2016-10-11

Switching to React - First Impressions

In earlier posts I wrote that I planned to use Handlebars as my templating engine for the CYOAG project. Things happened since then that caused me to change directions towards ReactJS. I'll take a moment here to say that I've had no contact with or sponsorship from the Handlebars or React teams. This is all just my opinion, formulated based on personal experience working with these technologies on the side-project level. Incidentally, though I'm enjoying working with React, this is notwithstanding my opinion of Facebook, who we have to thank for React. So there's some food for thought.

So why did I make the switch?

I realized Handlebars was more challenging to learn than a templating system needs to be. I didn't find community support to be as extensive or helpful as I'd like. Handlebars also hasn't enjoyed industry adoption as extensively as React, so from a career growth aspect React seemed a better choice. Ironically, the reason I chose Handlebars originally was because we used it on a project at work. But after talking to the lead dev on that project, I learned it wasn't selected for its quality or utility, but due to circumstance. Finally, having built my first working Handlebars prototype, it just didn't feel right. There's no remedy for that.

So, React. It's already big in the web dev scene, has been for some time, and continues to grow. Whether it'll become a longstanding mainstay in industry remains to be seen, but signs point to yes.

I'm surprised to say it, but React was easier to pick up than Handlebars. It surprises me because React has lots of new ideas and syntax you have to learn, while Handlebars has relatively few and advertises itself as a "no frustration" templating system; which, I can attest, is patently false. React, likewise, advertises itself as "painless," also a lie. I'm being a little harsh here, but point being that I find React less painful than Handlebars, despite the fact that neither is a walk in the park.

To be fair, Handlebars lends itself better to smaller projects. The infrastructure and planning required to use it is lighter. To get Hello World up in React, you have to do more work, download more libraries, and learn more technology: JSX, props, state, rendering, components and their lifecycles, etc. In Handlebars, you slap up a template and you're off to the races (relatively-ish). Build processes are another story. I found precompilation to be roughly equivalent in difficulty from Handlebars to React. The documentation is better for React, though, due to superior community support. More community support means more flavors of help, and a greater likelihood one of them will match your style of learning.

The appeal of React is reusability, structure, and organization. From a mile-high perspective, let's say you're the app lead for Facebook, and you want a UI component to let people "Like" things. All kinds of things; wall posts, images, events, shared links, comments, everything. With React and some proper planning, you can make a single component displaying a "Like" link, that dynamically hooks up to whatever needs to be "Like"d. The component itself doesn't care what it belongs to. You can plug-and-play it wherever. One downside to this, as mentioned above, is that the initial development of this component is relatively heavy. Once you have it built, though, you can reuse it dozens, hundreds, millions of times, at very little dev cost.

Another downside is that you have to be conscious of your component structure when building larger applications. CYOAG is not a large application, but if I didn't think about component structure in advance - and thus plan out how state was to managed and communicated among components - I'd find myself having a real bad time. The complexity of component interactions isn't hard to wrap your head around, but once you've built them, that complexity makes maintenance and modification a chore, and a considerable risk.

Part of this is because state and props "cascade" (my term) from parent components to child components when you build an application The React Way. So if anything changes along the cascade path, you have to make sure you account for it at every step and in every handler. Of course, things change as we go, this is life; but I think we can all agree it's to our advantage to minimize this, and with React, best practices in design amplify this risk/advantage relationship.

In short, React encourages better software engineering principles. Other technologies allow you to start hacking out a solution before thinking it through, which can lead to other kinds of headaches down the road.

Non-technical Example

We can use my (thus far incomplete) React component design doc for CYOAG as an example for this. I won't bother quoting the doc here, you can read it if you like. In short, the application state is best managed at the top level. One easy reason to explain for this is that if you allow children to manage state, you'll quickly find yourself making more calls in integration, and having a hard time communicating among components. So we manage the state at the top level, and (in short) provide getters and setters for particular parts of the state to children through props.

When building your components, it's helpful to know what state you'll need to be passing down to children from the ancestral point of view; and what props to expect to receive from the descendent's point of view; and what functions will be needed in order to manage and pass these around. And later, if changes need to be made, you need to keep this "flow" of state in mind to preserve it.

These are my early days with React and my opinions and understanding will undoubtedly develop as I develop applications using React. Once I start using this code "in production" on CYOAG, I'll have plenty more to say, I'm sure.

