Taking the A-Train

Hi people! In these posts I intent to deliver personal experiences and perhaps useful information in a casual setting. Follow the stories or just scroll down for curated links to high quality content.

On the road for interviews

It’s been a couple of weeks since I resumed looking for job opportunities and everything has gone… better than expected! I’m currently involved in several interview processes, and the adventure has been enriching. I have a schedule of things to study to refresh my knowledge and be prepared for surprises. If you’re in a similar situation, I’d recommend you to go through:

• Reading the specification of your tools and languages of choices.
• Reading about modern architectures using the tools and languages you already know. Even if you think you know them, there is probably something you haven’t checked out.
• Get out of your comfort zone and learn new things!

What new things to learn? You could go deeper into science. Try practicing mathematical constructs, like regression analysis or category theory. You might as well check for material on human relationships. I’m not actually sure of what’s harder between maths and people. In any case, don’t fear the unknown! Allow yourself to be surprised by your ignorance, and jump into the void ♥︎

To this date, the most interesting interview I’ve recently had, had me taking a train to meet a super awesome team in person. I know and understand why traveling might be undesired, but going to see wonderful people face to face is a good change from having been a full-remote developer for so many years 👽😂

I actually have a fun story about route planning. Since I’ve been traveling quite a bit in the last couple of years, I got used to over-scheduling trips. In consequence, I did a very (very) detailed plan for our honeymoon 😂 at first my wife wasn’t sure it would be fun, but she trusted me and we had a wonderful time. In case you want to be weird too, you need to: go to Google Maps, make several routes, save the links on the URLs into a document, with descriptions, dates, terminal names, street names, full schedules and have that document offline in your phone so you can easily go through it. Take screenshots of the routes, try to find pictures of maps of the inside of the places you’ll be, have all of them in your phone’s gallery, and have a power bank 😵. Perhaps print them too? I didn’t do that, but you go and discover the inner weird you have within.

In case of adventure, just ignore these advices 😂

The Future of Cities

Florida is not known to be the best place for public transportation. Bus routes are just a couple in many cities, trains only cover a fraction of the whole state, bikes aren’t always that practical because of the many large streets which don’t even have a sidewalk, or where you’re expected to go with the main motor vehicle traffic even if the speed limit is about 35mph.

I personally don’t like moving around in cars, specially if there are long distances involved. Cars are risky, and against all logic when we try to think on ideal ways to help large amounts of people move around. Nowadays, being on the verge of having self-driven cars on the streets (even though Uber had a rough first day this week), I’m really curious on the reasons why our cities are how they are today, and what are the ways in which we could improve them. If you’re interested too, here is a compilation of informative videos:

• Why Trains Suck in America, by WendoverProductions. This video goes through the history of trains in the United States of America and how this private industry has been limiting the potential of public transportation. It shows that even if there have been attempts to improve this reality, the incentives are just too low to make it happen.
• The Future of Cities, by Oscar Boyson, is the narrative experience of going around the world observing cities, trying to understand how some of them have developed very efficient ways of functioning. The video itself lacks focus, but I enjoyed it as an observant. Never underestimate the power of appreciation!
• How highways wrecked American cities, by Vox. This short video actually goes through the historical reasons behind US highways, the business reasons for them to exist, how related are they to the cars industry, and how they could have been thought of as a solution to polemical social problems.
• Superblocks: How Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars, by Vox. This video talks about a project in Barcelona that is trying to make cities more walkable and have a more vibrant local market by limiting traffic to happen just outside of the perimeter of a specific neighborhood. The idea is theoretically effective and could be implemented in many places. This video helps by exposing how the precept that every person must have a car is an ideal that limits cities and their population.
• Urban Geography: Why We Live Where We Do, by WendoverProductions. This video starts by comparing city densities, to show how US cities are way less dense than the European counterparts. It continues by explaining the reasons why this happens by considering historical events, wealth concentration, how farms have contributed, as well as the evolution of public transportation. It finally mentions how in the last decades, city centers in the United States of America have been following the European pattern and have started to be revitalized by people wanting to be closer to city centers — where the business are.

For the last video, I’m able to confirm that the people I know in the US are indeed looking to work more closely to where their business happen. Cities seem to be getting more dense as a result. In growing cities, housing costs are increasing in a great measure per year, and for similar reasons we picked to move as close as we could to the city center where the family business resides.

But what about climate!

