The View From 5280'

Here’s what I’m reading, watching, and listening to related to programming and software development as 2017 begins. I highly recommend checking out each of these works. 

Coder Radio

While I was commuting 40 minutes each way to my prior day job I employed a multitude of listening strategies beyond music to make that ambient time worthwhile. I zoomed through audio books, spent an ill-advised stint in 2014 guiltily listening to 104.3 The Fan, and regularly tuned into NPR. But, my favorite way to invest that valuable windshield time was to listen to podcasts, primarily those of the sporting and political variety. 

So, to continue learning while driving, walking, and riding the trainer I went on the hunt for a great programming podcast. I found it on my first try, thanks to this post: https://medium.com/@RobbCode/the-5-podcasts-that-have-helped-me-become-a-better-software-developer-b4fc1da3da6d#.6sht04k9m

The hosts of Coder Radio, Chris and Michael, showcase the breadth and depth of their experience by providing well-formulated and informed opinions on the latest tech news and how the newest trends affect life as a programmer. I started listening in early December and of late they’ve been analyzing the personal assistant space, test driving Google Home and Amazon’s Echo in an attempt to predict how useful these devices will actually be and which one will achieve prominence among developers and why. 

Podcasts are a perfect medium for getting nuance and humor across while also being informative and entertaining in an easily-digestible amount of time. Coder Radio checks all the boxes, and it’s the perfect audio supplement to the developer’s weekly diet of written content. 

Chaos Monkeys by Antonio García Martínez

I was gifted this book over the holidays and I haven’t been able to put it down since the calendar turned. García Martínez provides what I can only imagine to be one of the most frank, open, and detailed accountings in existence of how the sausage in Silicon Valley gets made. 

I’m just over halfway through and the experience has been eye-opening, to say the least. García Martínez paces the narrative at a quick clip and uses his experience navigating a startup through the twisting forest of Valley giants to demonstrate what it takes to make it big in tech. Along the way he develops a sharp picture of the absurd circumstances under which many of the forces molding our world have taken shape. 

While his experience is certainly unique, and he is brash and at times insane both by nature and by design, there’s plenty to be gleaned from his ambitious tale of entrepreneurship for anyone who works in tech and is contemplating the trajectory of their career. 

Perhaps the most useful piece of advice I’ve found thus far involves making oneself as prepared as humanly possible. García Martínez makes it clear early and often that a significant portion of the success he finds is due to his ability to read people and situations, and that ability largely stems from his preparation and research. He always does his due diligence and then some. Knowledge is power and this remains true in any walk of life. 

This book is a rollicking, sometimes inspiring, sometimes baffling, and ultimately fascinating account of Silicon Valley machinations. It’s a must-read for anyone who is thinking about working, or has worked, in a startup environment. 

The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

While attending CodeCraft last summer I began looking for a textbook, of sorts, that could provide some more depth and background to the actual practice of programming. I wasn’t searching for anything technical, there are plenty of those types of texts in existence and most questions are more easily answered by reading the docs, finding blog posts, or quickly heading over to Stack Overflow. 

I wanted something along the lines of On Being a Photographer by David Hurn and Bill Jay, a philosophical guidepost which I had read and kept close in a previous life as a photojournalism student. 

I found The Pragmatic Programmer listed atop several reading list posts and after going over reviews that spoke in reverential tones I procured my own gently used copy a couple of weeks ago. (I think it’s out of print at this point but I’m not entirely sure.) 

So far, through the first two sections, I’ve found what I was looking for. Hunt and Thomas provide a practical guide on how to work and live as a programmer that applies to any form of software development. It’s a great mix of philosophy and real-world advice on how to go about achieving clean and efficient code and how to put forth your best work. 

It’s one of those manuals that you can pick up and read from any spot and it’s structured in way that makes it easy to highlight the passages that are most relevant to you. It also holds up exceedingly well for having first been published in 1999. Technologies and languages evolve at a blistering pace but the strategies for how to craft and work with them remain largely the same. 

Some segments are certainly more applicable than others but I’m sure that this guide will prove to be a continually useful reference over the coming years, as I’m sure it has for multitudes of others. 

Lastly, as I continue to develop ForeCaddie in Angular 2 I’ve found a couple of great tutorials on Udemy covering development in the MEAN stack. (For those who may not know, MEAN stands for MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node.)

The courses are titled Angular 2 - The Complete Guide and Angular 2 and NodeJS - The Practical Guide to MEAN Stack Development and are both created by Maximillian Schwarzmüller, a freelance web developer and consultant. 