Thanks for reading!
- Steven Kitzes

2016-10-03

Circular Dependency in Relational Databases

This post is going to have an element of storytelling to it, because while some elementary understanding of SQL will be required, the Cliff's Notes seem to tell it all:

You probably want to avoid circular dependencies in relational databases.

These Cliff's Notes are incomplete, a little vague, a bit of an oversimplification, and up for debate besides. Some RDBMs (relational database managers) handle circular dependency better than others, and some problem domains necessitate circular dependency. Take, for example, table representations of nodes in a graph that allows cyclical paths.

However, not all problems necessitate circular dependency, and some RDBMs prohibit, or aren't capable of handling, circular dependencies. In these cases, we need to design around the limitations of our RDBM, and in any case, it's good to be aware of circular dependencies, just on principle. The purpose of this post is thus to share my own early explorations of database design, and to describe how I broke out of the circular dependency trap on a small side project.

Some project context will help here. I've been working on a passion project for a little while now. The high level idea is to build a "Create Your Own Adventure" game, where all content is user-generated, and the best story line branches rise to the top through a voting system like that used by Reddit and StackOverflow. An important early part of this project involved designing a decent database schema to build the rest of the project on top of.

You may wonder why I chose an RDB (relational database) for this in the first place, rather than an alternative such as some flavor of NoSQL. I plan to host this on the AWS (Amazon Web Services) free tier, so I can learn more about AWS. Unfortunately, at the time I started this project, the AWS free tier didn't offer any option other than RBDs. Incidentally, an RDB is almost certainly best for this type of application due to the interrelationships of different types of data, but that's a topic for another time.

So, how did a circular dependency surface in my design?

One feature I want this app to have is position persistence. When a visitor is reading the story, I want to remember where they left off, so they can conveniently come back and resume reading the story at a later date. My plan was to give the Users table a column called Current, to track a given user's position in the story. In other words, a story node would appear as a foreign key in the Users table.

The Nodes table was designed with an Author column to record who had authored a given story node. This was to support a variety of features, such as prohibiting authors from voting on their own posts, and allowing an author to edit their contributions, while protecting those posts from being edited by others. Unfortunately, you'll notice this means a user (author) is now a foreign key in the Nodes table.

Uh oh.

Now I have a node ID as a foreign key in the Users table, and a user ID as a foreign key in the Nodes table. This is a circular dependency of sorts, and is a block in SQL. You'll find some argument as to whether circular dependencies are fundamentally bad practice, or whether SQL just suffers some unhappy limitations. After all, what's conceptually wrong with tracking current node in the Users table, and author in the Nodes table? There's no conflict in authority over the data, since a user doesn't own its current node in this read-only context, it's just a position marker. To be fair, SQL doesn't understand our motivations, and to argue that an RDBM's designers could have done more toward enabling us to convey these human intuitions to the machine is too philosophical for this post.

Whatever the reason and our opinion of it, MySQL forbids this kind of interdependency. The solution I came to was to create a simple table called Positions, with a compound primary key consisting of two foreign keys, one being a user ID from the Users table, the other being a node ID from the Nodes table. Despite some apparent duplication of information, this works for the simple reason that the Positions table relies on Users and Nodes, but neither Users nor Nodes relies on Positions. I'll try to illustrate the improvement in design without opening Visio:

An arrow (->) implies dependency

Before:

Users -> Nodes
Nodes -> Users

As you can see, this yields Users -> Nodes -> Users, and so on, ad infinitum. This is bad.

After:

Nodes -> Users
Positions -> Users
Positions -> Nodes

We can combine two of these lines together to yield:

Positions -> Nodes -> Users
Positions -> Users

but you can see that this doesn't introduce any loops, or circular dependencies, as my first design did.

Thanks for reading!
- Steven Kitzes

2016-08-29

Alexa Skill Hackathon Takeaways

This past weekend we had a hackathon at work, focused on developing Skills for the (relatively) new Amazon Echo. The purpose of the hackathon was to expose us to a technology we hadn't used before and explore what use cases might exist that we could leverage either internally, or for customers. We had a great time and built some really fun Skills along the way to learning the Alexa Skill development tools. We found there were pros and cons, as with anything, and I personally took away a few key lessons from my short time working with the Echo.

