A bit of catching up

Not to sound too grandiose, but I think I’ve got an inkling of what Einstein must have felt working at the Swiss patent office. It hurts to be working on such mindless things. It really hurts.

The guy in charge of the project I’m working on doesn’t seem to be thrilled about working with an 18-year-old girl, either, even (read: especially) a productive one. Which is strange, because he was involved in hiring me. I could delve into what I’ve come to understand about why he’s upset–some of it understandable–but I listed this blog on my resume and he may be reading; I don’t think he’d appreciate my analysis. Although he probably isn’t reading. He wouldn’t like to read something that shows I’m competent.

The internship lasts only two months more, though, so I’m a third of the way done. And I’ve cut back on my hours. Maintaining going to school full-time and working 29 hours a week and doing homework and trying to schedule time for working on Raspberry Signage around all that was just not doing it for me–in the end it’s almost like trying to hold down two full-time jobs. And tinypapers? Forget about it. After two weeks of trying that nonsensical schedule, I’m down to 20 hours and finding everything a lot more tolerable. I should catch up on schoolwork soon.

I have an assignment in one of my classes this week to research job openings in programming jobs. Again, I plan to see this internship through, so I’m not taking anything now–and if I line up a job for two months from now, it’s got to be under 20 hours a week. But I’m not sure I’m that rushed for another job.

Yesterday, I was doing one of my most mindless tasks and thinking about how awful those job listing sites were, and how they all looked like they were designed and maintained by MBAs and marketing guys. I started to think about how you could do them better.

When I search for jobs, I get lots of results in cities that are unreasonable commuting distances; I get results for jobs I’m massively unqualified to apply for; I get listings that are unreadable because the writer had no idea what a paragraph was; and sometimes I get jobs that have basically nothing to do with the field I searched for. It’s like the MBAs think a blank results page would be seen as some kind of failure on the part of their site, but I’m a programmer, not a registered nurse–a minor difference, I’m sure, but if you squint you can spot it. (eyeroll)

Furthermore, job sites have dumb categories. For instance, instead of having jobs tagged with things like, “We want 3 years of Perl experience and an Associate’s degree in IT,” they’re categorized as “entry-level” or something. (That seems to be about as “entry-level” as you get, at least around here. If you’re “almost kinda,” you just apply anyway, and they pick from those. People who actually fulfill those requirements are probably too busy applying for jobs that they’re “almost kinda” qualified for.)

Basically–their methodology is dumb and needs to be fixed.

So I thought a bit about how you could do better with some forms and databases. Instead of making an employer decide to either spend 15 minutes debating whether “3 years’ experience” constituted entry- or mid-level expertise, or to skip all that entirely and paste in the unformatted job listing straight from Word and hope, you could make them fill out your form and let the program register them and generate tags. Instead of the ambiguous descriptions like “entry-level,” it would ask what range of years of experience you were after (e.g., 3-5) and what skills you wanted (e.g., certified to operate construction equipment, C# programming), how many hours a week it was, what cities and locations it was offered in… et cetera. It would be more like a social media profile, with fields to fill out, rather than a memo that had to be formatted properly. Basically, it needs structure beyond a questionably-formatted blurb and some tags.

I could see offering it as a free service at first until it got some steam behind it, and then charging small fees for employers to list jobs (say, $25, as not to hurt small companies) and maybe bigger fees like $50 to keep it up on the site for more than 90 days. This is probably how the existing ones got going.

It could even start out niche, as a site just for programming jobs, and then get bigger. Programmer job listings are awful. Applebee’s job descriptions don’t say “We want 4 years of experience as a waitress using the FoodFlow and SERV methodologies, and also the ability to fix refrigerators.” That sounds ridiculous. But it’s how programmer job listings read. I’d hazard that programming is one of the worst fields about this, because the people in charge of hiring often have no clue what they’re supposed to be looking for so they just come up with a laundry list of buzzwords.

Then I thought: I could fix this. It grabbed me, and for the first time in a month I got that rush, that feeling where you’ve just remembered the world is full of interesting problems just waiting for you to solve… if only you had the energy… or time… because you have to work… and go to school… and do homework.

It took maybe an hour for the restless energy generated by that one idea to wear off. I was feeling so jittery and the work I was doing wasn’t nearly intellectual enough to burn it off (which would have felt really good).

