Large walls of text such as these are just dying to be visualized, so I threw our commit messages into an online tag cloud generator. It’s funny that all three of us use different words – “fix”, “fixed”, and “fixing”, though note that similar words are grouped into the most common word.

Astrid.com server:

Astrid.com for Android:

Astrid.com for iPhone:

It’s easy to generate one yourself! If you use git, you can output a file with only commit messages:

$ git log --pretty=format:%s > messages.txt

You can then send that file to a service like tagcrowd.com

Finally, some of our notable commit messages:

• MIGRATION FINALLY WORKS
• dsjkfhdsfhdjakgfdk;lafj da;f jdslkfjdsa l;fdsa
• russian is really long
• deuling windows
• over 9000
• well that was a mess
• cat of the day
• Add some rescuage if some is needed
• You’re no child of mine! You’re deleted!

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The Bridges Transition Model

I’ve been reading a fantastic book called Transitions, by William Bridges. As I’ve been going, I made a list of all of the transitions in my life in the past year:

• Became a vegetarian
• Ended a relationship
• Moved twice
• Gained and lost three roommates
• Entered my “late twenties”
• Changed from renting to being a landlord at work
• Went to seven different churches
• Passed through mild depression
• Lived at home for the first time in ten years
• Became more proactive with my family
• Started thinking about the next five years
• Acquired a pet

Looking over that list, I’m starting to realize just how turbulent things have been recently. Transitions suggests that while there isn’t a universal life development schedule, people tend to go through a shift around age 30 as what they were doing before seems “not quite right”. That sounds pretty accurate, given what I know about myself and my peers.

Each transition begins with an ending (see the diagram). Endings are often sad, even when transitions are good, like getting married or moving into a new home. Endings can also trigger emotions felt during previous (possibly unresolved) endings, which can make them seem even scarier than they ought to be. The book, however, stresses that endings should be processed before new beginnings, which I guess makes sense.

From there, the neutral zone, which sounds bad, is actually awesome. Once you break from your old ways and worldview, there is an opportunity to re-see the world and life from a different perspective. Things you used to do automatically can be re-imagined because you’ve branched away from the familiar path. When I moved this past year, I realized that I didn’t want to own furniture anymore – even things I’d gotten attached to over the years. The move, painful as it was, gave me an opportunity to imagine a life without a lot of furniture, which is somehow really appealing to me.

I’m still working through the book (and my transitions), but without it, I don’t think I would have sat down and thought about the things that have happened and what they mean for my life. If you feel like everything is crazy, it just might be because there’s a lot that’s changing in your life. If that’s the case, I’d highly recommend picking up Transitions and giving it a read.

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Gandalf is a handsome critter, posing for the camera when he feels like it.

You’re cooking? Don’t forget me!

You don’t mind if I use this as a couch…

Brr… it’s cold tonight

The most interesting cat in the world

He also likes to play – with toys, yarn, and people.

Home-made cat toy, courtesy of Ellen

Furry mice also work

Ellen & a ball of yarn

My favorite toy… is DA BIRD

He also loves the outdoors – and in SF, it’s beautiful almost every day!

Staring at birds

Looking for birds

Wishing I was outside with the birds

Like all kitties, he gets tired and needs to rest sometimes.

Scratching and napping

Sharing a bed with cat-dad

Found a nice place to sleep!

Sometimes, my bed is a little too small

And finally, my favorite picture (just to prove that he is a wizard, after all):

Hope you enjoyed this peek into the life of Mr. Gandalf – which one was your favorite? Also, share/like to support my obsessive cat-picture-taking habit and unlock Gandalf’s secret powers.

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What architects do with blocks is move them around furiously – a process that others might call “making decisions”. For example, how does this block talk to this other block? How can I organize my blocks? Should I make new blocks, or try to increase the abilities of my existing blocks?

Central to all of this is the ability to quickly and accurately visualize the consequences of decisions – which is why the primary enemy of architectural decision-making seems to be overload. When there are too many parts, when changing something has too many implications, or when there are difficult tradeoffs to be managed, it’s possible to lose the ability to make architectural decisions with confidence.