I want to take a moment here to point out that I wasn't paid or encouraged by anyone, anyone at all, to share my experience on this blog. Amazon, to my knowledge, had no part in this hackathon; it was an internal event we did just for fun and exploration. I just want to solidify what I learned by revisiting it in a writeup. So let's talk about the Echo!

When you buy the Amazon Echo, you are buying a very nice piece of hardware that connects you to a service named Alexa, which is where the magic happens. You make your voice request, and then Alexa uses Skills (voice applications) to do something useful or fun in response to your request. First of all, I want to say that Alexa is a lot of fun to work with from a creative product standpoint. Working with Alexa's voice API provides a vast landscape of opportunities to be creative in ways that feel fresh and new. Alexa is also a lot of fun to use from the consumer standpoint, for me at least. I've heard many people say they don't know what they would do with an Echo if they had one, but to someone with that complaint, I'd say the cliche that there's an app for that holds true here.

Alexa has tons of capabilities out of the box, covering everything from checking the weather, to listening to podcasts, news, and music, to telling jokes, to making purchases on Amazon through your account. The system can integrate with home automation tools, and work in concert with apps on your phone to manage shopping lists, to-do lists, and other handy utility features. Additional Skills can be obtained from the community through the Skill Store to cover all kinds of additional fun and useful scenarios. Alexa has lots to offer.

In case this is reading too much like an advertisement, don't worry. There's plenty for Amazon to work out with the Echo before I would ever buy one at full price. That being the first of my concerns: I find it to be unjustifiably expensive. You're buying a speaker, with a hardcore microphone array, connected to the web via wi-fi; that's really all the hardware you get, and it comes in just shy of $200. It is a very nice enclosure, and the speaker itself is exemplary; but without internet, this thing is a brick. The Echo does no work of its own locally. All services are performed by Alexa on Amazon's side, and piped back to you over the web. I can go to OK Google, or Siri, or even Cortana for a lot of what Alexa can provide; so $180 feels brutal for the sole perk of having your voice assistant always-on. A big downside of the Echo, compared with voice services provided by Google, Apple, and even Microsoft, is that the Echo is immobile, whereas your phone is always with you. Adding to the cost, some of the handy features (music providers being a prominent one) require subscription fees; and the buy-by-voice feature, while convenient, can feel a little dangerous since Alexa doesn't recognize which voice is yours. (Buying each other socks without permission became a running gag throughout the hackathon.)

Along those lines, Alexa doesn't always understand voice input clearly, so you sometimes find yourself repeating commands to get her to hear you right. I find Google's voice recognition to be a tad more reliable. Alexa also does poorly if you try to give her a command in a room with other people speaking. She can't differentiate among voices, and this is very frustrating at times. Granted, this is an emerging technology, and natural language and voice recognition are very challenging problems for computers to handle, but from a practical, daily usage standpoint, this is often a frustrating shortcoming.

By far, though, my biggest gripe about working with Alexa is as a developer. Every technology has its idiosyncrasies, but I found learning the Alexa Skill developer tools to be a particularly harrowing experience. First of all, you need to use Amazon Lambda to host your Skills. Amazon Lambda is a cool idea, but developing Alexa Skills thereon is a new kind of challenge, and not in any particularly fulfilling kind of way. The tools for building Skills are a little clunky and the documentation is practically non-existent. They have some nice features, like the ability to test your Skills without needing to go through the time-consuming process of conversing with Alexa repeatedly. However, in order to deploy Alexa skills, you need to access two separate dashboards; the Skill itself, the Lambda logic, is deployed on AWS Lambda through the AWS console, but you have to separately log into the Amazon Developer Console to access Alexa configurations and tools to define things like user interactions, and recognized user phrases. Where is this documented? Great question.

The feedback from the system when something goes wrong is minimal. You'll get messages like "Syntax error." That's it. What kind of syntax error? Where? Your only option is to lint the code yourself and hope that any of your mistakes can be found that way, or be so good at programming that you never make typos or logic errors. There's not much available in terms of debugging help. By its nature, Amazon Lambda also faces the limitation of weak session and state management. This is one reason why some of us at the hackathon resorted to using Alexa as a forwarding service, simply to translate voice into API calls to a remote server (EC2 in this case) that hosted more complex service implementations outside of Amazon Lambda.

