Surf Roots, Software Thoughts

I’ve taken George W.’s $300 stimulus check, given a small donation to Barack Obama, and put the rest into my Europe savings fund.  This means that the majority of the check will be converted into Euros and then spent on food, beer, or hostels.

Thanks, George W.!

I finally got annoyed with all the damn #files# and files~.  Emacs users will know what I’m talking about.  Follow this guide on dealing with Emacs backups and autosaves to get them all to go into one directory.  Much better.

I’ve been working feverishly on my developing world capstone project, which is a Ruby on Rails e-commerce+content management website.  I’m starting to realize that I’m slowly becoming burnt out on web programming.  I’m fairly certain that this is just a phase; this is what I’m thinking:

Making websites is great because your products can be used and seen by huge numbers of people with very little upfront time and cost commitments — this is the main reason why I fell in love with the web in the first place.  I remember when I made my first website and got my first user contribution from a stranger; I was so happy I jumped out of my chair and ran around the house for a while.  It’s an awesome feeling having regular people use your product; I’d even go so far as to say that I live for it, partly at least.

The downside to programming websites is that the majority of your tasks are repetitive and, at lest in my opinion, annoying.  The tasks I’m referring to are getting CSS to work in IE6, copying and pasting DB code so that one model can function the same way as another, figuring out how to vertically align something in CSS, getting an XML traversal to work in all browsers, etc.  Rapid development frameworks and JavaScript libraries such as Ruby on Rails and Prototype, respectively, abstract a lot of the knitty-gritty that I just complained about, but they don’t let you totally avoid annoying web development details.  Moreover, most of the websites that I’ve made, with the exception of Timedex, did not have large performance constraints that create interesting engineering challenges.  Perhaps part of that is my own fault for not making popular websites ;).  Regardless, my involvement in website creation has been for the most part not as engineering-esque as I would like it to be.

What interests me the most about the web is scalability.  I would love to be Twitter’s lead softare engineer right now, facing tons of downtime and pissed off customers, figuring out clever ways to deal with insanely computationally-intensive problems.  I get excited just thinking about it.  It seems to me that the only way a 22-year-old kid could be involved with scalability whatsoever is if the company was a very, very small startup.  Otherwise the chances are high that an older, more experienced developer will own scalability issues.

Lately I’ve been recalling all the hours I’ve spent in the CSE labs hacking Linux kernels, extending a poor implementation of the EXT2 filesystem, creating peer-to-peer networking applications, taking a single-threaded web server and making it multi-threaded, creating my own preeumptive thread library in C, lexical analysis to create a timeline of events, creating Netflix movie recommendations, computing PageRank for Wikipedia, etc.  I badly, badly want more of this.  I want meaty, huge, disgusting engineering problems that make people scour and cry at the mere thought of them.  Now I’m not arguing that I’m capable, qualified, or what have you; I’m merely stating my interests — to be engulfed and overwhelmed with vomitous engineering problems dealing with scalability.

Partly what has motived this post is my frustration with web programming.  The recent Mars mission, Phoenix, has also got me thinking some.  I’m hoping that my desires will be fulfilled while at Google this summer.  In fact I’m confident they will be.  A wise man once said, “Be careful what you wish for.”  Hopefully I won’t regret this post in the future :).

Two friends and I cycled around the Lake Washington Loop this Memorial Day Sunday.  We started at Gasworks park, headed north on the Burke-Gilman, east towards lake Samammish, south through Bellevue and Renton, then finally north back to Seattle.  Along the way we stopped at Marymoor park to check out the RC flying field and the velodrome, which was unfortunately closed for maintenance.  The whole ride was about 60 miles and took 4.5 hours, not including stopping.  Including stopping the ride took about 6 hours, because we spent a lot of time at Marymoor and stopped for a smoothy in downtown Bellevue.  There’s only one really big hill at about mile 25, but I would say that a large majority of the ride is flat.  We only spent a small amount of time on high-traffic roads, the rest being spent either on trails or low-use roads.  It was an awesome ride, and I would totally recommend it.

