A year and a half ago, as I was going from miserable job interview to the next, I was asked what I think about code review. At the time I said that I thought it was the most important organizational aspect of writing code. I mean you can do agile, waterfall, work on games or mobile apps or business applications, use the latest or the oldest, the best or the worst technology and still code reviewing helps. I still think that way now, but recent experiences with the process have left me thinking of refining my understanding of it. This blog post is about that.

The Good

Why is code review good? The very first thing it does is that it forces you to acknowledge your work. You can be tired and fix one little thing in a lazy way and forget about it and it might work or it might break something, but when you know you have to publish what you did you do things less lazy, more documented, more thought out. It doesn't matter that no one will ever look carefully on the review, as that you are thinking there is the possibility of it.

Second, and obvious, is that any mistakes you made are more likely to come to the surface when someone looks at the code. It doesn't mean people blame you for mistakes, it means the mistakes don't come and bite you in the ass later, when your work is supposed to be making money for some poor bastard somewhere. This is very important because we tend to work on systems more complex that we can or are willing to understand. If a group of people who together understand the system is reviewing work, though, you learn not only about the inevitable code errors you introduce, but also about the errors in judgement or understanding or in the assumptions you made.

Then there is the learning aspect of it. Juniors learn from seniors reviewing their work, they learn from code reviewing each other and everybody learns from reviewing work made by anyone else. It opens up perspectives. I mean, you can review some method that was copy pasted four times in order to do the same thing to four different objects and learn how not to that, ever! No matter how much you would want to when coming in at work hungover and hoping for death a little. For example, I've only recently learned to comment on my own code review before submitting it. Some might say comments in the code should do that, but sometimes you need more, as anchors for discussion, which obviously cannot be carried in code comments. (well, they can, but please don't do that)

And there is more! You get documentation of the code for free. When someone doesn't understand what the hell is going on, they ask questions, which leads to you answering in whatever code review software you use. This will remain there for others to peruse long after you've left the company and went on to slightly RGB shifted pastures. I still dream of a non intrusive system that would connect reviews to the code in your IDE, so you can always see a list of comments and annotations for whatever you are looking at.

One of the benefits is that code review makes everyone in the team write code in the same way. For better or worse. I will detail that in a moment, but think about what it means to read a piece of code, trying to understand it, then switch to the next one and see it written in a completely different style. You waste a lot of time.

Finally, I think the confidence code review gives you can lead not only to better code, but also faster code. More on this comes next. This is controversial, but I think you can use code review to check your code, but only if you trust the reviewers. You might fire off commit after commit after commit, confident that your peers will check what you, normally, would have to double and triple check before committing. It's risky, but with the right team it can do wonders.

The Bad

OK, so it's a great thing, this code review stuff. I knew that, you knew that, why are you wasting your finger strength? Well, there is a dark side to code review. I've heard some purists insist on some rules for code review with which I am not completely comfortable with, for example. I invite said purists who also read my blog to come rant in the comments below. Also my recent experience which touches on said rules and introduces others. Let me detail the bad.

There are programmers and programmers, projects and projects, management and management. Where one developer writes some code and hopes people will look at it carefully and instruct them on what they could improve, some people just lazily write something that kind of works, thinking whoever will do the code review will also do the work of making their code remotely usable. Where in some projects developers remain working after hours because they want to see their code do good and the project succeed, in others people couldn't care less: they do their time and break the door when the bell rings. Don't expect careful code reviews then. And there is the management issue, which might protect the developers from anything unrelated to coding or they might pester them with meetings and emails and processes that break concentration, waste time and surely do not help with the attention span of a code reviewer. But in all of the worst cases above, code review is still good, just less effective.

One of the rules I was talking about above was to never commit code unless its code review was accepted. Note the bold font on the never. It was like that whenever I heard the rule. Sounded bold. But I completely disagree with that.

First, if you have developers that you can't trust to commit something, don't let them commit. Either find someone better or do something with their privileges, a system that prevents them from committing. Same goes for people you can't trust to read the code review and update the code afterward a bad or defective commit.

Second of all, you might work on a file that should appear in more code reviews. No, the system where you do the work, ask for review, then shelve the files so you can work on the next thing doesn't work! It takes time, concentration and leads to bad resolves that break your code. Just commit the first thing and move to the next. When your review comes back full of bugs, just finish what you are working on, commit that, then return to the code and implement fixes for the issues found. That is a problem for code review software that can't understand a file committed after changes were made to it doesn't mean you want to include all the changes since time immemorial. That's a software issue, though. Just create a new review and somehow link it to the other, via comments or notes. Creating a personal branch for all developers or other crazy ideas like that are also crap.

Not committing work that you've done means delaying your other work, testing, finding problems in it, etc. Having to juggle with software in order to submit to a rigid process that is indifferent to the overall pace of development and the realities of your work is stupid. Just work, commit, review, test, rework. It's what we do.

