch (Exception $e) {
    die("Unable to connect: " . $e->getMessage());
}

try {  
    $dbh->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
    $dbh->beginTransaction();
    $dbh->exec("insert into users (id, first, last) values (5, 'Eric', 'Mann')");
    $dbh->exec('insert into authors (id) values (5)');
    $dbh->commit();
} catch (Exception $e) {
    $dbh->rollBack();
    echo "Failed: " . $e->getMessage();
}

The same operation, leveraging a context manager pattern, would be far simpler:

function transaction()
{
    $dbh = new PDO($dsn, $user, $pass, $options);
    $dbh->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
    $dbh->beginTransaction();

    yield $dbh;

    try {
        $dbh->commit();
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        $dbh->rollBack();
    }
}

// Now use the transaction
foreach(transaction() as $dbh) {
    $dbh->exec("insert into users (id, first, last) values (5, 'Eric', 'Mann')");
    $dbh->exec('insert into authors (id) values (5)');
}

This is more complex than the first example. The gist is that the setup and teardown code for the database connection and the transaction happens outside of your business logic. The transaction() function here could be in a separate file or namespace from the rest of your code, which keeps the execution logic clean and removes the need to worry about setup/teardown at all.

Files, databases, remote connections to resources, locks, threads. These are all intensive operations that could benefit from the use of this pattern – and which do leverage this pattern in Python and other languages.

Is this a pattern that would make a difference in your code? It’s certainly different than the way many of us write PHP today. How else might you leverage this pattern? Would it make more sense if we extended the language with our own implementation of with?

Release Freeze is Coming

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I’d finished my turkey. Finished my pie. Then retreated to the other room with my laptop to finish my project.

Years ago while I was still freelancing, I fell behind on a project and had to lug my laptop along with me to the family reunion/feast on Thanksgiving. This meant I had to forgo games with my cousins, football in the yard, and catching up with relatives so I could work. It meant I also got paid, but I wasn’t billing anywhere near enough to justify abandoning family traditions for my computer.

Never. Work. During. Holidays.

WordPress 5.0

The next version of WordPress is dropping sometime soon. It was originally scheduled for earlier this week, but has been bumped to (maybe?) sometime next week. That’s great. It’s shaping up to be a great release, but there’s still work to be done.

As much as I love to ship code, it needs to be “done” before it goes out the door.

Given the rapid pace at which new bugs are being discovered, triaged, and patched, I’m not convinced we’re ready for a release. Let alone a release candidate. This is despite the latest release candidate having been scheduled yesterday … with several open bugs still tied to the official 5.0 release deadline.

For the record: a release candidate is intended to be a version of the software you think is done done and ready for final review before the release heads out the door. WordPress 5.0 is not yet in a “finished” state. A release candidate should be releasable and we’re not there yet.

At the time of this writing, there were still 20 issues on the WordPress 5.0 milestone despite the release candidate having shipped …

We’re still chasing after an arbitrary deadline, and while we won’t be shipping things during the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, we’ll still likely be shipping during one of the largest travel seasons. Bumping things back to December is no better as we start treading on various other major holidays – Hanukkah is Dec 2-10, Christmas on the 25th, New Years … and I’m likely forgetting others.

WordPress 5.0 is going to be great.

It should still be held back until January at the earliest.

Release Freeze

To that end, I’m going to step up and set an example.

While I will be working during December and, more than likely, writing code for new features and projects I will not ship any new feature or product releases in December.

This will give me time to focus on family and treat hobby coding as what it is – a hobby. It will help me balance “work” and life and regroup at the top of the new year with fun projects and releases. It also means anyone who relies on my code won’t have to rush to report bugs or patch conflicts or do anything to support my release until they’re also done with a family break and well established into the new year.

This release freeze will include not adding any new release hashes to DGXPCO.

If you’re using my plugin to ensure any updates to WordPress are vetted and cryptographically signed, my commitment to waiting until January to release an update means, regardless of when WordPress 5.0 drops, your site won’t see an update until January.

I’ll likely be taking some time during December to queue up a bunch of new stuff, so rest assured that work will continue and new releases will ship. But know that nothing I do or release will result in your having to lug your computer along to family events.

I learned from that mistake. Let’s work together to keep anyone else from having to live through it as well.

I Won’t be at ZendCon

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Next week kicks off the latest version of ZendCon in Las Vegas. Though I had, for a time, expected to be there … I won’t be. You should know why.

Speaking Habits

I really enjoy speaking in public. It’s been a regular part of my career for the past decade, and it gives me ample opportunity to connect with and learn from the communities I care so deeply about.

