So you might have noticed that I haven’t posted the 3rd part of the Toljari Cycle yet. It turns out that I am awful at estimating appropriate settings for laser cutters, and as such have tried cutting 2 boards in as many days without success (with restricted access to the cutter at NYC Resistor). So everything else is good to go, just that we’re going to have to wait until Monday to see how this all pans out. Stay tuned.

And so it ends. Hello, world.

The 2nd annual Devfest concluded… half a week ago, now. It was also my last, but nevermind that (you mean lounging around at student hackathons is NOT a viable post-academia career path??)?

You can already find out the whats and whens and wheres of Devfest, and perhaps the hows and whys if you tie up and interrogate enough ADI Committee members, so that’s not so interesting. What you ought to be interested in are thoughts, probably mine, about the event(s). I mean, that’s why you guys are here, right? For access to poorly filtered mind dumps and rambling incoherent monologues, and that’s before we even narrow it down from the internet at large. It’s either that or cats, so if you’re here for the other thing you should probably go somewhere else.

Overall, the quality definitely lifted from last year, mostly from knowledge gained from all the mistakes made last year. In particular, we got very good audience retention rates for lectures and workshops across the week with the introduction of focused theme nights, and having the Demofest on Saturday was a big win (overlap with Super Bowl: bad). That, and prizes were a nice addition, although it is a bit of a double-edged sword (partly mitigated by a relatively large spread of prizes).

As for mistakes, we of the ADI committee have an entire document dedicated to preserving our mistakes for future generations to squint at and ignore. So instead of musing on those, I’ll talk about some larger, architectural things that are offputting to myself.

First, Devfest is not scalable in it’s current form. In trying to include non-programmers (which we failed at, with notable exceptions) by extending the length out to a week, we get an event that excludes most everyone outside of the “Columbia Bubble”: contrast this with something like Pennapps, which almost consumes more than a weekend but makes it possible for students from across the upper-eastern seaboard to attend (disclaimer, I’ve never been to Pennapps. Sadface). If we want to grow past the impact we’ve been having, then we either need to convert more people to a Devfest-ready audience, or convert to a geographically scalable model (actually, the former is probably much more desirable, in terms of our mission. But I digress).

Second, it turns out that the ADI committee is too large. I used to think that we should fit whatever people we could into our (ADI’s) maw, but now I see firsthand what it means to have communication difficulties scale with the square of the group size. Now, I have nary a clue what many committee members are doing, or if they were even involved with our flagship event, and I would probably leave a person or two out of an enumeration of the committee members off the top of my head. What I would like is a metacortex a la Accelerando (which I’ll review soon) shared across the entire committee, but we know this isn’t going to be possible for a while, so I should get off my ass and make it happen.

It is going to be interesting if we take on new members: we probably hooked a few people’s interest with that Devfest stunt. If we keep the rigid subcommittee structure, we could use some augmentation in the less-populous subcommittees. However, I do have an idea that would put myself in more contact with more people across the committee, which is reorient the entire committee to more of a task-force driven model, where each event gets its own task force drawn out of the committee pool, probably combined with a blind system while playing to people’s strengths. On the other hand, I’m typing this while it’s 4am, so there’s a strong chance this is just crazy talk.

As for the projects, I guess the only one that really held my attention was Sid’s Scheduler (although the seating algorithm by Aditya and Zack was a close second), mostly because it somewhat jibes with my thoughts of how to kickstart my metacortex and make it useful from the start.

Oh, and my own project? I was (and still am) working on a replacement for IRC with regards to ADI: IRC is inherently stateless and persistent-identityless and an inheritor of old command traditions while lacking new ones (twitter tags and mentions come immediately to mind), which means that it’s essentially unusable for a loosely connected group that’s also pretty geographically synchronous (compared to standard companies that guarantee engagement for 8 hours a day). Add in difficult engagement with newbies, and you have a mess. Hence, something that fixed that, while also piling all sorts of smart digests/notifications on top. And when you decide to learn a new technology with it, then that seals it. However, I only got to the status quo of chat services over the span of Devfest, and didn’t end up presenting something boring. I do think this project is important, though, so I’ll probably get it to a version 1 at some point (MVP doesn’t really make sense here, since there are plenty of ready alternatives. They’re just not perfect).

But Devfest? It’s the little things: chilled applesauce, refactoring code, teaching someone the basics of python in 5 minutes, throwing k-means at a problem and calling it good.

And as the night is shot through with blue, I swear I’ll never do this again. But I always seem to come back.

A biting cold, pressing crowds, a barrage of sound, hints of snow filtering past enormous buildings, a touch of music, a place to lay a tired head.

Hello again, New York. I’m back.

