coding – A Geeky Gulati

Inventory of Projects

I’ve been meaning, for a while, to put together a spreadsheet of the (software) projects I’ve worked on in my life so far. The sheer number of them is staggering.

The thought was I could put in enough columns so that .. an interesting taxonomy could emerge.

Its also one of those things where, I never thought the list would get so large that I couldn’t remember them, but.. here I am. I guess 26 years of paid experience will do that to a person.

I Started It

I tried to do that for a bit – here’s what I got:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19ivowzqQJiPrMVk8rAfHbZ-cf_G6tqmQAzqYIW1sc00/edit#gid=0

The columns I have so far are:

Name
Year(s) – turns out some of them extended over multiple years.
Employed by + Project For – working at igNew, my project was for a client other than my employer. But before that, these were the same.
Implementation Details – this was pretty hard, to figure out what columns to use:

Language – Its mostly C#, but if I go back far enough there’s some Java, Perl, Clipper, etc as well.
UI – technologies related to UI stuff
DB Backend – technologies related to database stuff
Host Platforms – I was trying to figure out how to say Asp.Net MVC vs a Windows Service.
Additional Technologies – I think maybe EF + Dapper need to move to DB column

Management Details

SCM used.. this feels like an unnecessary column, who would ever want this info?
Unit Testing / Mock framework – if sorted by start year, can see how this becomes important
Integration Testing – as I think this is super important, putting it out in its own column.
CI/Build strategy – or lack of it – how we went about running the project

Project Management Details

Roles

Engineer = “thought about how to do it” + “did it”
Lead Engineer = “mostly all me”
Project Manger = “updating the Burndown” + “Communicating estimates + schedule”
Ops Support = “things broke in Prod. Figure it out.”

Slices – If I worked with a team of people, then these are the bits that I worked on.
Proud Of – this is probably the best part of looking back.
Coworkers + Contacts – I’m going to have to go look up many names for Contacts.

What Now?

There are so many projects! I put down 11 tonight, I think the list of paid things is.. probably in the 40’s? 1-3 per year, depending on role, and then add in another 30-40 of fun things?

I guess I could make a list of all the projects I could think of first .. vertically .. going through each Job.

I could (and will!) also add in all the for-fun projects that I’ve done.

But Why?

Simply put, this is to battle Imposter syndrome. Also, in my job, I’m undergoing a role shift – where I’m taking on more Ops and Maintenance type work – it feels like a good time to look back at my career as a software developer and take some stock of what I’ve accomplished so far.

The other part of it is, … my resume. I don’t need one at the moment, but every time people talk about keeping a resume updated … the level of detail involved … gives me anxiety. So the thought is, if I have this spreadsheet out there – my resume can become more of “who I am” and “what I care about” and shove all the detail crap to this spreadsheet.

Updates to twit-sort

I am currently on vacation! In Florida! We drove!

I took the opportunity (in the early mornings / late nights when everybody else is asleep) to work on some code that I wanted to update – I don’t normally get time to do this. Its my twitter-reading app. Which only I use. But hey, that’s fine, I haven’t tried to market it.

Changes

Change #1: I kept seeing “…” with truncated tweets. A little research led to some interesting stuff — basically following retweets to get down to the original tweet to get the text from there.

Along the way I tried to build up a “who quoted who” breadcrumb:

The code is a bit wonky:

However, its confusing – many people (or clients) retweet without actually having a retweet link. There’s “quoting” which is different .. eh. whatever. If I’m given it via the API, passing it through, figure it out later.

Change #2: I surfaced the like count and favorite count, as well as a link per tweet to open the tweet in its own window (as hosted by twitter).

Complications

I have the code in github, which is public, and I don’t want my access keys and tokens and stuff checked in there. So, I had to fudge around a bit – this was my solution:

I created a branch with all the passwords and stuff, and worked from there.
Once it was done, I either did a rebase (with cherry picking) or a direct cherry pick to move commits over to master, which I pushed up.

Granted I could use my azure visual studio hosted git, but I wanted the code to be visible / usable. So.. if anybody has other ideas of how to do this better, please let me know.

What Next (with this project)

Not much else I can do with this in its current codebase. I could certainly make it prettier, but .. eh, that’s not me.

