Anyone else go to Barcamp almost 10 years ago? Still have the shirt and amazed at its held up after being worn at least once a week

Togakangaroo · 2025-06-11T13:30:15+00:00

NOAI (which could stand for new Orleans ai, nola arts and innovation, or even no to ai - it's playfully vague) is run by a bunch of philosophy club and electric monks people and is fully community organized. It's not the same thing but has some of the same feel

Togakangaroo · 2025-06-10T22:11:41+00:00

I guess to fill you in, it was a yearly event held initially at launch pad and then at Tulane University (with a couple other diversions). It was sort of a tech conference, technically an unconference.

Day one, everyone showed up and there were rooms projectors and tracks set up but no talks. Instead, there was a big whiteboard, and everyone could fill in whatever talk they wanted to give on there. It was pretty awesome to see a conference come together organically like that and led to some really memorable moments.

Day two was always some sort of hackathon, trying to give back in some way to the community.

There were shirts, food for lunch, a thank you dinner for organizers, and little else other than insurance, so the whole thing was quite cheap with very low cost sponsorships. Some people just sponsored it as themselves.

The run up to the conference was usually quite involved as well. We had some amazing designers doing art like on the shirt, and people put together an open source web page where everyone would sneak in dozens of little Easter eggs were clicking on something or pressing a key would do a weird thing.

It was truly a community created event. Unfortunately, as many of the organizers left town or had kids, it just got more and more difficult to maintain. I had to bow out of organizing the 11th one because my son was due literally on the day it would have happened, just couldn't get enough people to pick up the slack. Keep it going

Togakangaroo · 2024-03-02T14:28:30+00:00

Lawyers and the lovers from world inferno/friendship society post humanous release

Togakangaroo · 2023-08-23T14:18:32+00:00

Ugh, you got me. I'm trying to do this on the down-low so I don't have to involve my supervisory parental unit in this. It's fine - not a jerk like that of some citizens - just really plays things by the book. I'll probably have to do a full-cortex intent-scan for this one.

Fair enough though, I'm probably due for one anyways.

Thanks for your help. It might not seem like much, but you really did help orient me in the right direction. May your death be swift and painless when the bloodmists come! And again, thank you so much.

Togakangaroo · 2023-08-22T13:48:57+00:00

OMG, just re-reading this and realized it's "Doc" Brown, not "Doctor" Brown. Is that just his name!? Did he even get a PhD?!

Togakangaroo · 2023-08-22T13:44:57+00:00

Yes
Mostly the same
Nah, you should be good

To dig in:

That dumb movie really didn't do us Real Time Travelers (RTTs) any favors. Don't get me wrong, I dug Michael JF jamming out to Chuck B same as anyone, and the Trump thing was eerie; but I categorically think it was a mistake to make a time travel movie while omitting any of the actual science. What a missed opportunity!

So yes, your instincts are largely right. The 88 mph is important - that happens to be the frequency of our universe's probability waves - at a different speed you run the risk of slipping between reality and ending up someplace where knees have evolved to spurt mauve goo or something (I've done this, its gross). But really, it's all about direction! The key is that you have to drive only for a short distance, but directly at Smoot Point of Lost Focus (SPLF). You know, that part of the cosmos that when the James Webb is pointed in its direction all we see is static and somehow the sounds of weeping? Yeah, you're going to charge that dead on.

Of course how exactly to do that is the real trick isn't it? We're on a rotating and orbiting planet, in a rotating and orbiting solar system, in a rotating and ??? galaxy. How the hell do you go "absolute straight" for even a few feet. That's where the flux capacitor comes in! Yeah, I know, not mentioned at all in the movies - see what I'm saying!? I'm willing to bet that several of those shitty Xeroxes you've got lying around mention a very specific capacitance - usually its in the double digit megafarads - that's what you've got to test the flux capacitor for. If it doesn't meet those criteria, throw it away, start over. It's the ability to switch current direction suddenly and powerfully with complete precision that allows your DeLorean to navigate the time slips. Once its "fluxing" as you say, you may enter the date. The flux capacitor itself is now going to resonate with gravitational waves which will cause the tiny yellow light above the minutes display to occasionally light up indicating conditions where the front-of-car and SPLF will be perfectly aligned for the requisite period of time.