As mentioned earlier, the documentation for this set of developer tools is sorely lacking. The official Amazon guide points to a blog post from 4 months ago that is not only incomplete, but also already out of date, with screenshots and instructions that are both flat-out incorrect. It was a headache trial-and-erroring our way through the process of developing our first Alexa Skill and finding third-party tutorials for Skill development. We were able to pull it off, but it was a lot harder than it needed to be. It could have been an hour long process if the documentation had been half-way complete or at least up-to-date. I would expect sketchy documentation from open source projects made by volunteers; not from a top tech company, on a service they profit from, that other developers are meant to use as part of a business model. Maybe I expect too much, but fair or not, that is my expectation of a for-profit system provided by a sixty-five billion dollar tech company.

It really doesn't feel like Amazon is bringing their A-game to the Alexa developer community. If these issues cropped up during an open beta or in a staging environment, that would be one thing, but this is a public-facing, monetized platform. One or two of the features are sub-labeled as beta as of this writing, but the features work fine; the process and interface design are just abysmal, and the documentation is being provided by home-use amateurs because Amazon isn't providing it. I personally find that to be a weak effort on Amazon's part.

Overall, I do like the Echo and Alexa, and I would like to have one if the price were more reasonable. I find it fun and useful. I would also be excited at the opportunity to do more development on Alexa Skills now that I know the process, but it was needlessly painful to learn the ropes compared with other platforms.

Thanks for reading!
- Steven Kitzes

2016-08-07

Precompiled Handlebars - A Ridiculously Clear Tutorial

This is a step-by-step tutorial on getting introductory, hello-world level, precompiled Handlebars up and running.

Just so you know, if you're already fluent in NPM or otherwise want to skip ahead, you can jump to the good stuff

It's my first time writing a tutorial like this. I plan to take you through it very slowly, but very clearly, so that even beginners can understand if they have some programming experience, but little to no web or templating experience. If this style of tutorial proves helpful to people, I'll follow up with a second tutorial on more in-depth Handlebars features. I encourage you to send any feedback that will improve this tutorial. Now let's dive in!

For those who read my recent post about a "real" side project, I know I promised a more detailed explanation so I'll tack it on at the end here. ;)

First, some context. What you're reading was born partly of frustration. I had a needlessly difficult time figuring this out for myself, and I want it to be easier for others in the future. Therefore, today's post has become three things: a precompiled Handlebars primer, a learning experience post-mortem, and an experiment in writing effective tutorials for beginners, by recent beginners. Handlebars isn't hard to learn, the concepts are approachable; but existing tutorials, StackOverflow Q&As, even the Handlebars team's own documentation assume you already know web dev and templating, so their tutorials give condensed steps for experts to hit the ground running.

Not much help for a beginner like myself. Therefore...

Handlebars for Beginners, by a Beginner

I'm going to take you through the steps I had to take to get this project moving, from the perspective of someone with beginner-level knowledge of web development, and zero knowledge of templating. I won't leave any of the steps out or assume you know any of them, and I'll try to cover the minutiae and details that many tutorials gloss over, either because they figure you already know them, or because it doesn't even occur to them that you might not know them. I also don't like tutorials that speak only to Windows users when I'm stuck on Unix for work, or vice versa, so I'll try to cover these cross-pollinations as well.

The only thing I won't explain in detail is installing NPM, the Node Package Manager. You'll need to have that running in order to precompile. It is relatively easy to get NPM going, here are installers/binaries for Windows, Mac, and even Linux.

Just so you know, the installer is intended to automatically add NPM to your PATH variable, but in some cases an error may prevent that. I'm tempted to describe the fix for this, but due to the number of operating systems out there, it's beyond the scope of this tutorial. Just be aware of this if you install NPM and it doesn't work, and it's not immediately obvious why.

Brass Tacks

First, you must install Handlebars for Node.js via NPM. From the command line (any directory is fine), issue the following command. Note for Windows users: think of the '$' symbol as your 'C:\>' or other command line prompt.

$ npm install -g handlebars

Now you should be able to run Handlebars on the command line from any directory. To test, try typing the following, and you should be rewarded with your installed Handlebars version, in my case, 4.0.5:

$ handlebars -v

4.0.5

That is all the infrastructure you need. Now I'll take you through the process of building a few files that you'll need. This is one place in particular I find that other tutorials fail to be clear, so I will do my best. First of all, I'll assume for clarity everything is taking place in the same directory, so make yourself a directory and keep all files there. I encourage you to improve your infrastructure and employ best practices, but later. First let's make sure we understand this technology.

