Chris Baglieri

I'm a good engineer. I learn languages. I explore frameworks. I read Hacker News and troll Reddit. I contribute to and heavily use open source. I'm led by numbers and measure everything. I test religioulsy. I comb through code for the sake of seeing how something works. I go to meetups and mingle with other hackers. I do all this and yet, I'm an incomplete maker, specifically when it comes to design.

Design is, well, hard to define. It's not front end development. It's not logos. It's way more, practiced in ways so subtle it comes across as being way less, which is what makes it so indescribable, so, human. It's typography. It's color theory. It's geometry. It's proportion. It's space. It's shaping emotion. Designers, good designers, inherently possess an ability to understand and control whatever "it" is.

I say this yet up until thirty five days ago, when selecting an area I wanted to focus on in the coming year, I never considered design. What happened thirty five days ago? This hacker met a designer. Seeing her evoke emotion, using the tools of her trade, through mediums I take for granted, inspired me.

As an engineer, I recognize my left brain is stronger than my right. I'm fine with that, in fact, I'm more than fine with that, I embrace it, it's who I am, it's what makes me good at what I do. What I'm not fine with is lacking a vocabulary. A vocabulary enables conversation, debate, and efficient, two-way communication. Without a designer's vocabulary, I'm doing myself and the creatives I work with a disservice.

This is something I will change.

Quake is a library exposing the U.S. Geological Survey's real-time earthquake data. As described on USGS' Earthquake Hazards Program:

Earthquake information is extracted from a merged catalog of earthquakes located by the USGS and contributing networks. Earthquakes will be broadcast within a few minutes for California events, and within 30-minutes for worldwide events.

Broadcasted data is found in a series of CSV files broken down by the time of the seismic event and hosted on USGS' servers.

Crack open the gem and it's surprisingly simple. Requests for seismic activity curl the appropriate source CSV data, parse it, and extract the bits into Events. It's minimalistic by design.

Fork and have fun. Pull requests welcome. Or install the gem.

Rands latest post is a masterpiece. I often find myself nodding in agreement when I read Rands but today, damn, I nearly stood up in my chair and shouted hells yeah. It spoke to me as an engineer always yearning for challenging problems. It spoke to me as a technical manager striving to build the most efficient teams I possibly can. Perhaps most noteworthy was his closing remark. Spot on.

I’ve gone back and forth on whether managers should code and my opinion is: don’t stop coding. Each week that passes where you don’t share the joy, despair, and discovery of software development is a week when you slowly forget what it means to be a software developer. Over time it means you’ll have a harder time talking to engineers because you’ll forget how they think and how they become bored.

Startup Weekend 2011 was amazing. I came with an idea to pitch, a sticker-adorned laptop, and a very basic objective, to network with locally based hackers & engineers. That's it. Intentionally simple and uncluttered. While I can't credit the weekend's success or the win on simplicity alone, I have no question it played a crucial role.

Simple worked. It helped me and my team gets things done quickly. Simple allowed us to focus on what we needed to focus on and nothing else. It forced us to think clearly and not get bogged down with meaningless fears, uncertainties, and doubts. Simple helped me get in front of a random group of 100 people and pitch an idea that deep down inside I knew only a few would get. It helped me thrive on very little sleep and remain incredibly productive through it all. Simple yielded an amazing response. It offered connections with communities I care about and a newfound respect for a city I left nearly a decade ago. Simple helped me and my team win.

If 2010 was the year I found my groove and 2011 the year I'd execute on that re-found focus, Startup Weekend was an unexpected shot of adrenilin that I hope sets the tone for the remaining 11 months.

In 2010, I found my groove and focus which I (apparently) left behind in Boston when I moved a few years ago. 2011 is all about executing on this re-found focus.  What follows are my themes for the coming year, in no particular order:

1. (Re)Build my network of local hackers, engineers, and technologists. Moving here, I left behind a kick ass community I had grown to love.  In the midst of a move, a home purchase, and two kids, it's been difficult for me to rebuild this.  While I joined numerous groups, my participation has been lacking; I intend to remedy this.  Barcamps, Meetups, Startup Weekends, it's time I stop being a bystander and start being a contributor.

2. Write more. Everyone's resolution. It's not that I am short of ideas I want to share. I think my problem has always been I strive to make my content as polished as possible. That's counter-productive and results in nothing but friction. More damaging, it's the antithesis of being transparent which is not who I am.

3. Read (non-technical) books more. A by-product of leaving Boston, or more specifically the commutes I had via public transportation, is that I have less time to read books. The other challenge, the books I have piling up around me are not light reads. GEB may have to wait a few years.

4. Revisit algorithms. I spent some time last year dusting off some of my algorithm tomes. I found I was struggling a bit to get through material I once knew like the back of my hand. That has to change. I need to figure out the best way to work this into my weekly routine otherwise it won't happen.

5. Up my Python game. I love Ruby. I love Python. I write lots of Ruby. I don't write enough Python.

6. Up my FP game. I'm a functional programming tinkerer. I'd like to change that. I'm considering playing around with Scheme or some other LISP dialect given it's basic and hammers home the concepts.  From there (next year?), I'd like to dip my toes in deeper waters.