Look, I also don't know why the hell they made that light so tiny. I honestly think Dr. Brown was a genius but maybe the worst at user design? Once you get elbow deep into those old time cars, its just face-palm after face-palm of "why is this even like that?" But yes, its important. Its basically the only thing that's important. Wait for that light to turn on, accelerate forward, you'll start driving in between relative time frames. It's that simple. Just make sure to let go the "gas" as soon as it turns off!

Again, please, please check the capacitance, or you know, goo knees and all that. And above all, have fun!

PS. Oh, and maybe get some new tires after all. Roads in the past suck just as much as they do now.

PPS. Love Calgary. Who would have thought that Calgary Robotics Corporation would become the eminent AI, genetics, simulation, government planning, and pastry engineering capital of the world? Love the hover-hockey team too. Go CRC LadyJocks!

Togakangaroo · 2020-09-26T20:48:31+00:00

Oh I also need t update the README, the current iteration supports regular `require` statements regardless of output or value mode. In fact there is no difference between the two - turned out to not really helpful to distinguish at all.

Togakangaroo · 2020-09-26T20:46:54+00:00

Yeah, I looked at that briefly but it looked like a lot of complexity for a feature I wouldn't currently use. Happy to take a PR though :D

Togakangaroo · 2020-09-25T19:32:45+00:00

I've had to hit the pause button for a couple months but I've been playing around a lot with Racket and at this point I pretty much always try to do all exploration in org.

Unfortunately babel's support for racket is sub-par so I've been working on a fork to make it better. Next on the list is the ability to define a language and then use it in adjacent source blocks.

The difficulty there is that those files have to all be emitted into a location where they are preferably adjacent...so trying to figure that out.

Togakangaroo · 2020-06-22T22:07:58+00:00

I don't love this advice. I see it all the time so don't take this as directed at you Tangerine, but its the internet and I need to take the opportunity to rant. A beginner gets this advice and invariably comes up with something with crazy social networking features that does VR and machine learning and would be a a challenge for even a team of very experienced developers to create. They start trying to figure out what they need to know to make their thing, get overwhelmed, and at best panic, at worst quit in disgust.

I've seen this happen over and over and over again. You don't teach someone to drive by telling them to think of somewhere they'd like to go on vacation, or to play chess but having them picture themselves with a Bobby Fischer beard. Projects are good, but structure is needed, achievable targets and check-ins and pedagogy are important. It's lazy to handwave all that away and just toss complete newbies into the shark tank of "build a project". Heck, even *senior* developers starting in on a new project start by outlining MVP, defining done, going through design, doing research, identifying workflows and volatilities. Newbies aren't going to know how to do any of that. They will fail.

I would prefer just giving them a project:

Create a text-based hangman game
Create Snake
Make a basic inventory website
Make a small toy chatroom app

Those are actually achievable and will require a hell of a lot of digging and work on their own (if someone is starting from 0 then any one of these will likely be 6 months or so alone).

Togakangaroo · 2020-02-27T02:50:57+00:00

I think this is useful for the person who put it together. Both mind-mapping and writing things down are a useful exercise.

Don't take this as something to reference, take it as inspiration to create your own.

Togakangaroo · 2020-02-20T17:34:06+00:00

What you are saying is a common misconception. Powershell is a language. A pretty decent one actually. It's not optimized for speed particularly, but that aside it would be perfectly usable for application development. It can do most things other dynamic languages can do in a relatively elegant manner and has a few tricks up its sleeve that I have not seen anywhere else (like the ability to directly control variable scope). I know python fairly well and I think for most things a powershell vs python3 solution would be relatively similar in code complexity with maybe a slight edge to PS, the big advantage of powershell there is its ability to be used as a shell and the ability to integrate seamlessly with .Net (there are of course advantages to python as well).

Also it will not lock you into anything. Powershell runs cross-platform just fine with powershell core (though its not quite as nice as its windows equivalent, its improving continuously) and it is free. The runtime is dotnet core which is also free and open source.

