To code or not to code, that is nit the question …

I can’t say without feeling arrogant (which proves nothing I know) that I’m a coder.

I started teaching myself coding while I was in high school during my last year to be precise.

I started by reading a book about C and another about pseudo language.

Then OO approach was the best thing around, so I read a book about Java.
I liked Java a lot, today I don’t hate it but nothing more.

Straight after high school, I got my first computer and started UNI. It was an electronic course, I enjoyed coding but at the time it couldn’t even compare to how I felt about electronics.

In UNI, I joined the Linux club, I followed the all Alexis tutorial, learned a lot of thing on Linux, along C++ and Perl.

After a two years course, I finally decided to get into computing and 5 years later, got out with a Engineering degree, as of 2013 I’m working as a consultant, in a big company on their(mostly boring)  systems.

During those “adventures”, I coded stuff.

I didn’t finished shit, except school projects but I coded stuff, from IRC Client in C++ to 2D Game engine using DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0. In the middle I have coded scripts in Perl and python doing various task. I don’t like to talk about it much, since I failed to complete things everytime but let’s say that I did my share of failed side project…

Despite those failure I can say without being cocky that I can say that I’m a bit of a nerd, at least some people call me that.

I wanted to join Open Source projects, I still do but never got motivated enough.
I read source code though. Learned a lot of thing that way but to “cross over” is something I failed to do a lot of time (thanks to all those great project anyway).

I had many sides project. I never truly finished one like I said before. If I did the portfolio I want to build for while now, would have been done by now. Thanks to school who forced me to finish stuff otherwise I would doubt even more my capacity of doing something on my own …

I’m not complaining, life is much bigger than what you can do on your IDE late at night. After all I gained experience opening and running my own company for almost three years, I completed my engineering degree, had mindless sex each and every time I could, traveled …

But I feel that I’ll never be satisfied with myself until I go to the process of coding something of my own. What I want is to build up by myself my own credibility.

So  I asked myself this : What is it that I am doing wrong ?

The reply came shortly straight after : EVERYTHING.

I should focus on one thing at the time, organise myself to do so and to stop dreaming !

In order work I need to work my side projects, like I work those boring projects do for a living. Except that it needs to be fun !

Will see if I can soon …

Sweet randomness

Hi,

I came back from my holidays not to long ago. I went to Ivory Coast. It was awesome !

It changed my perspective on many things, maybe not for ever but enough so that I can start to take more concrete actions now.

I want to do many things, from personal coding project to life goals. That’s not bad in itself, the problem is that I commited to too much at the same time. As a result even tough I’m making progress, I cannot be satisfied with myself since it’s never significant.

Randomness is sweet but counter productive. This trip made me realise that I can’t do everything and that it’s alright since I don’t need to.

So in the next few weeks, I’ll try to put that state of mind into everything I do. I don’t know where it leads me but small steps aren’t enough for me anymore …

Next time I blog, it’s to show some code, talk about concrete stuff or nothing.

Good luck to me !

Holidays …

Soon I’ll be in holidays.
It’s been few years that I didn’t get real long holidays.

I think that I will totally disconnect from everything and everyone, just to get enough quite to think about me and only the great ( I hope ) me !

I’ll be gone by august.

Slowly but …

Well well.
It’s been a while but here I am again with some thoughts.

I learned a lot about myself these last few month. My aim to get things done is still going strong and I did many things but not regarding my Upnp project, at least not directly. In short I’ve succeeded to acquire some side contracts, to get out of my boring job for a better one, to specify my professional project with real deadlines and achievable goals, to have a better health and face my failures once and for all.

I did all that but i did not get a real start at my upnp project. Oh sure I’ve coded stuff but failed to have a coherent code base, i have spent my time to restart thing over and over again.
I think that the reason for this is that if motivation is the fuel to get things done. Then to achieve things you also need to put that fuel into the right vehicle. Or you won’t go far …

After some hard thinking, I think i got the overall structure of my vehicle :

• skills
• discipline
• focus

I know it’s kind of obvius but I read so many post turned motivation speeches that I dared to think that the internet forgot about those…

Skills

That one is the most obvious of all. The good thing about programming is that all it really takes is practice and knowledge.

With the internet thingy ( depending of your goals and talents, at least for North countries ) knowledge is a given. Adding to that, the fact than practice also gives you knowledge.

Madame est servit.

Practice is a bit trickier since you need vision, patience and obviously time.

Vision means to know what you really want and mean to do.

Patience well it comes when you need it, if it fails you, it simply means that you lack motivation.

How do you make time ? Simply by taking it. Time and death are the only thing fair to everyone.

24hrs in a day. You want time? There it is, punk. Deal with it.

Discipline

In real life many people success doing things without discipline (or so it seems). While they have my respect as a programmer. I just hate working with such people. So imagine my surprise and the explosion of self loathing that came straight after when I realized that I lacked discipline… For almost 2 years … While acting like nothing is going on …

How did I get over the self loathing?
By remembering that perfection is out of this world and realizing that I only need to have enough discipline to keep my focus when I have to.