Schwarzmüller does a great job of clearly and concisely building up concepts and walking through crucial aspects of putting together a MEAN stack application within the Angular 2 framework. So far, I’d recommend each of these video courses, which contain over 24 hours of video combined, both if you’re just starting out in Angular 2 or interested in delving deeper and reinforcing your knowledge. 

My port of ForeCaddie to Angular 2 is officially underway. To this point, after a few hours of work, I’ve got a basic road map laid out and have scaffolded the application utilizing the Angular CLI. 

Before I go into more detail about how I’m going to structure and refactor this version and why the CLI is so great, I should explain what ForeCaddie is and why and how I built it in the first place. 

For our final assignment at CodeCraft, we were directed to build a full stack web app entirely from scratch in only two weeks. We would then present a ready-to-ship version (or close enough) of our creation at Demo Night. 

As an avid golfer and golf fan, I decided to make my own version of a virtual scorecard tracker, but one that contained more data than just a player’s score. This has already been done many times over, most successfully by Nike Golf and GolfNow, so I took some inspiration from those apps. For the sake of brevity, here’s a quick demo I recorded at CodeCraft:

I began the original project with a couple of primary goals in mind. First of all, I wanted to build something that utilized responsive design and Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS library. A mobile scorecard seemed like a great fit. (When I first went back to refactor the app, this goal would become the primary factor in my decision to move to Angular.)

Secondly, I wanted to build a program that took in and stored user input and, utilizing JavaScript, JQuery, and MongoDB, returned new and useful data from that initial input. Here, a user fills out a card and then sees their scoring averages over time reflected on the home page. 

I accomplished both of these goals on an operational level in two weeks, but there’s a great deal of improvement to be made in both categories. This leads to why I’m porting my project to the Angular 2 framework, and what I’ve accomplished thus far in doing so. 

As I mentioned above, the biggest flaw in my project was the mobile scorecard. While the original app does display responsively, it is not yet functionally responsive. A full card on a small screen is unwieldy and I want users to be able to easily track their score as they’re playing. This is where a single page application works beautifully. In Angular I can create one simple and reusable ‘hole’ component to quickly shuttle data in and out as a user enters scores for each hole and moves on.

In the initial version, for the sake of time and demonstration, I only included scorecard functionality for one course; Flatirons Golf Course in Boulder. In the Angular version, lacking the means to either buy or create a massive course database, I plan to implement the ability to build your own course as you go and then save that course data for future use. This would allow the app to be used at any track in the world and involves simply expanding my database schema and creating a reusable course component. 

My last pressing goal in this version is to add functionality to search data across variable lengths of time. A user should be able to see their scoring averages over any period of time they choose, whether it’s the past month, a past summer, or a single year. I’m also planning on expanding the home interface to allow users to view individual cards from rounds past. The way I’ll be structuring my app should make this faster for the user and practical to attain on the backend. 

Angular allows for the use of feature modules, which are a terrific way to partition your application and keep different functional interests separate from any potential conflicts. It also makes for easy reasoning about styling and program logic. I’ve decided to break ForeCaddie down into three modules, following the lines of my initial three-page architecture. 

First, there’s the required and overarching App Module which bootstraps the application and will contain each of the components, most importantly the authorization component, on my landing page. Next, I’ll be implementing a Home Module which will serve to house the quote, search, and user statistic components that a user will see upon logging in. Finally, I’ll be using a Card Module, which will contain the course and hole components. 

Lastly, a word on the Angular command line interface. It’s awesome. At CodeCraft we undertook learning Angular 2 while it was still in its 5th release candidate version. For educational purposes we followed the Ng docs (which are quite thorough and an indispensable resource) and created our project build system from the ground up. While useful for getting a grasp on deployment and how Angular works on a foundational level, this process is too time consuming to repeat for every project. 

The CLI makes it possible to actually start coding your components within minutes and gives you a fully-formed and functioning application out of the box. Even better, it comes complete with Karma and Protractor testing files to build off of. This is my first experience writing end-to-end tests and from what I can gather Protractor is exceptional because it allows you to script easy to read tests that act as a real browser running over your code. This provides a higher degree of confidence in the results of automatic testing. I’m excited to delve further into that. 

I’m sure I’ll encounter multiple challenges that force me to change the structure I’ve currently laid out and I’m certainly learning more as I go but as of now I’ve got a working landing page and a map to move along. My next steps will be to dial in the landing page styling (responsive background images can prove tricky) and build out my auth component. From there I’ll hook up my Node server and Mongo database before building out the Home and Card modules. In my next post I’ll dive into the nuts and bolts and share some code snippets, this was more of a bird’s-eye view of the project.  