Upon reflection, I realize I had planned to have a job tied up much sooner, and not still be planning out my life after school going into my last semester. Or, perhaps I have a skewed sense of when it makes sense to hire people. Usual employees don’t plan out 8 months in advance when they are going to switch jobs: it seems the rush to snatch up graduates has pushed recruiting efforts earlier and earlier into the semester, and I’ve been anchoring on that time frame. To reanchor: normal employees don’t usually plan to switch employers so many months in advance (maybe unless they’re a corporate spy), and startups (my employment of choice) don’t even need the stress of trying to recruit employees so many months into the future.

As is tradition, New Year, new resolutions. This year, I resolve to:

• Make some noise: I'll code whether or not I put it down as a resolution, so I'm not worried about that. However, getting myself off the ground as a computer musician is a much more variable prospect, and it may as well use a push, however small, from making it a formal resolution, declared in public.
• Read more books: I read plenty of things on the internet. However, there's lots of knowledge locked up in longer forms, like books or research papers, and the knowledge there tends to be deeper than your average post linked on Hacker News.
• Hack some Hardware: I'm part EE (and a physics major, to boot) but I don't hack nearly enough hardware compared to the amount of software hacking I do.

I, Nathan, do resolve to do these things. So be it.

I remember hiking through the woods, alone.

Which is somewhat surprising, because I was part of a big group of Boy Scouts, which started off hiking through the wilderness in single file. Then those faster pulled ahead, and the slower ones fell behind, and I eventually found myself trekking through quiet glades without a soul in sight (I recognize that this is not good hiking behavior, now; this was more than a few years ago). Not quiet fast enough to keep pace with the big boys, and too fast for the little ones.

I played an instrument, winding my way into lessons and then a youth orchestra, trying to master a calm instrument pitted against a capricious body (why? why do my shifts always miss the mark?…). And everywhere there were students of the art that weren’t suited to creating music, didn’t have the talent or the gumption to see it through. On the other hand, there were masters of the art that could whip out concertos with alarming speed. Not good enough to take it anywhere, not untalented enough to prevent the dreams.

Programming is my art, code the pond in which I swim. And here, too, I take a middling path: a console cowboy? No, just a kid spinning out the spare webapp. Not serving as the vanguard of humankind’s ability to grapple problems for the public at large, nor content with sitting in a cubicle, tapping out Visual Basic for a faceless corporation.

I was a middle child.

I guess this is what being a jack of all trades gets you; a fair shake at everything bringing a middle competency to the same. Maybe I should abandon this path, of trying to be human.

Or maybe I’ll try at it a bit longer. We have yet to see where this break will take me, and we’re not even a third of the way there yet.

We’ll see.

An approximation of a nightmare ends, and something new begins.

Now that I have the time and the equipment, let’s do something new:

• Cook ALL the things: cook at least one thing a day. My cooking-fu is not nearly strong enough to survive on my own, so I need to level up quickly before I find myself alone in a New York apartment, wondering what to eat.
• Write ALL the things: write at least one post a day. My writing-fu is not nearly strong enough to meet my own goals, so I'm going to force myself to pump out writing to get better, preferably not writing about what I'm doing that particular day, because it turns out my weekly "what I did this week" blog posts from summer are kind of boring.
• Code ALL the things: obvious goal is obvious
• Maybe write some music too? I need to keep learning, and I have these melodies and rhythms rattling around in my head, begging for release.

Basically, the theme of this winter break is building stuff and keeping up with friends: I know it’s overambitious, but it’s about time I didn’t have to do something, and instead do what I want to do, even if it’s only for less than a month.

But now, it’s time to play some games (not Minicraft). See you tomorrow.

Chilly night, possibly preceding a snowfall. Feeble jackets won’t keep the cold out for long.

My hackathon illness seems to have followed me from California: HackNY saw me talking with people rather than finishing something. And getting 4 hours of sleep, which is simultaneously tolerable and not.

Or more generally, it seems the pace of my hacking has fallen off, and other things shoulder in. The state of my writing in particular has fallen into disrepair, with a few posts sitting in the edit queue for a few months now.

Well, it’s more accurate to say that everything I’m doing is slowly starving for time. Time and will, but mostly time: there is only so much will to go around, and bioengineering isn’t good enough to fix that yet.

But really, the only reason I write here after 1.5 months of silence is the fact that missing an entire calendar month without blogging anything is… unacceptable. Even if nothing especially newsworthy happened to me this month, it would irk to be missing “October 2011” in that archive list. And so, I go. Hopefully next month holds more flash in store.

Oh god so much stuff to do.

Reprap: stuff is happening. It’s really coming together.

Family Reunion: hitch in the plans, currently on a short Family Reunion.

But yeah, so many irons in the fire. Workin’ in 2 more weeks for the summer, and then it’s quench time.