I tend to submit multiple talks to multiple events per year. On average, I think I’ve spoken at 4-5 conferences per year for the past 6 years – in one “season” I presented in some form at 14 events during the period of the year. This gives me a lot of time on stage, but even more time connection with members of the community.

It’s opened my eyes to quite a few things; one in particular is the lack of diversity (or at least the representation thereof) at many events. We have a wildly diverse community, but a fairly homogenous lineup of “experts” presenting on stage.

Representation matters. I got involved in tech because people I related to were standing on stage telling me that I could. I want everyone to have that opportunity. To have that experience. More often than not, this means I need to step aside and encourage someone else to stand in the limelight. That’s humbling, but perfectly OK with me.

And it’s why I won’t be in Vegas next week …

Acceptance

My original acceptance email was lost to the aether, but eventually the organizing team was able to make contact and confirmed that yes, I was invited to speak. They’d selected both a workshop on security and a shorter talk about promise-driven architecture in PHP.

ZendCon Twitter announcement of my attendance and presentations.
Original Twitter announcement that I’d be speaking.

I was ecstatic!

ZendCon is one of the larger PHP events every year. Better yet, it’s a super short flight from Portland – there aren’t very many high-profile events I can attend to spend time with my community in my neck of the woods. I immediately accepted the invitation and flagged my calendar so I could schedule my time away from the office.

But then … my conscience got to me.

Withdrawal

Don’t get me wrong, the speakers’ lineup for this event looks to bring in solid experts who will be presenting great content. However, it’s also the speakers’ lineup that led me to withdraw from the event.

At the time I was asked to speak, there were 37 other speakers listed on the website. This group of individuals consisted of:

  • 4 women
  • 2 (apparent) people of color

For those who don’t want to do the math, this meant the speakers group was 89% male and 95% white. Adding my name to that list did nothing to make those numbers better.

My presence as a speaker at ZendCon would have actively diminished the value of the event. I refuse to be another white, male face among a speaker list comprised overwhelmingly of white men. This is not reflective of our community, and my ignoring that feeling and speaking anyway would be a betrayal of that community.

I hold no animosity towards the organizers of or speakers at ZendCon. However, I will not participate in your event until you address this discouraging lack of representation.

Moving Forward

I’ve taken fairly strong stances towards many things. I will not participate in events that lack a code of conduct. I will not abide racists, sexists, ageists, ableists, or similar.

I will not participate in events that fail to address serious issues regarding diversity, representation, or inclusion in our community. It’s one thing to say “well, people didn’t apply …” It’s another thing entirely to actively encourage members of the community to engage.

Said another way – if members of particular subcommunities are not organically responding to your CfP in volumes that would make a diverse speakers’ panel easy, you have far deeper problems with your event than you realize and it’s likely something I will not engage with in the first place.

As I’ve said on many topics recently: we can do better. We must do better. Those to whom we leave our projects, businesses, industry, profession behind deserve that we do better. Everything we do today is paving the way for generations to come – I am committed to doing everything in my power to ensure that the future of our community recognizes, respects, and values diversity.

Right now, that means calling out an inclusivity issue and refusing to be a part of the event that’s done little to solve it. In my white, male, cisgendered privilege, one of the strongest statements I can make is to not participate. If that makes room for one more person who doesn’t reflect “me” to the world, it’s a net positive.

Mastodon: Social Media Made Social

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March 23, 2008 was the day my friend Sean introduced me to Twitter. It was a foreign concept to me. A website that would forward text messages from you to a group of friends – and forward any messages they sent back to you.

I was hooked. Sean had called the system “crack” and, honestly, it was addictive. I didn’t have a smart phone (or a reliable laptop), so getting content via text message was brilliant! I started following more and more people and, eventually, exhausted my limited capacity to pay attention to anything.

Early Twitter was revolutionary. It helped connect me to people I barely knew and tied me in to the communities I cared about most. Twitter was how I got started in the open source community. It’s how I learned about and interacted with WordPress. It’s how I built my blog. How I started making a name for myself in the world.

Sadly, Twitter today is not the thing that early Twitter was. It’s grown up, and I don’t like the thing it’s grown up to be.

Twitter Today

I follow less than 300 people on Twitter as a rule. It keeps my timeline manageable, and it forces me to carefully curate the content I consume. Despite that, Twitter (the company) has found a way to corrupt that stream of content. It’s disgusting.