If I had unlimited time, I’d rewrite it – make it so it did all its fetching and filtering and sorting locally (in javascript). I could get a LOT fancier then – things like pulling out hashtags into groups, etc. Maybe adding some sentiment analysis things.

However, I have so many other projects on the burner.. this one won’t make it for a while. My need has been solved, so there’s very itch here to scratch.

The url of the site: http://twit-sort.azurewebsites.net

The code: https://github.com/sunnywiz/twit-sort

Goodbye to old code and dreams of immeasurable wealth

In the Beginning

I would always hear about people who wrote simple pieces of software, who were in the right spot, at the right time, and their stuff got used and they became famous, and.. perhaps even rich.

Every time I heard such a story, my baby tyrant would say: “I want that! Lets DO that!”

To which my Fuddy-grownup would say, “Honey, you probably won’t become famous, and it probably won’t work out. Are you sure?”

And the Couch-Buddy would say, “Ah, too much work. Lets read some more facebook.”

I Made a Decision

I started coding this thing that I thought would be a good start of things. It was an app to make reading twitter easier – less context switches. It was also an experiment in using Azure, Visual Studio Online, and a little bit in starting bootstrap from scratch.

I got it working.

I started the code 7/26/2015, and by 9/22/2015 I was ready for the big time. This was mostly an hour or two during a workweek in the evenings, and maybe an hour or two on a Sunday morning.

I had a logo created, bought a bootstrap style, I had added what I thought were the key features I needed, I rebranded it, and I bought a domain name.

I stopped.

And then life got complicated, and I let it sit – costing me monthly $, btw. $17 per month to keep it hosted at the cheapest level I could get away with, AND have a domain name. I used it for a while.

Eventually, I got cheap, and work distributed a full MSDN license to me with an azure subscription, so I nuked it.

I’m letting it go.

Very recently, I put it back online under my MSDN license – You can use it here:

http://twit-sort.azurewebsites.net/

I’ve cleaned up the code that I deployed, removed all the passwordly bits from it, and uploaded it to github. Here’s the guts of it:

https://github.com/sunnywiz/twit-sort/blob/master/azuremvcapp1/Controllers/ReadController.cs

Letting go the dreams as well

I would have liked to have seen this thing become better.

I could have done a face lift on the front page. Too many words. Replace with screenshots of the configuration page and the read page.
I could have made it more colorful. Orange and Blue! You can see this in the icon a bit.
I could have made it front-end js only, with no server side talking to twitter, using local-storage for persistence
I could have added “click hashtag or username” to create additional groupings on the fly. delete groupings on the fly as well.

The good news is, all these dreams live on, in a future project – that works with Facebook, instead of Twitter

Conclusion

Letting this one go to make psychic room for other things that interest me. May it bless others. If you write a good one like this I’ll use it.

Code for doing Explosions

Playing FortressCraft Evolved, I played with explosives. I was not particularly happy with how the explosives were handled – and I was on vacation, and I had no internet access, so my creativity got into my brain and I tried writing code that would handle explosions better.

I shoved the code here: https://github.com/sunnywiz/explosion2d

Here’s the basics of what I did:

I did this in 2D instead of 3D because easier to Console.WriteLine()
I created a TwoDSpace<T> so I could store an arbitrarily large number of T’s in a 2-D plane
I created a function which mapped out, given a center 0,0, what the distances were to each X,Y.

I kept distances as squares, so I didn’t have to do square roots.
I did it with an initial max-radius, but the final version in my head would jit-figure out what it needs and save the resulting calculations in a static – it only needs to calculate it once. Bigger explosion might need to calculate some more.

That function can then call to a lambda, giving it:

the X,Y of the point that is being visited by the explosion
an array of parent points for the explosion and the ratios by which to weight them

The caller then says, “circle visit an explosion starting from here”, and keeps track of the force per X,Y that is being experienced. The caller is responsible for all the code that says “Ores are hard, but dirt is soft”, for example, or “Diamond cannot be damaged by the explosion”
I think its pretty fast. O(r^2), which given its a 2D explosion in 2D, is expected.

Fun Fun stuff. I miss the days of mud coding. You just don’t need to do explosions like these in real-world paid programming.