We will end up with a total of 4 files:

  1. We will make a Handlebars temmplate file, with the .handlebars file extension (not strictly required, but consider it so for the purposes of this tutorial)
  2. We will make an HTML file to inject our template into
  3. We will download or link to the Handlebars library provided by the Handlebars team
  4. The Handlebars precompiler will output a JavaScript file which performs our template injection (details to follow, don't get intimidated yet if this sounds foreign or complex)

Some folks will likely argue the best practice is to link in your code to an outside source for your Handlebars library (file 3). That may be so, but to make your life easier, I recommend downloading it and keeping a copy locally for the purposes of this tutorial. You can get it here. The version I got is called handlebars-v4.0.5.js.

File 4 is output by the precompiler, so we won't worry about that yet. Let's start by making a very, very simple template (file 1), to inject into our HTML file (file 2). What you need to know for now, is that a Handlebars template is basically made up of a mixture of raw HTML, and special Handlebars tags (discussed later). What that means, is that we can get started with an extremely simple example template containing just HTML, to make sure we have a grasp on the concepts, and that we're doing it right. So here's file 1, in all its young glory:

hello.handlebars File 1
  1. <p>Hello, world!<p>

Yup, that's it for file 1. Precompiling is very simple and straightforward, assuming Handlebars is installed properly. What you need to know for now, is that Handlebars takes .handlebars files and turns them into .js files. So let's use Handlebars to turn hello.handlebars (file 1) into hello.js (file 4):

$ handlebars hello.handlebars -f hello.js

... or more generically ...

$ handlebars <input-file>.handlebars -f <output-file>.js

Note that the Handlebars precompiler doesn't give you any real feedback on the command line. Just check that you got a .js file out of the deal, and that it contains some JavaScript in there, including your HTML. At this point, if all has gone well, we should have the following files, all in the same directory:

  • File 1: hello.handlebars Handlebars template file
  • File 2: not done yet
  • File 3: handlebars-v4.0.5.js or version of your choice
  • File 4: hello.js output from file 1

So all we need to do now is put together a very simple HTML file into which our template will be injected. Note that in this case, I'll be including some JavaScript in my HTML file. Normally, it may be wise to separate your JS from your HTML files, but for simplicity I'll keep it all together for this tutorial. Let's start with a very basic HTML file and build our way up from there. I'll highlight changes at each following step in green, and describe the changes.

hello.html File 2
  1. <html>
  2.   <head>
  3.     <meta charset='UTF-8'>
  4.     <title>Handlebars Tutorial</title>
  5.   </head>
  6.   <body>
  7.     <div id='content'></div>
  8.   </body>
  9. </html>

If you're new to HTML, most of this should still be approachable. Just note the <meta> tag, which tells the browser what character encoding the HTML file uses; and the initially empty <div> tag, which warrants more explanation (but for now, don't overthink it; it's a generic container for part of a page's content).

Nothing really special going on here, if you load this in a browser now, it'll just be a blank page. Just take note that <div id='content'><> is the place in this HTML that I have chosen to inject my Handlebars template, which is why I gave it an ID.

Now I'm going to add in some vanilla JavaScript, whose job is singular: tell the browser not to try doing anything with any scripts, until all of them are loaded. (If you want to do this using jQuery or other more advanced methods, I encourage it, but the point of this exercise is to be simple and to-the-point, so for now, we'll stay vanilla.)

hello.html File 2
  1. <html>
  2.   <head>
  3.     <meta charset='UTF-8'>
  4.     <title>Handlebars Tutorial</title>
  5.   </head>
  6.   <body>
  7.     <div id='content'></div>
  8.     <script type='text/javascript'>
  9.       function init() {
  10.         // This only runs after the whole page is loaded
  11.       }
  12.       window.addEventListener('load', init, false);
  13.     </script>
  14.   </body>
  15. </html>

Simple enough to follow, I think. Now, let's add in the scripts themselves, that the browser will load before running our init() function.

hello.html File 2
  1. <html>
  2.   <head>
  3.     <meta charset='UTF-8'>
  4.     <title>Handlebars Tutorial</title>
  5.   </head>
  6.   <body>
  7.     <div id='content'></div>
  8.     <script type='text/javascript' src='handlebars-v4.0.5.js'>
  9.     </script>
  10.     <script type='text/javascript' src='hello.js'>
  11.     </script>
  12.     <script type='text/javascript'>
  13.       function init() {
  14.       }
  15.       window.addEventListener('load', init, false);
  16.     </script>
  17.   </body>
  18. </html>