This will serve as a quick re-introductory post and mission statement as I fire my Tumblr back up, which was last updated way back in 2012. 

Back then I was a recent graduate from the soon-to-be-defunct School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado working as a freelance sports photographer. 

Now, I am again a recent graduate, this time having earned a certificate in JavaScript-based web development from CodeCraft School of Technology in Boulder. 

This Tumblr initially served as a place to share some of my photographic work and my thoughts on Colorado’s sports teams. I’ll post about the Buffs, Nuggets, Avs, Broncos, and Rockies as the mood strikes but this space will begin to serve a new purpose. 

Going forward I’ll be utilizing this blog to, essentially, show my work. My primary goal is to write myself through personal projects, explaining my decisions and describing solutions to the challenges that I encounter as I go. One of the best ways I’ve found to improve my code and reinforce lessons learned is to explain the process to others.

First up, I’ll be working to port my dynamic golf scoring application called ForeCaddie to Angular 2. I’m currently hosting the original version, built using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript (as well as MongoDB), at https://forecaddiegolf.herokuapp.com/. 

I’ll also be chronicling my journey towards landing my first full-time position as a developer. I was fortunate enough to work with an early-stage startup called Meetup Golf this past fall but I’m now pursuing a more substantial landing pad from which to launch my programming career. I think it will prove helpful to share what works and what doesn’t while actually on the job search, and I’ll be writing about my efforts to gain valuable experience along the way. 

Lastly, as I’ve now lived in Denver for the past 4 years, I’ve changed the title of this page to reflect my current elevation. 

On Saturday I made my triumphant return to the Coors Events Center baseline, shooting once again for Scout.com. After shaking off a bit of rust in the first few minutes, getting into the flow of the game was just like hopping on a bike.

My goal during these last four home games is to push myself out of the comfort zone that I've developed. I'll be looking more for emotion and lesser-seen elements of a Colorado basketball game and trying to frame these things and the usual action in ways I previously haven't considered.

As for the team themselves, this was a gigantic win. The PAC-12 may be down this year but a win over the Arizona Wildcats who, much like the Buffs, are young and rebuilding is nothing to take lightly. This conference is as wide open as the Pacific Ocean and everything remains in play for this CU team.

4 years is an exceptionally long period of time.

For some perspective, that’s roughly the length of 20 (!) Kardashian marriages.

The University of Colorado football team went precisely 1,490 days between out-of-state victories. 24 road games, three head coaches, and countless miles came between Friday’s 17-14 triumph over freshly-minted rival Utah at Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City and October 27, 2007’s 31-26 victory over Texas Tech in dusty Lubbock, Texas.

That year I was a freshman living in Libby Hall, with a bit more hair, who foolishly believed in the enormous fallacy that was the Dan Hawkins Experience. During my sophomore year I witnessed two of the 24 road losses live and in person. One was a pre-ordained failure in Jacksonville, Florida against the Florida State Seminoles. The other was the heartbreaker that came at the hands, and feet, of the Nebraska Cornhuskers in America’s most scenic concrete methamphetamine dispensary. (Had to, I’m not sorry.)

It takes extraordinary circumstances for a streak like this to grow and the Golden Buffaloes found every possible way to nurture it. Colorado often found itself simply outmatched and outmanned in many of these games. But in contests where they stood a reasonable chance of competing, it was always “the little things” (read: horrendous penalties, poor special teams play, key injuries, missed scoring opportunities) that would begin snowballing at the beginning of each game and before you knew it a full-fledged avalanche was burying any slim chance remaining to the Buffs. They say you make your own luck and CU was conjuring every bad beat imaginable.

All of the familiar demons were in attendance on Friday, and not even the Church of Latter Day Saints could keep them at bay. The Buffs came out firing, scored first, and caught Utah flat-footed. But then, with a chance to begin to really put the pedal down late in the 1st quarter Toney Clemons dove for the pylon and in a twist that could only happen to CU lost the ball, which then proceeded to bounce through the end zone for a touchback. However, the Buffs' defense remained stout and took a 10-0 lead into halftime.

Following the break, the road demons reared their ugly heads again. CU’s defense started receiving gashing plays from Utah’s offense. The requisite quota of bad penalties at crucial moments was met with numerous false starts and holding calls. Throw in a bad turnover, a no-call on an obvious facemask, and a poor penalty on Parker Orms’ vicious but clean hit and you could faintly hear that same old song and dance drifting over the waters of the Giant Saline Puddle. But clinging to a 17-14 lead in the dying minutes, CU’s injury-ravaged and much maligned defense stood up to The Streak. They held Utah in field goal range and let fate take care of the rest.