In particular, when systems are poorly abstracted, we tend to pay attention to the details (because we have to), leading to increased cognitive complexity. This manifests itself in slower and more difficult decisions, as things just don’t “feel right” with the system.

Here’s this crazy thing – the way you simplify an architecture is to add more things… but better things. Add layers with well-defined interfaces. Make rules. Group small things into bigger things. When at the point of overwhelm, instead of trying to solve the problem at hand, it may be worthwhile to step back and work on your mental model.

While sometimes you can get rid of things, in my experience, a lot of project requirements are handed down from “on high”. At best, you can try to make a case for getting rid of old, crufty things – which is why I’m always asking my cofounder if we can kill this feature or that. (I’m sorry, Astrid users, it’s true)

At the end of the day, as an architect, your job is to make decisions and produce blueprints that others (or yourself) can work with. Make better decisions by creating better abstractions – zoom in when you need to, but always keep the big picture in mind.

Need a hand? Some patterns that help simplify things include MVC, dependency injection or service locator pattern, and facade pattern. Design patterns, good times.

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As I’ve brought the idea of themed days into my life, I can name several reasons why I’ve come to love them:

• Focus: let’s face it – there’s more than one thing that’s important in life. Whether it’s family, work, chores, hobbies, or learning, most everyone has a few things going on simultaneously. Having themed days makes sure that you spend at least 14% of your time focused on the areas that you want to get better in.
• Defining Success: what makes a day successful? For me, it’s when I get a lot done. Having themed days, though, lets me derive joy from improving on the other aspects of my life, including writing, relationships, and managing my team.
• Easy to Remember: everyone knows that they’re supposed to balance work, life, fitness, spirituality, and all of that good stuff, but it’s hard to follow through. In contrast, it’s so easy to remember to make themed days happen. If habits need regularity to be formed, and they probably do, themed days provide a weekly rhythm that allows change to occur.

Not convinced yet? Let me share about each of the days that I’ve instituted, and why I appreciate each of them.

Analog Sunday

I’ll start with my favorite. Analog Sunday has the following guidelines:

• No Internet
• No email or SMS (phone calls are ok)
• Spend some time journalling

The goal of this day, as you can probably guess, is to clear my head of distractions, rest, and take stock of how things are going. I don’t know about you guys, but if I don’t force myself to journal, I pretty much never do. Plus, CNN seems to think it’s pretty helpful to have a “stop day” to stay sane.

Meetings Monday

As someone who manages a team, and is responsible for their success, I’ve learned that meetings are important. As someone who still has a lot of coding responsibilities, and has been a software engineer all of my professional life, I still dislike meetings and think they’re the devil. (If this resonates with you, Paul Graham has a great essay on this dichotomy). My solution is to try to pile all meetings onto a single day – Monday. It saves the rest of my week to be productive, while on Mondays, I define success by the number and quality of my meetings. It’s been really helpful.

Fun Friday

I’m still experimenting with this, but the idea behind this day is to work on projects that you find personally fun, nurture the joy of the creative process, and try some things that may not always be at the top of the queue. For you programmers, that means try to fix your high priority bugs Tuesday through Thursday

Social Saturday

Yes, I need some structure to make sure that I don’t stay in a cave all week. I blame the startup life.

So far (three weeks), it’s been a lot of fun to engage in these days, and I hope they become a long-term part of my life. What do you think? What are some themed days that would be helpful for you?

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STI allows your code to be much cleaner, removes those nasty case statements (see below), and gives you logical groupings for related functionality. As our code base has grown, and functionality is repurposed or expanded, I have since found myself refactoring classes to split them into subclasses as appropriate.