Focus

All of this brings us to the motor of our vehicle : focus !
As a programmer you can be crap at everything, you can even lack fuel but if you lack focus you should stop coding.

Have you ever heard of a coder who can’t focus ? A good one ??

To get focus, there’s only one way and it’s to have his/her priorities right ! How well I don’t have all the answers yet…

Focus is what will keep you from those websites you love while coding. Focus is what will help you avoid dumb mistakes. Focus is what will help you achieve this feeling of satisfaction and pride straight after a coding session. Focus is what makes your motivation grows day after day. Focus is your father and your special friend, you crazy bitch !

That last one might have been a bit over the top, well fuck it as long as I succeed at sharing the value I put in focus. I’ll assume it.

What about having a life dude ?

That’s it for me folks, it took me 3 month to realize all this but to achieve this I also know that I need the right environment. You don’t build a vehicle in a burning factory, same here you don’t get things done (well) if you don’t have some balance in your life Go out, have fun, get those administrative shit out of the way and then come back to your side projects !

So let’s all get things done while having fun in our lives !

See ya.

The good, the bad and the ugly …

Well regarding my personal project of writing an Upnp Server in C++, I got some news.

The good news is that I didn’t give up … I’m not working as regulary as I would want since I am quite active on some contract I took on the side but I’m still on it.

The bad news is that I seem to have a hard time to focus on anything these weeks, part of the reason is my daily job which is for some month now pretty boring. The other is a simple lack of organisation in my life in general. Both of them can be fixed and I intend to do so in the near future…

The ugly is that working on this project made me realise how clueless I am on the subject of A/V processing. Which made me think that I should probably start by understanding how a simple media player works before having the ambition of delivering anything around a network …

Well that’s it for now, maybe in my next post I would gather some technical data on what is it I am doing exactly but for now, I just don’t feel like it.

New year, new project !

After a lot of inefficient thinking, I finally decided to get started on the idea of creating from scratch a Upnp DLNA server in C++. I’ll keep tracks on this blog of my progress.

I’m usually all for the “don’t reinvent the wheel” but my small experience taught me that there is no better way, for me  to really understand something than doing it myself.

Besides it should be fun !

In my next post I’ll put more details about it.

I’m fairly confident that this time, I’ll keep my motivation to finish that thing !

Ebook nonsense

I don’t blog much since I opened this blog, It’s a good thing I am not in a rush.

I came to talk about Ebooks.

You see I’m a french dude and a huge fan of Fantasy. I read other kind of books as well but since I started reading Fantasy, couple of years ago, I just can’t stop. I am just amazed each time I read a book from Glen Cook, Robin Hobb, Brandon Sanderson and others, at the style, precision, care and suspense they are able to put in their books. As a matter of fact I read more than I watch TV, so please trust me when I tell you, that I spend a lot of cash buying books.

So you can guess how happy I was when my girlfriend of the time, now ex-girlfriend, offered me 2 years ago, the greatest gift ever : a sony e-reader (not that I know if it’s the best e-reader).

It’s the kind of thing I would have never thought of buying, simply because I liked paper and still do, as a matter of fact I still buy a quite a lot of paper book. However that thing got me hooked on ebooks, yes EPub is not that great, especially if you want to read technical books (as I experienced) or any kind of books which involves more than text (as I experienced) or ancient books (as I have seen during one of my old job). At the time I found my reader slow and not great on scaling which is the reason I didn’t use it that much, last year I have bought only 9 ebooks.

Now here come the non-sense. Recently I started to buy ebooks again, however every ebook I want to buy from diesel and other sites, is not available in my country…

I dig the a bit and found out that you need to have an american card, to buy the shit.

I would have never believed that a e-commerce would refuse me to spend my money, whatever the reason. I’m sure it’s not their fault but the fault of some institution who has not yet realized that this can only lead to people obtaining their books, by non-legal means (or maybe they did but just don’t give a fuck).Those people should have looked at the history of digital content to see that the more you screw people over your products, the more they screw with your products. With that in mind they should have also learned that DRM and other restriction on ebooks cost money and are ineffective since you can get the shit anyway. It just takes time and some people really motivated.

The thing that makes really no-sense to me about that geographical restriction, is that the same rule does not apply on the paper version of these books. That for me proves that it is not meant to protect the interest of the author. So I wonder why do they put geographical restrictions ? Oh I’m sure it’s for profit, I just can’t see who profits from people like me not being able to buy ebooks. I’ll check it out.

I was planning to buy a new e-reader but now I wonder for what reason, It feels like investing money in a device to be screwed over by some geographical restrictions (amongst other thing). There are a lot of french ebooks (even if we are quite late on the subject)I know but the idea of being screwed disturbs me and my rectum… deeply… and it is not comfortable. At the price I would pay this shit, I want to be comfortable.

So as usual I will wait, until they have no other choice than changing their mind. In the meantime, I’ll manage.