I’m thinking about stepping it up next weekend if the weather is nice, so stay tuned for more Seattle cycling!

I got curious and started load testing my blog using the Apache ab load testing tool.  I didn’t have any caching setup when I first ran ab.

$ab -kc 10 -t 10 http://www.alexloddengaard.com/

Requests per second:    8.19 [#/sec] (mean)

During the ab run my server’s CPU usage was at about 99%.  That’s insanely awful considering my web server is monsterious, at least to my standards.  I installed the WP-Cache WordPress caching plugin to see how that would improve things.  Take a look:

$ab -kc 10 -t 10 http://www.alexloddengaard.com/

Requests per second:    44.60 [#/sec] (mean)

The CPU usage during this ab run was about 3%; much better :).  I was curious to see how many requests per second my machine could handle ignoring network latency, so I ran ab from my server on itself and got a much more impressive result:

$ab -kc 100 -t 30 http://www.alexloddengaard.com/

Requests per second:    1140.20 [#/sec] (mean)

Lesson learned: WP-Cache is a must-install WordPress plugin.

While sorting through old pictures I came across this one that I took this March ‘08.  I was home for spring break and the waves were awesome.  The only car in the house was my mom’s Prius, and somehow I managed to squeeze my 9-6 (9 foot, 6 inch) board into the thing — the hatchback actually closed!  Luckily I’m only five minutes from the beach, because it was pretty tough driving without being able to see anything on my right side.

I love that car.

Savan inspired me with his post about himself to spend a quick bit to say more about myself.  I’ll give you the short version.

I’ve made a few recent changes to my blog, namely I changed the title to “Surf Roots, Software Thoughts.”  I did this because I’ve always considered myself as having a split personality.  When I’m home in Los Angeles I’m mostly outdoors either surfing, snowboarding, or doing something else active.  However, when I’m in Seattle I’m mostly indoors working on some sort of programming project.  Even my friends are considerably different in these two lives.  My friends from high school all share the same outdoor interests as me, and we always have a blast encouraging each other into big waves or down steep sloaps.  On the other hand, most of my friends in college are computer science classmates, and we tend to crack nerd jokes and talk about software.

I grew up in Los Angeles running between the snow, ocean, and soccer field.  I always wanted to spend my time with my family and friends doing the things that I loved doing.  School wasn’t really one of those things until I started pursuing computer science.  I was inspired to learn more about computers while playing Counter Strike in 9th grade.  From there I learned some programming languages and started making awful dynamic websites (I wish they still existed for comedic purposes).  I came to Seattle to study Computer Science at the University of Washington and became much more of an academic.  I had a new found appreciate for learning, and Seattle was a great place for me to get started with my academic discovery.  I found myself being limited a lot by the Seattle Weather, so I spent most of my time indoors behind a computer.  I think this was good for me, because I always thought I could do better academically than I did in high school.

I’ve made some great friends in Seattle, and I’ll be very sad to say goodbye to them eventually.  However, I’m looking forward to eventually being closer to my best friends and family and in a place where I can surf and snowboard regularly and also crank on some (hopefully) awesome software projects.

But before I head back south I have a minor to finish, some backpacking to do in Europe, and some work to do in Shanghai, China for Google.  I’m pretty excited about the next few months; all I need to do is stop buying things.

Bonus image: here’s a good comparison:

Here’s the ad:

Here’s my profile:

Apparently their tageting algorithm needs some work.  Actually, maybe the purchaser of that ad wanted to target all males in hopes of finding some people who are still not open about their gay sexual orientation.  Who knows.

When will they end?  Not yet.  I still need a better pair of shoes.

• Canon Rebel XTi Digital SLR (body only) - $509 from Dell
• SanDisk 4GB Compact Flash Card - $28 from Dell

I’ll be using my dad’s lenses from his 35mm SLR that he never uses anymore.  I believe he has a 75-300mm lense and a 28-105mm lense.