For example, Astrid used to only support premium accounts via Recurly. When we added the ability to perform in-app purchasing through various app stores, we ended up adding methods like “verify_android_token” and “verify_apple_token” to the PremiumAccount class. Even worse, when we had to write common functionality like a cancel method, it would look something like this:

def cancel!
  if type == :recurly
    # do stuff
  elsif type == :android
    # do stuff
  elsif type == :apple
    # do stuff
  end
end

After refactoring, each subclass of PremiumAccount has its own cancel implementation, and thanks to the magic of Single Table Inheritance, we always get the right type of class when we need to perform these operations. Unfortunately, like many things Rails, STI is not that well documented and isn’t exactly discoverable. Lucky for you, other people have done the hard work of figuring things out.

My mantra when it comes to code quality is to have smaller, conceptually grouped units – fewer files in each folder, fewer methods in a class, and shorter methods. STI lets you group related classes into a subfolder, separates out related functionality, and eliminates proliferation of if statements such as the one above. Tools like these are powerful weapons in the war we fight against code attrition.

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We used to use delayed_job, but for us, processing jobs became really slow. First, each worker has to try to lock a job. Then, it has to check if it obtained the job lock, and then it has to do the work, and then it has to delete the row. Last week, we reached a point where more jobs were getting added to the queue than finishing – which means that even if we had cleared our queue of old jobs, our jobs table would still have continued to grow unbounded.

Time for some intervention in the form of Resque, the hot redis-based queuing system from Github.

We’re obviously not using our old infrastructure anymore, but I would estimate that our job throughput increased at least 5x after the switch. We also get much better transparency into our jobs via sexy UI. What’s not to like?

Step 1: install resque

(We are using Rails 3.2 on Ruby 1.9)

We added resque, resque_mailer, and resque_unit (in the test group) to our Gemfile. If you don’t have redis installed, you’ll need to do that in your development and production environments as well. On Mac or Linux, homebrew / apt / yum should do the trick.

While you’re here, you should check out the Github pages for resque, resque_mailer, and resque_unit.

Step 2: migrate your jobs to resque

For the most part, this is straight forward – convert the perform method to a class method, and convert the invocation (e.g. Delayed::Job.enqueue C2DMJob.new(notifications) becomes Resque.enqueue C2DMJob, notifications).

SUPER IMPORTANT!

Resque serializes your parameters to JSON, not YAML. For us, this had two major implications:

• You can’t pass ActiveRecord models directly – you need to change your jobs to take ids as parameters instead of models
• Symbol keys will become strings (e.g. { :cat => "Mittens" } becomes { "cat" => "Mittens" }). If you check for hash[:cat], this will break.

As an added bonus, you should add a named queue to each of your jobs. We (and Github) use a named-priority queue system (critical, high, medium, low), and specify to our resque workers to work them in that order.

Step 3: convert your ActionMailers

Add “include Resque::Mailer” at the top of your mailers. Find all of your old references to the Delayed::Job mailer invocation (Notifications::delay.signup_email) and change them to Resque::Mailer style of invocation. We did this with regular expressions and sed. You may also want to change your non-delayed mail invocations to use the deliver! method. Then, change all of your ActionMailer methods to use ids instead of models (see above).

Step 4: convert your unit tests

Of course, this depends on how you wrote your tests, but we had to change from:

assert_difference "Delayed::Job.count" do
  # do some stuff
end
 
Delayed::Worker.new.work_off(1)

to

Resque.reset!
 
# do some stuff
assert_queued MyAwesomeJob
 
Resque.run!

We also had to add the following line to an initializer to have Resque::Mailer not suppress emails in the test environment (since the resque_unit gem handles the mocking of redis):

Resque::Mailer.excluded_environments = []

Step 5: misc stuff

There were a few loose ends for us to tie up. We had to create a simple resque.rake file that loaded the Rails environment. There were a few delay calls that weren’t emails and weren’t using background jobs that we had to convert to Resque-style jobs. Finally, we installed the resque web interface, which is awesome.

That’s it, other than the actual deployment of resque workers to your production environment. I trust that if you’ve come this far, that should not be too much of a chore.

