unethical blogger

Last Sunday, I announced the "0.1" release of my memcache-ada project on comp.lang.ada, thus ending a 2 month experiment with the Ada programming language.

In my previous post on the topic, I mentioned some of the things that interested me with regards to Ada and while I didn't use all the concepts that make Ada a powerful language, I can now confidentally say that I know enough to be dangerous (not much more though).

This is what my coworkers thought of me, learning Ada.

All said and done I spent less than two months off and on creating memcache-ada, mostly on my morning and evening commutes. The exercise of beginning and ending my day with a language which tends to be incredibly strict was interesting to say the least. Due to the lack of an REPL such as Python's, I found myself writing more and more unit and integration tests to get a feel for the language and the behavior of my library.

The past couple weeks I've been spending my BART commutes learning the Ada programming language. Prior to starting to research Ada, I sat in my office frustrated with Python for my free time hackery. Don't get me wrong, I love the Python language, I have enjoyed the ease of use, dynamic model, rapid prototyping and expressiveness of the Python language, I just fall into slumps occasionally where some of Python's "quirks" utterly infuriating. Quirks such as its loosey-goosey type system (which I admittedly take advantage of often), lack of good concurrency in the language, import subsystem which has driven lesser men mad and its difficulty in scaling organically for larger projects (I've not yet seen a large Python codebase that hasn't been borderline "clusterfuck".)

Before you whip out the COBOL and Fortran jokes, I'd like to let it known up front that Ada is a modern language (as I mentioned on reddit, the first Ada specification was in 1983, 11 years after C debuted, and almost 30 years after COBOL and Fortran were designed). It was most recently updated with the "Ada 2005" revision and supports a lot of the concepts one expects from modern programming languages. For me, Ada has two strong-points that I find attractive: extra-strong typing and built-in concurrency.

Incredibly strong typing

The typing in Ada is unlike anything I've ever worked with before, coming from a C-inspired languages background. Whereas one might use the plus sign operator in Python to add an int and a float together without an issue, in Ada there's literally zero auto-casting (as far as I've learned) between types. To the inexperienced user (read: me) this might seem annoying at first, but it's fundamental to Ada's underlying philosophy of "no assumptions." If you're passing an Integer into a procedure that expects a Float, there will be no casting, the statement will error at compile time.

Concurrency built-in

Unlike C, Java, Objective-C and Python (languages I've used before), Ada has concurrency defined as part of the language, as opposed to an abstraction on top of an OS level library (pthreads). In Ada this concept is called "tasking" which allows for building easily concurrent applications. Unlike OS level bindings built on top of pthreads (for example) Ada provides built in mechanisms for communicating between "tasks" called "rendezvous" along with scheduling primitives.

Being able to define a "task" as this concurrent execution unit that uses this rendezvous feature to provide "entries" to communicate with it is something I still haven't wrapped my head around to be honest. The idea of a language where concurrency is a core component is so new to me I'm not sure how much I can do with it.

For my first "big" project with Ada, I've been tinkering with a memcached client in Ada which will give me the opportunity to learn some Ada fundamentals before I step on to bigger projects. Disregarding the condescending jeers from other programmers who one could classify as "leet Django haxxorz", I've been enjoying the experience of learning a new vastly different language than one that I've tried before.

So stop picking on me you big meanies :(

A couple weeks ago I decided to try out reddit's self-serve advertising system for one of our products at Apture: the Apture Highlights browser extension. While I am an Apture employee, I've also turned into a rabid user of our browser plugin while browsing the web, I've found it to be perfect at answering a number of quick questions like "what does this word mean?" or "who the hell is this?" In a mix of curiosity regarding reddit's advertising system and advocacy for our browser extension, I decided to run a trial campaign on reddit.

If you've not been exposed to reddit's self-serve advertising platform, here's a quick overview. The entire system is bid-based, with minimum bids starting at 20 USD a day. Ads are created by users (like me) and submitted for approval with tentative dates. Once the ad is approved by reddit, it is scheduled to run on a particular day. From my understanding of the system, the number of impressions given to your advertisement is based on your bid and the demand for ad impressions on the given day. On top of this basic structure, you can run advertisements "targeted" to a specific subreddit or reddit-wide.

For the purposes of my campaign, I wanted to try both reddit-wide and targeted ads, for my targeted portion of the campaign I ran my ad for two days on the /r/todayilearned, a subreddit with nearly 80,000 subscribers who all are looking to share an interesting nugget of information that they have learned today.

A few weeks ago I finally tied the knot after a rather long engagement, putting my relationship with then-fianceé into a legally binding relationship. While a wedding should hold a very special place in the bride and groom's heart forever, I feel like it is safe to say that our wedding objectively rocked.

I don't want to dive too much into the nitty-gritty details of the entire weekend which culminated in a great ceremony and reception at the phenomenal Madrona Manor Restaurant and Inn. The entire atmosphere, from both families having a great time together, to impeccable weather and the fantastically prepared dinner, was damned near perfect.

The name change that I mentioned in my previous post is now official. This means I now have to update everything. I'm in for a world of hurt between the DMV, banks, brothels and strip-Parcheesi clubs.

The only thing you need to do is update your address book, lucky you! I know at least one friend of mine has, who messaged me to say:

I put your old surname in the "Maiden Name" field in Address Book. Just thought you'd want to know.

I spoke to my step-dad George on the phone immediately after the hearing was over and asked if there are "any perks to being a Croy?"

Still haven't gotten a response to that one yet.

Tomorrow morning I will be in court, hopefully finalizing a process I started earlier this year. I will be changing my name.

When I was first considering it, I found the entire idea a bit scary. I have worked tremendously hard to make a name for myself, from my work in the open source community to conferences I've spoken at and interactions with numerous companies and people who have been instrumental in my whittling out a career in software engineering. I have been very particular about being referred to as "R. Tyler Ballance," ensuring that my "self-branding" remains consistent, netting me somewhere north of 36,000 results when searching Google.

Tomorrow I intend on throwing all that out the window, there are more important things in life than Google results (as shocking as that may sound).

I'm hesitant to go too much into the motivations for the change, knowing full well that everything I publish might as well be set in stone on the internet.

Those close to me know that my parents divorced when I was young. After a particularly nasty divorce, my mother and my three sisters parted ways with my father who I have since only had sporadic contact with. After a couple dark years for my sisters and I, my mother married another Navy man, George P. Croy, III. George came into the marriage with his daughter, bringing my sister-count up to four.

Over the past fifteen years or so, I have become George's son. Successfully exploring his emotional spectrum from tears of joy to turning him a bright crimson shade of pissed-off, never once treating me as if I were anything less than his kin. I'm convinced my attitudes towards family, women and friends not to mention my strong opinions on honor and integrity have all been heavily influenced by him

Plainly put, I would not be the man I am today without his guiding hand.

Provided everything goes well at the courthouse, I enter as R. Tyler Ballance and leave as R. Tyler Croy.

Might as well update your address books.