Surf Roots, Software Thoughts

I just bought a Canon Rebel XTi for my travels.  Wow.  I’m no photographer, but I can totally appreciate the difference in quality between a point-and-shoot and the Rebel XTi.  I took some photos yesterday for fun, and I’m insanely impressed with the camera.  I spent a few minutes reading through the manual to learn about the camera’s settings, fiddled with things, and snapped off a few photos.  Prior to buying this camera I had a small understanding of photography principles such as exposure and ISO.  Some of the photos below were taken with a 28-105mm lens and others with a 75-300mm lens.  I can’t wait to get more usage out of this sucker.  Europe and China, prepare to get photographed!

I’m giving a guest lecture for Marty’s CSE 190M class tomorrow, Wednesday, June 4th in Guggenheim 220 at 3:30pm.  The talk will be about basic steps to creating and launching a website, with a focus on Cellarspot.  I’ll update this post later with the slides.

Update: download the slides here.

I remember my first Seattle autumn.  Having come from Los Angeles, the city with one season, the sight of brown leaves flowing in the wind reminded me of “the most beautiful thing in the world” according to Ricky Fitts in American Beauty.  I was so happy to see an autumn and be in a city that actually had seasons.  I’ve since revised my perception of Seattle’s seasons.

Having lived in Seattle for four years now I’m confident that I’ve seen what the city is capable of.  I’ve backpacked on the Olympic Peninsula, biked around San Juan Island, hiked up Mt. Rainier and snowboarded down, surfed at Westport, and lived in Seattle while attending the University of Washington.  After four years I’ve made a conclusion about Seattle: it is a city with one season and intermittent change.  Here’s the breakdown:

• June - August: warm rain with occasional gloom and sunshine
• September - November: rain and gloom with occasional falling leaves and potentially freezing temperatures, occasional sunshine
• December - April: cold rain, freezing temperatures, snow, very, very occasional sunshine
• May: rain with lots of gloom and occasional sunshine

Keep in mind that I’m exaggerating pretty heavily here.  I’m bitter that I gave my rear fender to Glenn forgot to bring my rear fender on my commute this morning, leaving me with a wet ass, back, and feet.  Perhaps this is my own fault and not Seattle’s, but I thought I would try and make a funny post out of it.  For the record I’ve had an awesome time in Seattle, and I don’t regret coming here.

Photo credit here.

The fellers over at AGoodReed were super generous and got me some travel gifts.  I got a sick surf backpack with the bare essentials — wetsuit bag, skate carrier, insulated cooler pack, laptop case, etc.  I also got a hip AGR (TM) shirt to rock at the hottest clubs in Europe.  Check it out:

That’s 5XL right there. Thanks, dudes :).

This past Friday was my last day at Redfin.  Sometimes I wonder why I’m leaving such a wonderful company, but I think I’ve made the right decision. I had a really hard time saying goodbye to all my awesome coworkers, and my insane happy-hour-turned-to-long-night-of-drinking made things even more difficult.

It’s going to be hard to find a company that is filled with such wonderful people and work. Goodbye, Redfin. I miss you already :(.

Sushi after a long day’s work.

McGarty Party.

Sign conversations. I’m good at drawing.

Loki, one of the many Redfin doggies.

UW CSE affiliates day.  Also Halloween.

Yay IT Party.

Me and Mose.

Bahn.  Look at the dude on the right!

Scientists.

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.