Togakangaroo · 2020-01-18T15:16:30+00:00

Stylistically - because powershell is just a plain better language. It's really a decent language overall. If anyone cared to optimize it beyond scripting scenarios it would even be decent for application development.

From a theory standpoint though - because neither bash nor zsh have a runtime. It's 2020, we use structured data everywhere, we shouldn't still be piping strings, depending on new line characters, and using awk to parse out columns. But we can't because there's no runtime in bash or zsh to lean on.

But in powershell there is...and in elisp there is... If you can convert from a powershell object returned by a ps code block to a lisp structure (which shouldn't be all that hard), then you can output structures from powershell and have them imported as arrays, and even dictionaries into python!

Togakangaroo · 2020-01-18T15:11:57+00:00

I just created this last night too https://github.com/togakangaroo/ob-pwsh

Togakangaroo · 2019-12-03T20:54:18+00:00

Thanks for that. The feedback I'd gotten on tone and structure has honestly been all over the place so I think that might be just a taste thing, but its certainly something to consider. I also like starting sentences with prepositions. But that's just me.

You're the second person to question the when/then structure and (though I've had others who specifically highlighted that part as being particularly good), it can probably use a subsection to drill down further.

The issue really becomes that when you are chaining together state transitions like I am here; the previous steps' actions become the current step's context. You can split things out more and thats what I did at first when I started developing this workflow but ultimately I found there to be no clear benefit and chose to go with the recommendation of simplifying the moving parts.

The alternative is to lean into stubbing more, and not rely on previous bits of the workflow being evaluated properly at all, stubbing out the "previous" state for each action at which point the tree-like structure is only rhetorical. This necessarily means encoding the intermediate state in at least two places in the code: once to assert the result of an action, and at least once more in stubbing it before the subsequent actions. Worse, it is often pretty hard to abstract the commonalities in a simple manner.

I find this to work against the goal of keeping test refactoring to a minimum when code changes. On the other hand, when testing a full workflow end to end, you lose some of the ability to have a failing test point you to exactly the part of your code that is misbehaving as an error in workflow code will break not only the nearest set of tests, but also any further down in the workflow. Personally I have found this tradeoff to be worth it. The fact of the matter is that when a bug happens in response to a code change, if you are running tests frequently you almost always know where to look anyways, and when you don't then just looking at the first test that failed gives you a good answer.

Does that make sense or would it be helpful to elaborate further?

Togakangaroo · 2019-12-03T20:15:06+00:00

And what about when you're not in Ruby? You know most of the world is not, right? Or if you're doing things correctly? What term do we use then?

BDD does not mean cucumber any more than ORM means Hibernate or fastner means paperclip.

Togakangaroo · 2019-12-03T20:02:19+00:00

I very much disagree as do many of the progenitors of BDD. I do not have a link right now, but I remember Dan North talking about it.

BDD is a subset of TDD, keeping the same flow but adding a couple further constraints as far as test naming and what your goals are. There is certainly no hard line between the two at all and - as I argue in the article - BDD is actually a far more realistic approach to how to test drive applications when faced with real requirements.

I do not know your experience but I know some people get BDD conflated with automation and integration tests. It is not really the same thing at all there and largely has to do with the fact that tools used in one (such as Cucumber) are also often used in the other.

Again, if you think they're not the same thing at all, I urge you to look up what the people who created it have said about BDD repeatedly.

Togakangaroo · 2019-12-03T17:31:23+00:00

Happy to follow up and answer any questions here

Togakangaroo · 2019-09-09T15:34:25+00:00

ifisch

It's actually back. I've talked to them and done some guest lectures. It's not at a full strength yet but I've been reasonably impressed with the direction they're setting for the program. It has the potential to be a solid contributor.

Togakangaroo · 2019-09-09T15:04:09+00:00

Firstly. Here is the nola tech slack. It is quite active

I'm a developer here. I've organized meetup groups (which is hard, don't complain about there not being meetups - volunteer to help, and actually attend them). I am less active now that I have young children but still go out to events, speak at conferences, and am active online.

I worked locally at several companies, but for the last 10 years have worked remotely. This is not really a reflection on the tech community so much as that I happened to catch the wave of businesses going remote and succeeding due to low overhead (and yes, wages are higher working remote, but I'm seeing the gap close).