The bottom line

Are you still using Delayed::Job in a large production environment? You shouldn’t be. Go replace it

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Autobiography in 5 Short Chapters by Portia Nelson:

I

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost. I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in; it’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street.

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I know, who wants to be SSH-ing into multiple servers, but there are times when it’s necessary, and often you aren’t going to be able to run the same exact shell script on each server.

Real world examples:

You want to check for stale server processes

You can use cssh to log into all of your app servers. Then, use ps aux | grep "PROCESSNAME" to find all of the running instances of PROCESSNAME. Instead of killing them all, you can visually look across all of your terminals for processes that have been around for too long and are clearly frozen, and then kill them manually.

You want to change your server hostname scheme

Each server’s hostname has to be different, so what better way to pull this off than to have every server open in a different window for you to visually make sure you didn’t make a mistake.

You want to find out which servers aren’t configured properly

Similar to the case above, you can print out / grep configuration files to find which servers aren’t configured correctly. Then, you can close the windows for the properly configured servers and mass-configure your broken servers all together at once.

You want to make a configuration change

What did you used to do? Make changes to a configuration file, and then copy it across to each server? Sometimes the files have to be owned by root, and I hope you can’t SSH into your boxes as the root user. Make a script? Then you have to be careful not to mess up. Instead, use cssh to edit the same file on all of the machines… at the same time.

Check it out now! Use the “Install ClusterSSH” below for more info on how to install (and get reminded about it later!).

Also, if you have further tips for system administration or another awesome use for Cluster SSH, hit up the comments!

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Suffice to say, I haven’t been a morning person since high school, and that was not really by choice. I’ve tried several times to change my body’s schedule, unsuccessfully. Lately, however, I have been going to bed around 11 PM and waking up before 9 AM. Yes, I now sleep 5 hours before my previous bedtime. How did I do it?

Motivation

Why did I want to go to bed earlier? For a long time, it was because I “should”. Over the past three months, however, I had been sleeping 8 hours and just not feel rested the next day. I found that the few days I woke up earlier, I felt much better. (My theory is that since the sun rises here around 6:30 AM, sleeping late was causing most of my sleep to occur while the sun was up). Knowing I would have a lot more energy helped me gain resolve for sleeping earlier.

In addition, I realized that by staying up and sleeping later, I was making poor choices. I noticed I would consistently watch TV in the evenings, invariably watch “just one more episode,” and push my bedtime even further. With an earlier schedule, I head home from work with my coworkers around 11 PM and then head almost straight to bed.

Trigger

With all of that motivation, I still needed a trigger to get started with the plan. For me, it happened a day after I had only gotten 5 hours of sleep the previous night (went to bed at 6 AM, woke up around 11 AM). I was so exhausted that I ended up going to sleep at 8 PM… and waking up at 6:30 AM. From then on, I started going to bed much earlier than I used to.

Technology

Getting out of bed early in the morning isn’t easy. I’ve found that chewing some caffeine gum as I wake up helps me get out of bed in around 5 minutes instead of the 30 that it took without it. Once I get to the office, I’ll often consume my second dose of caffeine in the form of coffee or red bull. By front-loading my energy via caffeine, I have energy to start the day, and I’ll start to run out of steam in the evening, which then helps me go to bed earlier.

Secret Weapon

But it’s easy to get back into a bad habit, right? Sleep later and later, until you’re back where you started. That’s where my secret weapon comes in. I used to sleep with my cat outside of the bedroom, because he would often keep me from falling asleep, but I decided to keep my door open. I find that my cat (Gandalf) will often wake me up around 6 AM and again at 8 if I’m still in bed. It’s annoying, but it prevents me from getting too far off track with my sleep. I don’t know if he wants to be fed, played with, or genuinely thinks that my feet are a threat to society, but it definitely wakes me up in the morning.

It’s probably some combination of these that’s helped — all I know is that I sleep a lot earlier than I used to, feel better, and have more scratches on my feet. That works for me.

Anything you do to keep yourself on track in the mornings? Do share!

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