When I’m in the office I feel like I have to get out and hack. But when I get home my drive seems to go away. Maybe I need to start working in coffee shops or something. Maybe I need to write down the feeling while I’m at work so I can summon it elsewhere (my emotional memory sucks). Or maybe I just need to get myself into a situation where I’m not so tired all the time.

TechWeek in KC is coming up. I wonder if that’ll help me, or just set me further back on schoolwork.

Anyway, I’ve got a metric butt-ton of schoolwork to catch up on from the past two crazy weeks and my sanity is still jogging behind. I’m afraid I have other stuff I need to do than sit and write blog posts.

When you’ve been programming too long…

This happens:

Last login: Thu Jul 30 03:03:52 on ttys000

Keep in mind it’s using the 24-hour clock. 10:00 PM = 22:00 to the Terminal.

(I must have sleepily closed it on accident at one point. I was working far earlier than 3:00 AM, and I kept working for I think another half hour or something. Or was that the night before? It’s hard to keep track.)

Tinypapers is making progress, but it’s not pretty progress. After days of trying various ways to fix the bugs with my button list and also procrastinating on trying to fix it, I decided to fork the project off into another folder where I stripped off all the UI stuff and everything that didn’t immediately work, which makes debugging what I’m debugging a lot easier because of how little I know about Kivy. See–I don’t have much of a way of knowing whether it’s another piece of the UI (e.g., the canvas background) overlapping buttons that should be there, or if it’s the button list itself.

Another problem that surfaced when I got down to the concrete of the program was that my test data was… not that great! I wasn’t putting in the test data right. Go figure.

So, while I like my UI design and it’s encouraging to have made it, I’m happy to work on the back end for a while.

I have to admit that at first I felt weird about working on what I thought of as the “front end”–UI stuff, for the non-techies–but I had no idea what the “back end” was yet, so I convinced myself there wasn’t much of a barrier between them yet, like there isn’t when you write simple HTML/CSS web pages. As a result, I fiddled with the analogous HTML/CSS until I found the part that needed the PHP/SQL.

It bothered me to be working on shiny stuff with no substance at first. But I should have realized that the important factor was that I was working, and that I was enjoying the process of making things. When you make things, you’re much more likely to figure out which problems are important to solve than if you stand over a notebook and try to pre-craft the whole thing in your head.

Also notable: something I discovered to be true while working at 3:30 AM. I was told by someone on the Internet that there’s a point of tiredness where your programming brain becomes super-effective and able to really focus. I didn’t believe it. I work in the middle of the night because nobody interrupts me and (to be honest) I kind of like the ambiance.

But the tiredness version of the Ballmer Peak… exists, somehow. Don’t ask; I don’t know.

The code I wrote at 3AM (last night? the night before?) actually runs, though. It works! It’s even readable! I was half-conscious at the time and it’s not chicken scratch! (That’s better than I’ve seen some career programmers do while fully conscious!) Not only does it run, but it did something productive towards my goal 😮

I’m off to try to do that again. Happy hacking!

Not dead, just tired.

The 3-day anime convention last weekend really took it out of me. It took me three days to recover. What is even up with that?! To be fair, I was dealing with some difficult people over that time, and that takes a lot of energy for me. But it was a lot of fun, even so, and my mom and younger brother had a good time too.

Anyway, I spent yesterday cleaning up my workspace a bit, and today I finished the chapter of the Kivy book I was on. I’m finding that it’s REALLY not a good idea to stop in the middle of a chapter. It’s just too disorienting. It didn’t help that I’d spent a week off programming.

Which feels really weird, by the way. I feel like “normal Rebekah” and “Rebekah in the middle of programming” are two different people sometimes, and the latter is still exhausted due to not getting out and about right now. Programming feels like a different state of mind to me. At least, when I’m working on my own projects–it doesn’t work like that if I’m doing toy problems out of textbooks. (The Kivy book is a better caliber of textbook than usual–it does work in this regard.)

Hack Mode Rebekah is just gonna have to take this can of Full Throttle and get with the program, because we’re moving on anyway. But, man, I’m exhausted.

I need a cofounder. Unfortunately, the only potential cofounder available to me right now is underage… the other guy I might ask is someone I won’t see for a month or two. My few other friends are either adults with families and responsibilities of their own, or are… not people I’d ask, frankly. Or they’re my cat. He’s adorable, but he doesn’t count.