Golang Again

I first read the Golang spec in 2011. Then I spent 2012 studying Erlang and Haskell syntax. Today I went through the Golang spec again - it's been a while!

While I am on tract to retain certain commercial work while pursuing a few months of studies... I must remind myself to remain undaunted by this complexity. Fear is a mind-killer, indeed. It doesn't help the rate of learning, at all.

More time spent on client work. Still not a lot of vacationing in sight. Let's see how long this goes on for. On the other hand, budget control is shaping up nicely. I really don't remember the last time I got charged RM2.50 for food at a mamak restaurant in Petaling Jaya.

Current readings:

Current toolbox:
- Golang for glue
- Cayley for graph traversal
- PostGIS with SFCGAL for spatial storage/queries

On the Curation of Communities

Funny how commerce (riding on technology) and technology (read: social media) have swung so much towards community management. Growing up with a pastor is paying off nicely :P or so it would seem. The general training for religious leadership provides one with operational practices that dive into micro-economics, behavioural psychology, rhetorical, narrative curation... all that and more... sans academic language ;)

Old Hat: Destroy the Margins #untrend

I'm at a hipster brunch place. Next to them is chap fan. One has zero customers. Guess which one? We were talking about chap fan supply-chain optimisation. But I think here's an old, and deeper, market inefficiency. We need to make western chap fan. Brunch for the masses. It's a nice neat optimisation problem. We need to destroy margins.

Guaranteed Monthly Raises

Thought about this before: first chance I get, I'm implementing salary schemes that guarantee a monthly raise. So easy, and so much psychological sugar. Once you do a DCF, it should never look like you're losing out by staying put in a job.

Exploring the Possible Reasons Why I May be a Bad Fit for Professional Services

Well, probably the real reason I'm a bad fit for the industry is that I'm fairly altruistic.

When I meet a fool who wants to pay me to become more clever, I tend to tell him to keep his money and to learn more patience.

Edit: I take that back, a more fundamental reason is that professional services are mainly vested in their reputations as a commodity, and while I fully understand how to manage a reputation-oriented operation, I myself am not a reputation-oriented operation hahaha.

"Mediocre!" said the War Boys

The world makes me sad, today. It's not the sick fucks making Vines of drowning people - at least, those people are interesting. It's the massive cadre, whose notion of enlightenment is commercial success. Their mediocrity grates against my sensibilities - as I'm sure, mine would grate against theirs. They are devoid of antipathy, they scream, absent of taste.

Why I Program Computers (2015)

I expect this to change from time to time:

1. Intellectual curiosity / boredom - people bore me, I believe that people are quantifiable, no one believes me, so I think it would be fun to demonstrate a person in a machine (since 2007 or so).
2. Commercial value - I want to know how to manage software engineers (since 2009 or so).

Those are the first things that come to mind, but aside from that I probably did find computational finance to be interesting when I was reading about it in 2006/7. Also, when I was working with a social enterprise in 2007/8 I did think it would expedite many projects we were talking about if we could just build the software on our own, immediately.