It's also, I think, an error in judgement to force code review. As good as I think it is, you can work without it. It is an optional process, so keep it that way. Conditioning development on an optional process makes it mandatory. It might sound like a truism, but people don't seem to realize things unless you articulate them.

And then there is human nature. If you ask me to code review for you, I will stop what I am doing and perform the review, because if I don't, you can't commit. It hurts my work, because it breaks my concentration. It hurts your code review, because I am not focused enough. Personally I am best at reviewing in the morning. None of the organizational crap happened yet, no meetings, no emails telling me to write other emails, no chat messages asking questions that I have no desire to answer. I am rested, I am a bit pumped from making the minimum physical movements required to get me to the office and so I am ready to singlemindedly focus on your review. It shouldn't matter that you committed the code yesterday. I'll get to it when I get to it.

The Ugly

The ugly is not only bad, but also disturbing. It's not a characteristic of the code review per se, but is more related to the humans involved in the process. Code review has some nasty side effects on certain people and in certain situations. Let's discuss this for a bit.

I was saying above that it's good everybody writes in a certain way. That actually may stop people from innovating in the writing of code. Do it this way, that's the pattern we're using, you will hear, without the slightest hint of the possibility to improve on that pattern. Same thing might happen with new ideas that you might feel need to be introduced in the project, or some refactoring, or some other creative work that would make you proud and motivated to continue to do good work. As I said above, it's a people problem, not a process problem, but when it happens, it stifles innovation, creativity and ultimately the fucks you give on what happens to the project as a whole.

Code reviews, like any other communication medium, may be abused. People may be attacked or shamed by others who don't really like them. They might not even be junior and senior, as it might involve time in the firm rather than technical skill, or some other hierarchical or social advantage. Ego fights can also erupt in code reviews, which can exacerbate the problem if they are blocking reviews. Arguments are good, pissing contests are ugly, that kind of thing.

Reviews waste time. That's really not a people problem, it's a process problem. All processes, that is. You need to put in the work to do a good review. Just glancing over and saying "it looks good", without trying to understand what the code is supposed to do, is almost worse than refusing to do the review. I am plenty guilty of that. Instead of thinking about what the guy did and trying to help, part of my brain just keeps rummaging on what my current development task is. This is another argument to separate reviewing from code writing. You need your zone for both. When code review waste rather than spend time, that's ugly.

Finally, I think one major issues with code review is that it encourages lazing off on unit testing, proper testing, refactoring and even simple writing of the code. This is a management issue, mostly, and it's ugly like vomited shit. When people write horrid code filled with bugs assuming that code review will fix their lack of interest, that's ugly. When you are urged, more or less vigorously, to skimp on the unit or manual testing because the code review was accepted, that's ugly. But when you are trying to improve the general quality of the code and the answer is either that you don't have time for this or that any change is unnecessary because the code review passed or even when you are unwilling to do the refactoring, knowing what a hassle will be to send it through review, that's damn ugly. It means you want to do more than your share and you get stuck in a process.

And on that note, I end this wall of text. Process before people is always ugly.

Comments and opinions, if you dare! :)

I just read a very cool article (Understanding Default Parameters in Javascript) and my takeaway is this smart piece of code to enforce that a parameter is specified:

const isRequired = () => { throw new Error('param is required'); };

function filterEvil(array, evil = isRequired()) {
  return array.filter(item => item !== evil);   
}

So all you have to do is define the isRequired function in a shared library file and then use it in any function that you write.

Are you a bit put off by the fact you can use functions as default parameters? Welcome to Javascript, a language that seems designed by Eurythmics

What the hell have I tried to read? It felt like a Google bot trying to describe random YouTube videos, a meaningless brainstorm of a neural network trained on black and white images, an intentional insult to anyone attempting to make sense of the book. At a mere 260 pages (on my smart phone) I thought that no matter what the subject or writing style, I would finish it, but after 60 pages of understanding nothing and using all my will power to continue, I've decided to call it quits.

It "helped" that I had no idea what I was reading. I just picked a book at random from my library and started it. I didn't know Herta Müller was a Nobel laureate for literature, I didn't know she was part Romanian, nor did I know of the Romanian movie based on the book. I could just read and enjoy the content. Or not. I don't know how I can describe this book in a way that is comprehensible. I had to read the synopsis of the movie in order to understand what The Fox Was Ever the Hunter tried to say! I am Romanian, I've lived through communism, even if I was just a kid at the time, I should have no reason not to at least understand the basic plot of the book, but I didn't get it. Eyes just glossed over the pointless descriptions, unnamed characters identified by body characteristics or clothing, useless details and unrelated chapters. One chapter ended in "The comb's teeth were blue." It wasn't a particular comb, it didn't feature in any interesting way in the story (had it been one), it was just a piece of detail that should have conveyed the lack of interesting things in the gray communist era or something. The book is filled with stuff like that.

