jaredrobinson.com

During my career, I’ve written code in C, C++, GNU Make, Perl, Java, Groovy, Ruby, Python and bash. I’ve often wondered what new programming language (or framework) I should learn so that my skills remain relevant. The number of languages and frameworks has blossomed over time, and the size of the industry has increased to support and keep them vibrant.

In the old days, I read books to learn new languages, but in modern Internet times with online tutorials and stackoverflow.com, I haven’t used them as much. Recently however, a coworker loaned me “The Go Programming Language,” published by Addison Wesley and written by intelligent, seasoned software engineers. Studying it reminds me that I enjoy books. They often contain a distillation of knowledge and wisdom that is harder to come by in online mediums.

For example, the Go tutorials explain how to use slices, but they don’t explain the mechanism of how they work, so they were a bit confusing. This book rectifies that gap in my knowledge, and briefly covers other interesting side-topics such as how UTF-8 was designed to be self synchronizing and directly searchable without having to convert it first.

Go isn’t as familiar to me as what I’m used to, so initially I didn’t like Go. I remember feeling the same way about learning Ruby, which is even more foreign than Go. In the end, there are many considerations with using a programming language that matter more than whether it feels familiar or foreign, elegant or boring. John Arundel summed it up well:

…every programming language represents a set of trade-offs. Each language is optimised for different things, so your choice of language should be determined by what suits you and the problems you want to solve with it.

Tradeoffs include, but are not limited to…

• Integration — the ability to integrate with existing systems at various levels — the operating system, foreign libraries and programming languages, network systems and APIs
• Maintainability (simplicity and type checking are great benefits on large projects)
• Speed of compilation (important on large projects where frequent change occurs)
• Performance in production — speed, scalability, memory usage
• Tooling — build system, editors (IDEs), refactoring support, linters, formatters, packaging, deployment, profiling, testing, etc.
• Ecosystem: libraries (availability and quality of those libraries), community
• Backward compatibility
• Industry momentum — pool of engineers, the time to come up to speed, trust, longevity.

Engineers don’t often get to pick the programming language for a project — it’s already been chosen by the time they arrive on the scene. Instead, they get to pick the project or the company they work on or for.

Like tens or hundreds of thousands of others, I am working from home while the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the United States and the rest of the world.

Here are a few observations about my experience working from home. I’m a software engineer, and I realize that my experience is different from that of hardware engineers, QA folks, customer solutions agents, teachers, and even from other software engineers.

Sleep. The first several days, I worked from my bedroom, which has a great view of the outside world, but I found it difficult to sleep restfully at night. Once my wife shut down her in-home preschool, I moved to working from one of the two preschool rooms, and now I sleep quite well at night. It’s good to have a separate work place.

Exercise. Working from home, I feel more fidgety… maybe I move around less, because there are fewer meetings, and fewer impromptu discussions. So I feel a strong need to get out of the house and work in the yard (pruning, since it’s spring), take a walk or ride a bike.

Convenience. The kitchen and bathroom are closer. If I want to take a nap, no problem — I’ve got a comfortable bed nearby. Taking a walk around the block is a piece of cake — the front door isn’t that far away compared to when I’m working in the office.

Interruptions. Most of my children are teenagers, and believe it or not, I have fewer interruptions at home than I do at work. When my children are doing their remote school, two of them are in the same room as me, with headphones in their ears, and it’s so quiet that I can hear a pin drop.

Social. I enjoy the more frequent face to face interactions with my wife and children. I miss the face to face interactions with my coworkers. Video conferencing is a great invention, and yet it’s not the same as being there.

Communication. There are a lot fewer impromptu hallway discussions with coworkers, and more with family members. I’m not sure if we’re better at communicating with slack now that we’re all remote or not.

Internet. We have excellent wireless internet service. Since our entire family is working/schooling from home, we notice much more quickly when there’s network latency or poor quality.

Up to now, we’ve used a Disney Circle for parental control, and we knew it caused problems on a nearly weekly basis (it does ARP poisoning of a local network), especially for managed devices. With remote school, Circle started breaking things on a daily basis, so I turned Circle off.

I found that 5 Ghz WiFi on the main floor of our house doesn’t penetrate the floor and walls to the basement, and so I pulled my old ASUS WiFi router out of storage, put it in access point mode in our basement, installed a firmware update, and wired it to the router upstairs. Now I get better speeds and connectivity.

Commute. I had a great commute before, but it’s even better now. With so many people staying home, the air is cleaner.

Productivity. My productivity ebbs and flows at work, and the same is true while working from home. Overall, I feel a bit less productive working from home. I’m more inclined to put my Slack app in “do not disturb” mode when I finish working.

Update: It took three weeks before I settled into a good flow of working from home.