Magic Happens

We're going to inject our template with just 3 lines of code. You can do it in fewer, but for clarity I'm spreading this over more lines. I'll explain this process line by line following the new code below:

hello.html File 2
  1. <html>
  2.   <head>
  3.     <meta charset='UTF-8'>
  4.     <title>Handlebars Tutorial</title>
  5.   </head>
  6.   <body>
  7.     <div id='content'></div>
  8.     <script type='text/javascript' src='handlebars-v4.0.5.js'>
  9.     </script>
  10.     <script type='text/javascript' src='hello.js'>
  11.     </script>
  12.     <script type='text/javascript'>
  13.       function init() {
  14.         var target = document.getElementById('content');
  15.         var inject = Handlebars.templates['hello'];
  16.         target.innerHTML = inject();
  17.       }
  18.       window.addEventListener('load', init, false);
  19.     </script>
  20.   </body>
  21. </html>

Line 15: This is the easy part. We are just creating a JS variable to represent the $lt;div> we're going to inject our template into.

Line 16 Here we are grabbing our template, and putting it in a variable called inject. There are a few things here worth knowing. First of all, the reason we have access to the template at all, is because we included the hello.js file we precompiled with Handlebars on the command line (file 4). We have access to the Handlebars variable because it is provided by handlebars-v4.0.5.js, file 3, which we also included. As a convenience, Handlebars allows us to refer to our precompiled script by file name, without needing the extension (e.g. 'hello' instead of 'hello.js'). The last thing that is critical to understand, is that inject is now a function, not a string or other variable type. You must therefore use it as a function, and that function returns the precompiled template as a string.

Line 17: Now that we have our target, and our injection function, we can inject our template into the target. We call our template function, and assign it to the innerHTML property of the target. Done! If all has gone well, you should be able to load your HTML and see your simple HTML template loaded into an otherwise blank page: "Hello, world!"

Celebrate

This write-up has given me a great opportunity to review what I learned in teaching myself Handlebars, and I hope this tutorial, written from the perspective of a web templating beginner, for other beginners, was helpful.

Thanks for reading!
- Steven Kitzes


CYOAG

I promised to describe my side project, so I'll take just a moment to do that. (It'll be a quick moment, because that's all I have to spare at this particular moment, but I want to fulfill my promise of sharing my idea.)

In short, it's a user-generated Choose Your Own Adventure game. Many of us enjoyed these books as kids. The basic idea for those of you who are unfamiliar, is that you read a chapter, the book lets you make a decision for what the characters in the story should do, and you flip to different pages based on your choice and get to see different outcomes. I basically want to create a web-based version of this, where users not only get to see different outcomes based on their choices, but also get to contribute their own branches and paths to the story.

Of course, with users able to generate content, you could potentially have dozens of possible paths out from any given chapter (or 'node' or 'snippet', as I call them). In order to combat the potentially overwhelming number of options available, I plan to implement a voting system, similar to the ones used by Reddit or StackOverflow (but without the complexity of decay, though I may add that in later if needed... not likely). Basically, all paths will be available to any user by request, if they want to read and vote on them; but by default, the user will only be shown the top four most popular paths.

That's all I can give you for now, not because I don't want to share more, but due to time restraints... gotta jet! I've cobbled together a first-pass functional requirements doc for this project, so if you want to learn more, it's public on my project's GitHub page. You can check out all the gory details here!

2016-07-31

My First "Real" Side Project

Greetings, old friend, and well met, new acquaintance! You have stumbled across my dev blog at a fortuitous moment in my career. You can think of this as a reboot in many ways.

And I promise, if you read (or skip to the bottom of) this characteristically long-winded post, you'll find that it does, matter of fact, have a purpose.

At the most shallow level, I'm rebooting my blog. The old posts, I'm leaving them up for posterity. Some seem to have helped people, and I'm glad for that, despite a level of quality I'm not, in retrospect, happy with. Oh, well, as they say; oh, well.