I know that last week I talked about how climate change is likely to happen, however in my previous topic I focused on living closer to city centers to help our life and business. One could guess we are not going to be able to have both things, right? It might be a bad idea to plan our future years near the tropical areas of the planet. But we could be able to save ourselves with technology. There are concurring efforts to do artificial alterations to the atmosphere so we can prevent the worst to happen, or perhaps even control our weathers so we can continue living as we’re used to. One of these efforts was highlighted last week, when a group of scientists from Harvard published a theoretical framework to recover our atmosphere by spraying anti-acids onto it. The unknown consequences could be devastating, but as we approach crisis, flipping those coins could be seen as a less and less worrisome factor.

Unfair Persistence

We all believe to some degree that social network profiles make a good representation of ourselves, but do they? There might be photos, or content in general, that are too old to be relevant. People do change, at least their behaviors can change between different life events. A decade ago, while I was still in high school, I believed I needed to show myself as a bad-ass metal guitar player. Nowadays, that idea sounds ridiculous.

In our modern world, there’s a strong demand for us to be consistent, to promote ourselves as players of a well defined role. But even if we try hard to live up to the expectations, we might sometimes let out some craziness that could drift people away. This behavior shouldn’t be punished, as it currently is in most of the well stablished social networks, social groups and even jobs. Fortunately for us, the population of mobile users seem to be pushing towards more ephemeral social networks, and with that, we might be entering into a more flexible and open society.

I’m leaving this topic with some related links:

• The CrashCourse videos on Identity will likely help you clear any doubt about how much we change over time: 1, 2, 3.
• Some links on the rising of self-destructing social media: By the American Historical Association, by TechCrunch and by MIT Technology Review.

Curated Content

Links

• My super awesome friend Štefan Alexander made a drumkit in JavaScript while making practices with the audio API for HTML5, see it live or read the code 🎶
• Cooking for Geeks, by Jeff Potter is in my wish list. This book might light some understanding to what makes cook so delicious. Besides that, it’s actually referenced within the book “What If?” By Randall Murdock (the XKCD guy). I think I wouldn’t have known about this book under any other circumstance 😂
• Should I keep working remotely or should I get an office job?. I’ve been a remote developer since I started calling myself a developer, but nothing is perfect, not people, nor opportunities. We do need to be able to endure difficult times, but after a while we might be missing the chance of be happier under other circumstances. I think I’m up for a change.
• Lucas Dohmen published a little essay about how Functional Programming and Object Oriented Programming shouldn’t be thought of as conflicting paradigms. It’s important to spread these ideas so we can all grow together, instead of being fighting uselessly. Especially now that most languages combine ideas of both worlds.
• The microservices essay by @martinfowler. It’s been two years since it appeared, but it’s worth the read. Microservices have a history in our field, and they solve a specific problem. They are not tools of all trade, and that’s perfectly good.

Streaming content

• This week we finished Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, available on Netflix. It’s a well produced rollercoaster of fun. Check it out if you want a high quality musical comedy.
• Rick And Morty’s new season is here! Well, it isn’t, but wouldn’t that be awesome? (It’s supposedly going to arrive on Mars 2017). At least we got to know some details about the upcoming release (see them here). I know at first sight some of the art and humor of this animated series can be far from enticing, but have patience with it and you might find yourself having a wonderful time.

Videos

• Visualizing the Riemann Zeta function and analytic continuation, by 3Blue1Brown. This video is perhaps yet another explanation of the infamous result of the sum of all the natural numbers, but I believe this is the most comprehensive approach. I just actually published a Spanish translation of that video. If you like it, don’t forget to heart it :)

Music

I’ll get full hipster and share a couple of my non-classical influences:

• Bang on a Can is a bunch of brilliant musicians experimenting with music. If you want to have new musical experiences, please follow them. They have content on most of the major social networks (SoundCloud, YouTube, Spotify), but if you can break the piggy bank and buy some of their releases, you will be getting more bang for the buck. These guys also founded Cantaloupe Music. For specific compositions, I would recommend Reeling, and Cheating, lying and stealing.
• Aisha Orazbayeva is an absolute genius with the violin. She will put you on a trip right into many real life feelings, and the beauty they possess. Here’s a pair of relaxing yet interesting examples: Fragment and Harbor Light.

Hey! This is my second post in a row 😱 (plus an extra bit of math this week). I know it can be demotivating to talk about stuff alone, so — YouTube style — please like this post or comment down below, and I’ll make sure you have more stuff to read the next week ✌️😄. Thanks for the time!