I use “likes” to bookmark content for later consumption, research, or reply. Many of my friends do this, too. The thing is, Twitter started using “likes” as a form of passive promotion – and feeding content liked by my peers into my feed as if it had been explicitly promoted by them. 1

Twitter today fills my feed with ads – most of which are flagged as “promoted” content. Some of which are not flagged in any way. The other day, I noticed advertisements for Accenture Security in my timeline, all retweeted by “null.” Attempts to suss out the identity of “null” failed, as the Twitter API merely told me “usernames are unavailable.”

I later found out that “null” was Accenture Security itself! A few days later, I saw other content “shadow promoted” in my feed; content retweeted by accounts I do not follow was showing up in my feed along with content I wanted. This is … problematic at best. Nefarious at worst.

Most likely nefarious.

Then there’s the fact that Twitter the company “owns” the platform. They control the content that does or does not appear. They conduct shadow bans of users. They lock users’ accounts with or without reason. 2 They refuse to lock other accounts, then publicly defend their non-action despite evidence.

I joined Twitter because it connected me to the communities I care about. I’m now leaving Twitter because it’s actively worked to damage those communities.

Introducing Mastodon

Some time ago, the tech community started moving towards Mastodon – a federated social network with a similar interface and use case to Twitter. Unlike Twitter, however, it’s not controlled by a single entity.

Every Mastodon community is a unique installation of the software on some server or servers managed by that community. Individual users belong to one or another community and interact with other users on that same site – exactly like Twitter.

Unlike Twitter, these disparate Mastodon installations can all communicate with one another. A user on mastodon.technology can follow a user on mastodon.social from any other community. The servers handle transferring and copying content from one installation to another. All you need to keep track of is your own account and the list of users you follow.

Again, unlike Twitter, no one company or individual is in charge of when, how, or why accounts are locked or purged. It’s a community effort. And, because it’s a community effort, for-profit companies can’t inject themselves into the workflow with ad buys or any of the aforementioned potentially-nefarious activity I’ve seen on Twitter.

I explained it to a friend using the WordPress community as an illustration:

Twitter is to WordPress.com as Mastodon is to WordPress.org

One is a monolith run by a single, for-profit company. The other is a piece of software created and powered by the community that allows individuals to democratize the otherwise monolithic system.

I run my blog on WordPress to own my own content and avoid answering to anyone else. As of this week, I run my own Mastodon instance so I can own my own social network and avoid the malicious interference of corporations with their own interests.

My instance runs on AWS and has closed registration to prevent abuse. It’s invite-only at the moment and is home to a few of my close, personal friends. If you want to join, drop me a line and we’ll talk about it. Server costs are shouldered by the entire community, and we operate on a rule of personal respect. Oh, and no Nazis.

What Comes Next

My Twitter account will stay around. For a while.

I won’t be actively using it much as I’m trying incredibly hard to force myself to cut the “crack” Sean introduced me to out of my life. I will interact with these communities primarily through Mastodon.

If you DM me or @-message me on Twitter, I’ll see it. It just might take me a few days (or weeks) to respond. If you contact me through Mastodon I’ll be as responsive as I used to be. Remember, it’s becoming my primary tool.

Blog posts will still auto-publish tweets for now. I might still cross-post meaningful content at intervals. But, come 2019, I will archive and remove my Twitter account.

Said another way, I will be removing my Twitter account on December 31, 2018. All new content and interactions will take place on Mastodon.

I invite you to join me!

There are a lot of Mastodon communities out there. Find one that fits you and join the conversation. Together, we can own our content. Together, we can have engaging conversations. Together, we can build a network like Twitter used to be. Like Twitter should have been. The network and community we deserve.

I’m on Mastodon. Are you?

Notes:

  1. I know it’s fed my content into others’ feeds as well. I once “liked” a racist tweet by a former colleague so I could draft a cohesive response later … someone took my action to be agreement and endorsement of their position. My mistake using the tool in such a way. Twitter’s mistake in conflating my bookmarking of content with endorsement. ↩
  2. I’ve had my account locked once in the past year for no reason whatsoever. Twitter claimed I’d violated a rule, but refused to clarify which rule or how I violated it. ↩

System76 Oryx Pro – First Impressions

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The past few weeks have been exciting! I recently purchased the new Oryx Pro by System76 and have been absolutely loving the new machine. Here are some photos and first thoughts from my setup experience.

Unboxing

First and foremost, it took a bit longer for my machine to arrive than I’d expected. I was one of the early pre-orders for the new machine, so the build took a while and shipping added a few days after that. This all being said, I am ecstatic about the build quality and the level of support I received even before my laptop arrived!

