Jared’s Blog

A discussion I was having with my boss prompted me to write this and I thought that it was too good not to share with the world.

My problem is with the Internet community as a whole placing so much importance on SEO and Google SEO in particular. I believe it’s possible to rank highly on search engines without SEO. I believe it’s futile to optimize for an algorithm that 1) you can’t and won’t ever see and 2) is ever changing. Human powered search is starting to gain ground (like Wikia and Mahalo, or even Digg and Delicious). And as technology progresses, the algorithms are going to get better at separating useful content from spam. I believe that Google (and others) could do a much better job of giving results if no one did any SEO at all. If people took the time they spend on SEO and instead spent that time on improving their site, coming up with new features, thinking about accessibility, etc., they (and the Internet as a whole) would be much better off.

The more I think about it, the more I consider myself anti-social. I feel most comfortable when I’m alone. Going days without leaving my house or speaking to anyone doesn’t bother me. Silence is only awkward because of others expectations, not because I feel awkward. Making conversation or small talk is a chore.

While growing up, I was always a shy kid. I was even shy around family I knew, but didn’t see all that often. For instance, I had an uncle, aunt, and cousins who live about an hour away. We’d see them maybe 5-6 times a year so it was never more than a few months in between. It’s not like these people were strangers. Still, every time we pulled up to their house, I felt a slight tinge of anxiety.

In high school, the most socially awkward time in one’s life, the biggest social anxiety problem I had was giving talks in Speech class or dancing with a girl for the first time at a dance. Most everyone else was the same way. I also never felt like I was part of any clique and had friends in all the major ones (jocks, nerds, goths, etc.).

College was relatively the same as high school in terms of befriending new people. Though I think it was in college that I started to become increasingly critical of others. As a customer service rep for a major broadband supplier in the US, for the first time, I was introduced to a large number of people outside the world I had become familiar with. I can remember sitting in my cube one evening and having the realization that the world was collectively a whole lot dumber than I could have imagined. Sure, I had met stupid and ignorant people in my life before. What I didn’t realize was how many of them there are on this planet. It felt a little like Luke Wilson’s character in Idiocray after he wakes up in the future and figures out that he’s the smartest person alive.

Then again, maybe I’m just an overly critical, pre-judgmental asshole who needs to stop selfishly thinking he knows how the world should be. I’m going to go back in my hole now.

You may have noticed a lack of posting in the last several weeks from yours truely. I have been putting in extreme hours at work. The good news is we finally launched our Ruby on Rails based site on Monday. For a team of 3 guys, 2 of whom started the project without knowing a lick of Ruby, we managed to crank out a solid app in 9 months.

This launch is especially exciting for me as I did pretty much all of the visual design. There’s a ton of work to be done and I best be getting back to it.

TheHoneymoon.com Check it out!

Let’s play a game. It’s called “What’s under the sheet?” It looks human. It’s been sitting in that exact position for at least 3 hours. Whatever it is under the sheet, it’s wearing shoes because I could see them from the back when I got close. Unfortunately none of us in the office were brave enough to see what was under the sheet.

Yesterday, I came in to work just like any other day. While checking some bugs out, I went to load the staging version of our site. Lo and behold, the site was down. No big deal, I thought, maybe Apache died and needs to be restarted. I’d been messing with the Apache configs quite heavily last week, and so I just assumed that was what caused the problem.

I brought up my console and typed in the ssh command to which there was no response. The server is located in my building, so I walked over to see what the deal was. The server was still running, so I gave it a restart. Though Linux is known for being rock solid, you’d be amazed at the problems a restart will solve. Well, it finished restarting and still no connection.

After poking around some more, I discovered the server wasn’t even online. I couldn’t ping out. I tried disabling the firewall for awhile, no luck. I tried changing the DNS to OpenDNS, still nothing. Finally, I walked over to the IT admin’s office and asked him if there had been any changes over the weekend. Of course his reply was a “Yes…”

It seems that over the weekend, they decided to switch the IP block they had. And it wasn’t like a subnet changed, the entire block was different. A change like this doesn’t just happen. There needs to be planning done so that server configurations can be changed, DNS needs time to propagate, people need to be notified. Apparently, I wasn’t on that “to notify” list. I was told “we tried to find you on Friday, but we couldn’t.” Bullshit. I was in the office all day on Friday and the IT admin even came in to our office earlier in the day.

I spent the first half of my day yesterday dealing with getting our staging server up and running. All that really needed to be done was to change a few config files. A task I could’ve easily prepared for last weekend and finished in minutes yesterday had I known in advance. That kind of inconsiderate behavior is unprofessional and it really pissed me off.

I first learned of the Ruby Users of Minnesota (RUM) through the Rails Pragmatic Studio that I took last December. I thought it would be a good place to pick up some new ideas and skills once I got more comfortable with Ruby and Rails. Soon afterward, I began working with James, who regularly attended the monthly meetings. There were many times I would hear “you would fit in well with the guys at RUM” or “some of the guys at the last RUM meeting were talking about that.”  I always told myself that I should check it out, but I’d always forget about when the meeting was or I’d have something else going on that night.

Well, last month I finally decided I was going to make it to the meeting no matter what and I’m glad I went. I found the new location, the Acadia Cafe in downtown (or is it uptown?), with relative ease and took a seat in the auditorium style room. I probably should’ve sat closer to the middle of the room but the anti-social in me took over and made sat in the back of the room.

As the first presentation began, I thought to myself how weird and nerdy the casual cafe goer would think we were. There’s a bunch of people all staring at laptops and talking about writing code. Only the LAN parties we used to hold back in college rivaled the dork level in that room. Anyway, the first presentation immediately grabbed my attention. I had seen HAML before and didn’t think much of it. However, it’s CSS equivalent, SASS, was completely new to me and I think I had a little nerdgasm right there in my seat. Consequently, I haven’t done anything with it since, but I no doubt will.

The next presentation was on telecommuting/telecomputing. It was actually more of a discussion on the pros and cons. I’m a big fan of working from home and in my situation, I find there are little cons. Our other developer telecommutes 100% of the time, so my contact with him is through email and IM anyway. When I’m in the office, I usually put headphones on, and program away on my laptop; a task I can easily do anywhere there is an Internet connection. I also find that when I work from home, I am more productive. I can just put some loud music on, get buried on my project, and focus for long periods of time without being interrupted. A lot of the cons discussed in the meeting centered around project-specific metrics such as number of developers, distance of developers from each other, and language/locale difficulties. None of these are problems for me, so I only gave it half my attention.

The final two presentations were demos of projects. The first, FanChatter.com, was kind of cool, but I don’t think it’s anything I would use. The other, Lean-To.com, a project management app, was also of little interest to me.

As I said, I was relatively anti-social during most of the night, but I did end up talking to one gentleman in between presentations. Dave was just getting started with Rails and was having trouble getting his database data into his view pages. Drawing on my TA experiences, I tried to instruct him as best I could, but I have a feeling a lot was lost in translation. However, I gave him my card and invited him to email me if he had any questions. Maybe he did get it, because I haven’t heard from him yet.

I’m looking forward to the next meeting and whatever people come up with to present. The meetings are open to presentations by anyone, so maybe I can demo The Honeymoon once we finish it.