At a deeper dive, I'm finding that I have rebooted myself. What manner of melodrama is this? Part of my self-improvement effort being a closer attention to a need for conciseness, I'll describe it thusly: I recently finished my Master's in Comp Sci. I'm psyched about it, in spite of myself, it's been a very trying road. I also recently landed my first real full time job as a software developer, with a fantastic company that I plan to talk about later, pending a discussion with leadership on the propriety of divulging various levels of trade secrets. In short, during the respite I gave myself between graduation and the first day of work, I realized that a day without career development, in some form or another, be it software development, reading, practicing, ideating, etc, was a day that felt in some sense hollow.

Note to self: 'in short'? Who am I kidding? Concision will never feature in this blog. I'm just going to accept that that is 'okay,' and that this is a place not only for sharing knowledge, but also for free expression. So I'll try and just enjoy myself a little writing these up, and hopefully the flavor of my style will stick on the back of your throat in a not wholly unpleasant way.

I digress. Point is, in my spare time, I've come to feel some kind of learning toward a better career as a software developer is not only fulfilling and rewarding professionally (and hopefully financially), but also personally. I find that I enjoy writing software. I prefer fun software, such as a near-complete, but technically in-progress web tool that I started on, and which I shall shamelessly plug posthaste: How Many Drinks In That Drink? I put this little static web app together to help beer snobs track how much alcohol they're really drinking.

This was an incredibly rewarding project for me. Not only because the end result was useful to me personally as a craft beer fan. Not only because others will hopefully find it helpful, possibly in deeply meaningful ways. Not only because it is taking shape better than expected. But also more importantly because I learned a ton about a new software domain and new technologies in building it. This last point was, I have found in-spite-of-myself, probably the most rewarding part of building the tool and the part that has stuck with me the most.

To place this narrative in temporal context, How Many Drinks was made over winter break, basically January of 2016, so yeah, fair to say it's been a while since I worked on a side project; but the experience and the feeling it gave me stuck, and it's been gnawing at me ever since, however gently. Grad school resumed that spring term, delaying my ability to spend time on personal projects, then my month off between school and work was packed, I say packed with travel, and then I fell into this new job, and I fell hard.

Alright, now what manner of melodrama is this? Well, I won't name names because I haven't run the idea of connecting my employer to myself in this blog past my boss just yet; but I will say it's a software consultancy firm with a highly unusual, enthusiastic, and very genuine focus on growing talent internally, rather than burning it out and tossing it on the midden to make space for the next unfortunate soul. I won't get into too many details, but the basic idea is that they take care o' ya in a big way, protecting you from overwork, and making opportunities for you to grow both personally and professionally without taking your life away. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, I'm not exaggerating in the least when I tell you with honest, genuinely unsarcastic, dead-straight, and seriously intense eye contact that I made it to the final level of on-site interviews at Google, and the interview at my current employer was equally challenging, yet more grueling. Rewards are earned, sometimes, I guess.

That felt a little tangential, but it has a point to it in the emphasis on career development without employee burnout. The basic policy is to keep client work to a sensible level, close to or even occasionally below 40 hours a week, to make space over the span of a reasonable work week schedule to spend on career development. Meaning, you get to work on building technical, business, networking, and other skills on the clock; and it's not only allowed, it's encouraged. I'm trying to think of a more melodramatically eloquent way to put this last, most salient point, but what it basically comes down to is that I'm absolutely psyched to fall into such an opportunity just at the same time I'm learning to really, truly love learning and career development in what I unfortunately have to refer to as a synergistic way. (I know, we all hate the word synergy because it has been so badly misused by middle management for so many years, but this particular synergy is both real, and startlingly pleasant.)

You will soon realize that all of the above has been an elaborate way of leading you to an announcement that I am starting a new project; not only a side project, but a project of passion. I will be blogging about it regularly, discussing what I've learned, what I've achieved, and any pitfalls I've encountered; I set this explicitly for myself as a task. I'll be posting weekly, as the plan has it, both to motivate myself to get work done on it more quickly and also to practice blogging more quickly, frequently, and effectively (and yes, even concisely ... starting next post, as always).

The project itself, which I'll describe in next week's post, is already under way, and it's quite exciting and fun to be making progress on it already (in a sense you may not agree with calling 'progress,' but we'll get to that). In any case, hope to have you along for the ride, and even if you don't care to read up on my trials and tribulations, I hope you'll enjoy the result when it's done!

Thanks for reading!
- Steven Kitzes