How I code

Have you ever seen a car burn rub­ber and then shoot for­ward? It spins out so fast, but when it comes to mak­ing a turn, the car has to give up notice­able speed to make up for poor con­trol and cor­ner­ing. Now take for exam­ple the same car try­ing to pull a very heavy load, the tires spin and spin and spin before it slowly begins pulling the load for­ward and mak­ing progress.

This is how I code. My goal is to fin­ish the project as quickly as pos­si­ble. How­ever, if I’m thrown at some­thing and I don’t solve it, I will keep ham­mer­ing at it until I make a break­through. I mean, I’m tena­cious. I’m not afraid to ask when it’s some­thing I don’t know, but if it is some­thing I should know, then I keep at it. Yes, I may talk out loud about it and pos­si­bly annoy the other coders at work, but we all have head­phones for a rea­son — to block out the dis­trac­tions and let us get stuff done.

Today I, with the help of my boss, R, hard coded in a solu­tion my bosses wanted on their blog. It was immensely sat­is­fy­ing to do it and then go in and then tell them that the prob­lem was fixed. Espe­cially as my clos­ing note before head­ing home for the day.

Pro­gram­mers are noto­ri­ous for tak­ing their work home with them. We get struck by inspi­ra­tion in the shower, or in the mid­dle of the night, or while doing the dishes and I’m sure I would have come up with the solu­tion tonight while at home had I not got­ten it done at work.

I’m find­ing myself set­tling in nicely at work. I’m bring­ing attrib­utes and skills to the table, and it’s always nice to be able to explain things like Track­back. A lot of peo­ple don’t get it, and I admit I didn’t get it when Six Apart (the guys behind Live­Jour­nal and Mov­able­Type) rolled it out. In fact I dis­abled it because I didn’t like it!

Track­back is so straight-forward a lit­tle com­pli­cated but most peo­ple over com­pli­cate it. It’s a two sided sys­tem, designed to allow blog sys­tems to com­mu­ni­cate easily.

Before Tb, you had to com­ment on my blog for me to see your thoughts on one of my posts, so while your com­ment would ben­e­fit my blog, your own blog was unaf­fected except by the sparse traf­fic your com­ment link would generate.

SixA­part came up with Track­back in 2002. This sys­tem is where you can write on your own blog about a post on my blog, and if you link to my post and both of our blogs have Track­back enabled, then your blog would con­tact my blog and let it know that you had writ­ten that post. My blog would con­firm that the link existed and then make a men­tion some­how in my blog, show­ing your Trackback.

So now your blog entry is listed on my blog, show­ing your link­ing to it, and pro­vid­ing a snip­pet of the post usu­ally, mim­ic­k­ing the com­ments that might be left. Now we both ben­e­fit (from an SEO stand­point and a com­mu­nity stand­point) through this system.

I wish I could come up with a good metaphor for the Track­back sys­tem but it seems I’m at a loss. It’s such a dig­i­tal con­cept that I’m hard pressed to find a par­al­lel in our ana­log mechan­i­cal trans­mis­sion dri­ven world.