Morels of Morals

Q: What is the emotion underwriting moral superiority?

A: (unconfirmed)
Contempt
Fear
Pleasure

Q: From where does moral superiority stem?

A: (proposed) belief in right and wrong, and the application of this principle onto all interactions, human, fowl, or beast.

Q: Whom does moral superiority affect?

A: (proposed, unconfirmed) the affectations are extended to all who come in contact with a moral spirit but the most lasting damage is wrought upon he whom holds these beliefs. An careless moral superiorist stands at risk of the perceived power of morality becoming the most pleasurable of all sensations

Q: How does moral superiority form?

A: (conjecture, purely) genetics, cultural training, infectious other moralists.

Q: Why did moral superiority not die with religion?

A: (divinely guessed) although religion served as the house of rules (morals) that provided an ample frame or structure for a culture of moral superiority to develop, the emotional underpinning of superiority, once established, survives long beyond the life of its divine host, much as a morel in the forest flourishes on the tree, in life and in death.

Weekend wandering

Justifiable incension over the dominance of MtoF being the 'default' transgender trope.

"It's just not as big a deal for women" is horseshit.

It's still just all male identity politics.

Gratitude that RM didn't succeed at building the Battery Park bridge.

Adulthood as avoiding entering a book store because I have a literal stack of prior commitments waiting for me at home.

Bad habits of following the bike path, even while meanderingly afoot.

General ideas about teaching programming : 'apps' vs. 'programs'

Apps are hard.  I wrote my first Appery.io app today*.  (It was a version of the homework we ask job candidates at work to complete.)

From a certain perspective, writing an app is rather easy.  You throw up some buttons, wire the data to the views, and ship it.  That wasn't so bad, right?  But the amount of knowledge you need to write an app is a bit daunting.

First, you need an idea.  You need to be able to clearly articulate the audience, the scope of what the app will and won't do.  Second, there's the layout and navigation flow of the app.  A poorly designed navigation experience can kill an application.  You need coding know-how.  What the classes are, how the different underlying APIs work together to make the views happen.  To say nothing of the necessary pre-reqs of understanding programming primitives, like variables, control flow, language syntax.  Finally, unless you're writing a local app, you need to know how the internet works.  What a RESTful API service is, how HTTP works with headers and params.  How to get an API key, how to authenticate.

Appery's a low entry point for building a very simple app, and maybe for copying tutorials you could get something a bit more dynamic, but the seams between knowing a very little to knowing pretty much everything there is to know about writing an app are close together and a bit rougher than you'd hope for a tool this simple.  There's a lot of places where you fail over into JavaScript, or where you need to know what a web proxy is (so that you're can get around making Cross Domain Requests**.)  Writing a mobile app in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript requires a surprising amount of web domain, app, and just plain networking knowledge.

That's asking a lot for new developers.  Admittedly, maybe the target market isn't new developers, it's companies that don't have the developers/time/money/inclination to create a native Android/iOS/Windows phone from scratch for each of the platforms.  It's significantly easier to throw an experienced dev at Appery and get a workable mobile app than to create a native app from scratch.  (Disclaimer: In no way is this an endorsement of Appery's product -- if anything, this experience has only deepened my belief that there's no substitute for a natively written app experience.)

But for a new dev audience (one without an experienced dev who can blunt corners and abstract away the rest of the considerable amount of knowledge that you need to write a native app), Appery seems like a terrifying and frustrating experience.  (Though if you know web development, well, then you know web development).

What would be better for young devs to spend a weekend doing?  Other than learning wire framing and writing very leakily abstracted apps?  They should learn programming.  They should write programs, not apps.  It could use quite a bit of set up to get going, but I really liked the challenge at the Hackette's Spotify Hackathon they held last year (https://github.com/pbos/spotify-hockey).  It basically involves writing a hockey team algorithm.  It's a good problem for a weekend project because a) the end product isn't about presenting your ideas (you just load up the different hockey teams and let them have a tournament style show down), b) it'd involve a non-trivial amount of programming, and c) it's kind of fun.

Or maybe that's a bit too advanced for completely new programmers.  Something like Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) or even some format for writing text adventure games could be fun.  Basically, make it less about building a product, and more about writing a small program, with a code editor and a runtime environment.

/rant


* I work professionally as an Android app developer.

** If you clicked on this link, you just proved my point about needing massive amounts of previous knowledge.  Bonus points to you if you now get why CORS is a problem.  You're probably in the minority.

Silicone Valley - Episode 1

I watched the first episode of Silicon Valley tonight with some other engineers from work.  Overall it was flat.  I've been convinced to give it another episode, but here's somethings that blew.

- None of the characters seemed to be anything bigger than caricatures of roles in tech.  I wanted to like at least one of the developers.  Or be impressed by them.  Or feel like I had met one of them in person.  Not a single one of the 10 or so characters mapped to a single developer or person that I know.  Or would want to know.  Their caricature of the super nerdy, very brilliant software developer that starts a website by himself wasn't like any person that I've ever met.  I know a lot of people in software.  Albeit, successful people in software.  I've also met a lot of people not in software.  All in all, they came across as inflated depictions of stereotypes about what people who work in tech and at start ups are like.

- None of the tech dialog really seemed to have any real backing to it.  It is not possible to have proprietary algorithms in a website that's posted on Github.  If it's on Github, it's open sourced.  Open source software means that anyone can read or inspect the code that you have written.  By definition, software that is freely published is not proprietary.

- There wasn't a single girl developer.  The only women that appear in the entire show are wearing skirts and high heels.  Both of the females with speaking roles use their few lines to croon about a male character.  Or offer one of them a ride home.  Snore.  You know what this show needs?  It could use a female foil.  Or two.  Instead of having five geeky men that fit the 'asian, east asian, pony tailed, tall white guy, weird bearded' stereotype, why not throw in a couple of women into the mix?  There's episodes, hell even story arcs of entertainment and character sub plots to explore.

Dear writers of Silicon Valley, I sense that you need some suggestions.  Here's some ideas for future Silicon Valley episodes:
- An entire episode built around a text editor civil war
- Have the main character struggle with an unexpected homoerotic attraction to his angel investor
- A whole episode about Twitter gender flame wars
- An episode dedicated to winning the top spot on some Hacker Daily website that in the end proves to have been manipulated the whole time (via an authenticity bug in the core security layer) by an AI project being run out of North Korea
- A Halloween episode featuring trolls
- Replace (or augment) some of the *very* bland core developers with multiple female developers characters.  The hyper femme who paints her nails in five colors of neon, and won't stop spamming the internal list serve with cat gifs.  The punk rebel coder girl who hacked her way into the Pentagon at age eleven and now spends her free time contributing to the Linux file system and talking about unmentionable body piercings.  The uber nerd girl that no one wants to sit next to because she has bad breath and a slew of Final Fantasy stickers adorning her laptop.  The hyper code bunny who does nothing but check in software bugs and check out the brogrammers at the code conferences.  Sure, maybe none of these females exist in real life.  To be fair, neither do any of the other characters in the show.