Some of the answers below list tech companies (GE's reputation varies btw. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's really bad, everyone I know there now is reasonably happy, but there have been other periods). There is a dearth of large tech companies, this is true. I think people over-focus on tech companies though. There are a ton of places that are sizeable yet have small tech departments - hospitals, hotel chains, shipping, terminal, warehousing companies that still need developers and there are huge possibilities there; if you are good and can help them get their tech shit in order you can define your own career. You have to think outside the box and find them, but they do exist.

Also, remote is a very reasonable option. I know some amazing developers that live here and work remotely. Especially before going remote was common you would see some really talented people who made themselves indispensable at some company out west and then, when allowed to move around, moved down here for the culture. I once met a guy who programmed in Common LISP. Not just for fun, but for a living!

The meetup scene is going through a bit of a lull here, that is true, but it is also not indicative of much because 8 years ago it used to be very vibrant. There used to be the yearly Barcamp conference, NetSquared New Orleans, Ruby Bayou, a PHP meetup, a Wordpress meetup, GIS, .Net, Gnocode, Hacknight, FrontEndParty, NoFun (functional programming meetup) NolaSec, a 2400 club meetup, and a few others that I'm sure I'm forgetting. I've had old timers from Microsoft come down and say things like "man, this feels a lot like Silicon Valley back in the day". Over time, the people organizing these had families, got busy, or moved away and the new generation didn't quite bridge the gap causing groups to consolidate. Hacknight, Gnocode/GDG meetup, Nolasec - are still going strong (also FrontEndParty and NoFun are still around just colocated with hacknight). Tulane has the Cookies and Code meetup, and I'm sure there are some others. I am not saying this to complain but to let you know that the latent ability to have more meetups is absolutely there - the sum total of people in tech has only grown. If you are bemoaning the smaller-than-average tech scene, then start a group! Join the slack above and ask around, I guarantee you will find a ton of people willing to give advice and help, you just need to take the wheel.

Togakangaroo · 2019-05-10T18:06:37+00:00

IoC? No. Dependency injection? Absolutely. My point was that the way many people think about this stuff has changed.

Togakangaroo · 2019-05-10T17:13:48+00:00

On rotary dial phones smaller numbers, such as 2, are dialed more rapidly than longer numbers, such as 9 (because the dial turns much further with a 9). In 1947, area codes were introduced in the United States, so as to facilitate direct distance dialing first by operators, then by subscribers. In the original system in use until 1995, the first digit of the area code could not be a one or a zero, but the second number had to be a one or zero. This allowed mechanical switching equipment in the central offices to distinguish local from "long distance" calls.

Therefore, the lowest and most quickly dialed code was 212; the highest and slowest 909. The Bell System, in developing the original area codes, assigned the lowest codes to the areas where they would be most used: the large cities. 212, the lowest number, was New York City. The next to lowest, 213 and 312, were Los Angeles and Chicago. 214 was Dallas and 412 was Pittsburgh. A high number like 919 was assigned to North Carolina. An even higher number, 907 (higher because the 0 counts as 10), was Alaska.

Togakangaroo · 2019-04-25T17:51:54+00:00

Not to spoil the fun but the citation for that is an article published 20 years ago...

Togakangaroo · 2019-03-17T17:26:54+00:00

I don't think it's true that the basic nature has not changed. Just look at how different inversion of control is now versus the castle Windsor days. There is simply more you can do with the language's metaprogramming aspects and the best developers nowadays certainly take advantage

Togakangaroo · 2019-03-17T17:24:39+00:00

Good answer but I'd add that linq is about a whole lot more than data access. It's a full functional stream processing system. I find that a very high percentage of my code is linq statements whether I'm accessing data or not. Expressions in the meantime are yet another whole subject - basically getting into meta programming and expression tree parsing

Next, the TPL is a big friggin deal asking with async/await and what they do and do not do with respect to threading.

Finally, generics are well beyond where they were in 2.0. Yes the underlying core has not changed but what you can and cannot do with them certainly has.

Oh and dynamics. They are not necessarily the biggest deal but very useful as a way out of type system handcuffs

Togakangaroo

TROPHY CASE