To conquer something that becomes so enormous that it takes on a life of its own, a few things need to happen. You need to stare that thing straight in the face, accept it for what it is, and then claw past it by any means necessary. Most importantly, it takes some extraordinary circumstances to break your way. This time, it was the opposing kicker who was missing chip-shot field goals.

Tonight the Colorado Avalanche face off against the Detroit Red Wings in the over-sized trash bin otherwise known as Joe Louis Arena. (Full disclosure: I've never actually been there, but I've heard stories.)

Two days ago the Denver Broncos squared off against the Oakland Raiders in what is affectionately referred to as the Black Hole and less affectionately referred to as the Overstock.com Coliseum. This game took on the strange semblance of a holy war with the amount of vitriol spewed at Tim Tebow from the black-clad Raider "faithful" but that's a whole different story.

While these games still carry import, with standings being tight in both the NHL's Western Conference and the NFL's AFC West division, they are nowhere near as deeply meaningful as they were when I was growing up along the Front Range in the late 1990's.

Despite attending contests featuring all of Colorado's major teams before 1996, my first truly great and vivid sports memory is that of the inaugural Avalanche season. I was lucky enough to attend a few early-round playoff games and I will never forget staying up for Uwe Krupp's Game 4, 3rd-overtime goal against the Florida Panthers with my Dad in our basement. I still have all the signature white pom-poms given out at McNichols Arena that spring thanks to my uncle Jason.

That first campaign began with a gritty 3-2 victory over the Red Wings, birthing a rivalry which would grow exponentially when the Avs acquired all-world badass Claude Lemieux who had a penchant for destroying faces. The teams would meet again in the Western Conference Finals that year where the underdog Avalanche would prevail in 6 literally hard-fought games and sports' greatest rivalry for the next 5+ years was born. From goalie fights, to Detroit's always-annoying habit of sacrificing octopi-I will never understand or respect this tradition, no matter how many times it's explained to me-to the familiar characters both righteous (Joe Sakic, Patrick Roy, Peter Forsberg) and evil (Chris Osgood, Kris Draper, Steve Yzerman), an Avalanche-Red Wings game was appointment viewing nation-wide.

The summer following the Avs' magical run to Colorado's first professional sports championship I would fall asleep every night listening to the highlight CD of the radio calls from that season's biggest moments. At my Aunt Therese's wedding in the summer of '97, I deliberately dumped red punch all over my tuxedo in order to be able to change into my Avalanche t-shirt, which featured an Avalanche player bashing a Red Wings skater, at the reception. (See photo at bottom, and yes, that's me in the coke-bottle glasses. I miss those.)

My Broncos fandom began much earlier. I was born during a Monday Night Broncos-Raiders match-up during which my mother delivered an ultimatum to my father, who had grown up in Northern California rooting for Oakland. "You will not raise our son to be a Raider fan." So that was that.

During my formative years, the Raiders were awful and the Broncos were at the pinnacle of football with John Elway firing Nerf footballs 100 yards down field at Mile High in between throwing actual footballs for actual touchdowns. Mike Shanahan, Denver's greatest coach, famously carried a heavy grudge against late Raiders' owner Al Davis for unceremoniously firing him earlier in his career. These factors as well as the dichotomy between each team's image and the history of success at both organizations, stoked the rivalry at it's height. In modern times, both teams are in a perpetual state of flux constantly looking for direction and are generally producing lackluster football.

As is common knowledge, the Broncos' back-to-back Super Bowl victories came sandwiched in between the Avalanche's two Stanley Cup victories leading my elementary school self to facetiously believe that being a Colorado sports fan was awesome and my teams would always kick ass.

Since 2001 both teams have been in a lurching pattern of decline revealing a hard truth about rivalries. Rivalries in professional sports begin due to success as much as, if not more than, geographic proximity. Fans may carry that same hatred with them for life but when the players who created that feeling are all retired and both teams have fallen on tough times, it's hardly a rivalry in the meaningful and true sense of the word. There will always be "Raider Hater" t-shirts and "Red Wings Suck" chants but they'll never carry the same weight and immediacy that they once did.

On Sunday I watched the latest installment of Broncos v. Raiders at my Aunt and Uncle's house in Erie. They have a 6-year-old son named Ryan who watched with us in his favorite Broncos t-shirt, not unlike myself at that age. At halftime when the Broncos were trailing he stated matter-of-factly, "The Broncos always lose to the Raiders, huh." My Uncle Don and I looked at each other and then at Ryan and Don said, "It didn't always use to be this way." Of course, Denver would come back to win in emphatic fashion, but he's right about that in more ways than one.