System76 Shipping Box

Several people had tried to warn me away from the new machine given the laptop’s size. When I got the box from UPS, I was … a bit worried they were right. It was huge.

The shrink-wrapped laptop inside an oversized shipping box.

But the laptop itself wasn’t nearly as large as the box. I was intrigued by this innovative packaging (though I’m sure System76 aren’t the only ones who use it). The laptop was undamaged and dwarfed by the shipping box. All of that extra space ensured nothing would jar the machine in transit.

  • Side-by-side with my Mac at work.
  • The Oryx Pro is just a tiny bit larger.
  • The Oryx Pro is just a tiny bit thicker.
  • That display finish reduces both glare and reflection. Major wins for working remote!

I had shipped the machine to my office so I didn’t have to worry about it walking away from my front door had I shipped it home. This had the added benefit of allowing me to do some side-by-side comparisons with my existing 15″ Retina MBP.

Yes, the Oryx Pro is a bit larger than the MBP. But not by much. Considering how much more power it’s packing under the hood (my MBP was one of the last models not to feature a separate graphics card), I’m not surprised. I’m happy with the built-in 10-key on the keyboard, and the matte finish on the display reduces glare and reflection when I’m working in oddly-lit environments.

The Oryx Pro is also lighter than the Mac. It’s a noticeable difference.

Setup

It was a challenge, but I managed to delay actually booting the machine until I got home. The setup was … just like what I’d expect from a Linux machine.

Standard Linux boot screen.

I was impressed by how quickly pop_OS! booted – and the backlit gaming keyboard wasn’t a bad addition, either.

pop_OS! installation start screen.

I’ve installed various flavors of Linux on various machines over the years. The installation always feels a bit rough, but pop_OS! felt much more like the friendly Windows/Mac first-boot experience many consumers would recognize. It walked me through language settings, wireless configuration, then was off to the races on its own. Except for the initial scrolling-shell boot screen, it didn’t feel like a “hacker setting up Linux” installation.

pop_OS! home screen

Installation was remarkably fast and had me using the computer in less time than it took for me to write this intro post. I enjoy the super clean home screen look, but it did take me a second or two to figure out how to find the app launcher. The “Windows Key”/”Command Key” workflow we know and love from Windows/Mac has bled over to the Linux world with a “Launcher Key.” I’m OK with that.

First Thoughts

The first software I installed included a browser (Firefox), email client (Thunderbird), my dev IDEs (IntelliJ and friends), and Docker. I took things a few steps further and set up Python with Tensorflow so I can work on some hobby machine learning projects.

My only gripes with the machine are related to the above:

  • The graphics card is new enough, and the pop_OS! CUDA support modern enough that I had to downgrade a few things to get Tensorflow to even compile. This wasn’t too much of an issue, but makes following “just install X” tutorials a bit useless.
  • The system doesn’t seem to ship with any video decoders by default. I had to install a couple of my own in order to stream from Amazon (as DRM-protected media needs special support)
  • The battery life while using the NVIDIA graphics card is sub-par. It’s usable, sure, but this is more a “portable workstation” than a “keep it unplugged” laptop. On Intel graphics mode, the battery is super! Just need to keep in mind which mode you’re using, when.
  • The built-in fingerprint reader is disabled by default and requires some beta software to configure. I haven’t installed it yet – I’m lazy – but look forward to it. I just wish all of the hardware were immediately operable out of the box.

I also immediately customized the home and lock screen graphics. I like the “unleash your potential” slogan, but the solid, non-gradient color schemes make the machine feel … old. I’ve used Ubuntu (both server-side and on the desktop) for ages and the solid full screens of orange and blue just feel unpolished and unprofessional. This is definitely a polished and professional machine, so it needs a modern look.

I’ve installed at least one game (Minecraft) and the play experience is incredible! I’ll be setting up Steam later for even more playtime. Writing on the rig is fantastic. The integration with 1Password is a bit rough, but their new 1Password X extension for Firefox makes things work smoothly. I also configured my Yubikey for use as both a GPG/SSH smartcard and a U2F security token – I had to customize some system interfaces to get U2F support, but this is well-documented on Yubico’s website.

At the end of the day, almost every problem I had was solved by reminding myself “this is a Linux system, I know this” and donning my sysadmin hat to find the right file and install the right software. I absolutely love this new machine.

If you work in software or manage linux machines in the cloud, I’d encourage you to take a look at System76 for your next personal machine. It’s head and shoulders above the rest of the field. You won’t be disappointed.