Stoneham Church. On my way east to Holyoke to shoot the Colorado Cup, the annual match play competition between the University of Colorado and Colorado State University golf teams, I was looking for some random and interesting buildings to silhouette against the blue and orange colors of the rising sun.

The USA Pro Cycling Challenge. Yesterday, the inaugural race made its way from Gunnison to Aspen in what has come to be called the Silver Queen Stage. The riders summited two passes, Cottonwood and Independence, each over 12,000 feet in altitude placing them as the highest stage race locales on the globe.

I unfortunately was unable to secure a ride along, and was initially bummed I had to stay in the city, but it worked out for the best. The energy in Aspen was comparable to a college football Saturday, this town loves its bicycles, and there was plenty going on. The day was a great learning experience.

George Hincapie, best known for keying teammates such as Lance Armstrong, Alberto Contador, and Cadel Evans to victory in France, took the stage with an impressive burst in town to outpace Aspen favorite Tejay Van Garderen, who would earn the yellow jersey with his 2nd place finish. Van Garderen and I both went to Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins, though I only knew him in passing. Since I'm not shooting any other stages, it's safe to pull for him to roll across the finish line first in downtown Denver on Sunday.

Catching the finish was a blur and I was focused on nailing the shots surrounding it for the paper, but along the way I was lucky to find a few interesting features, like a racer fresh off her finish of the Aspen Snowmass Women's Pro Stage Race downing a PBR while watching the men summit Independence.

International Sevens Rugby. On Saturday the Gentleman of Aspen Rugby Football Club hosted the Mexican National 7s Rugby team at Wagner Park in the heart of Aspen. 7 on 7 rugby differs significantly from the traditional game. It is much, much faster and consists of two 7 minute halves (sometimes 10 minutes) leading to quicker and more frequent scoring. The field is the same size so each player covers much more ground at a much quicker pace. The two clubs contested four matches throughout the day, which resulted in one draw, one Mexico win, and two victories for the home side. Through much of the day El Tri looked significantly faster, but the altitude and travel may have caught up with them leading to a 19-12 Aspen win in the day's final match.

The event is hosted by Norm Clasen (who also happens to be the man who shot the Marlboro ads for over 20 years) at his ranch nestled below Sopris Mountain. Norm has been involved in polocrosse for over two decades and after a brief hiatus is starting up this annual festival anew.

The tournament featured a team from New South Wales, Australia, where the game is most popular and most competitive, squaring off against American teams with players from Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and the East Coast. One unique feature of the sport is that men, women, boys, and girls can all compete against each other fairly. It comes down to the horse, the rider's management of that horse, and stick skills to ultimately be successful.

The game itself has relatively straightforward rules. To begin with, in any given tournament a player may only use one horse for the duration of the tournament, adding an element of endurance and putting a premium on "horse management" techniques.

The match is divided into periods called "chukkas" of 6-8 minutes in length with a mandatory minimum 2 minute break in between to give the horses a chance to hydrate-they're often given syringes of electrolytes-and recover energy.

The field is 160 yards long and 60 yards wide with a 100-yard-long midfield and two penalty areas-think endzones-of 30 yards in length. It sounds like a large field but the horses cover that distance incredibly fast. 6 players are on the field at a time and each is numbered 1, 2, or 3 on each team. 1s are the attackers, 2s are the midfielders, and 3s are the defenders. A 1 is the only player from that team allowed in their attacking end, all 2s must stay in the midfield, and 3s can be in the midfield or their team's defensive end. There are no goalies and the goal posts stand 8 feet apart. The ball used is like a small dodgeball in size, with heft but soft so the horses won't be harmed when hit.

That's the gist of it. Perhaps the most interesting rule is that the attacking player cannot possess the ball when crossing into the attacking zone. They must either bounce the ball over the line before entering and catch it again in the zone or be passed to by a teammate who is outside of the zone, there is no offside rule.

The horses are treated like professional athletes, ankles are wrapped securely, saddles are taken off whenever there is a break, and their hydration levels are monitored closely. They sometimes even receive acupuncture after a match to relieve pressure. One match-with all of its sprints, turns, stops, and starts-is the equivalent of running a mile or farther at a dead gallop. The players told me these steeds are probably some of the best conditioned horses on Earth, and I believe them.

Click through to Flickr for the best image quality.

Blast the Mass. The Mountain States Cup made its annual stop in Snowmass this weekend featuring a collection of slaloms, downhill, and cross country races. Race favorite Jay Henry of Avon, CO was unseated by 18-year-old Howard Grotts from Durango, CO, and by a healthy margin at that. Grotts wasn't even sure he could accept the prize money due to his amateur status as he prepares for the junior world championships.