Bottom line: I didn't find any positive thing to say about this book. No sentence that made me feel something, no interesting fact, no eye opening writing style, no plot or character that made any sense or brought any pleasure as I was reading it. It was like being so thirsty that you try to drink desert sand. It works just as well as this book. I hate it with fervor.

Persepolis Rising went into an interesting direction. One that I don't particularly like, but interesting nonetheless. The seventh book in the Expanse series is happening about 30 years after the sixth. You have to remember that lifespan is slightly longer in the future, so that's not a show stopper or a revamp with new characters. It also featured yet another condescending asshole who wants to rule everything using the protomolecule.

Now, the thing I love about The Expanse is the locality in the Solar System, the exploration of the near future society of space that is mere decades away from now (assuming we discover the Epstein drive, hmm...) Moving the action on other planets in other systems, more into the future and messing with alien tech doesn't help that. Instead it is turning it into yet another Stargate or similar franchise, where they just up the ante until there is no more up and people are bored. The authors have dodged the same bullet a few times in the past, though, so it just may be that they are aware of this and careful to thread the fine line between hard sci-fi and the ability to relate to what is going on in the story.

There isn't much about the story that I can tell without spoiling it. Some dudes want to go Roman Empire on the 1300 solar systems available and "civilize" humanity. Holden and the crew of the Rocinante have different ideas. However, the book basically ends in a cliffhanger so if you hate that kind of stuff, I recommend you postpone reading it until the eighth book is published. I liked the writing, the pacing and again I read it in mere days. Is it a masterpiece, not really, but it reads well. Now I have to wait until I can get my hands on the next book to see where the story is going, but considering that plans are to end the series with the ninth book, I wonder if I shouldn't just wait until they are all written and spare myself the misery of ending up with another, larger, cliffhanger at the end of the next part of the story.

Conclusion: I liked it, but I would much rather have read another dozen books about the Belters and how they made their home in the asteroids. If you think about it, the last few books did away with even the pretense of space colonization realism and it is always a small pain seeing how the stories always favor planets, which are not only less rich with the type of materials needed in space, but also have a lot more limited space. Asteroids can support trillions of people, and that in this Solar System alone. But that's another rant altogether. Just make sure you calculate the exact energy and reaction mass you want to spend in reading and then waiting for the next part of the story, which may not be published yet.

I was left a little disappointed by the books in the Expanse series. The TV show was doing great with the ideas in the books masterfully woven together, while the books were turning more and more into pulp. The greatest sin, for me, was that they took the action out of the Solar System, which was the main quality of the Expanse concept. Well, I am happy to report that, without a large increase in quality, Babylon's Ashes has returned to be a Solar System story, complete with intrigue, space war, politics and the Rocinante finding itself in the middle of everything important, again. It may be formulaic, but it's the formula that I like! Plus, it is clear that the quality of the TV show is feeding back into the books, which is great.

So Holden and Naomi need to deal with the fact that her psychotic ex-boyfriend and father of her child is a mass murderer who is leading the whole Solar System to war, chaos and finally starvation. Some characters die, which put Holden even more in the spotlight. Quite pointless characters are preserved, like Prax, which I personally despise, and others are added, like the pirate captain Michio Pa. In this book, the authors are tying up the loose ends: the state of the Solar System, the war, the situation at Medina station. The path toward the future is still in the balance at the end of the book. It's almost like asking "so, do we do cool Belter culture Solar System stories or do we pulp it out in the alien worlds?". Well, I will read Persepolis Rising next.

Conclusion: I liked the book enough to read it in a day or two and it made me want to read the series again.

So I am having this dream. Or I am so having a dream? Anyway, weird fucking dream, like Coscarelli meets Happy! via those explaining videos where someone talks very fast while drawing what is going on while an obnoxiously and totally unnecessary music plays joyfully in the background. Although that was mostly a way to graphically depict my inner thoughts... in the dream... so that I could understand what I was thinking. The dream concerned altered states of mind, biology, physics, logic, anything really.

Everything was altered, but also very real. It was all real. One moment I am doing something horrible, like killing innocent bystanders by throwing them from a tall place onto other people that were trying to make me stop killing people or pushing terrified (and annoying) kindergarten kids out of my way, my wife in tow, enjoying every second, the other I am home, waiting for the cops to show up, amazed that I got away, only for someone to force very strong psychiatric meds down my throat and make me realize that it was all a fantasy of someone who isn't even who I thought I was. Then I wake up and I am a terrible (and amusing) force of evil trying to understand both who I am and why do the people that force feed me medicine look like my parents, while they clearly are not. I terrify them and so I can tell them what to do, maybe they won't discover I am as terrified of not knowing what the hell is going on. But I will be having fun, as a God given right.

And then it switches again, with a good friend arranging the trip that will take us out of the country, on a touristic toury tour that me and the wife will use to escape the authorities that no doubt are looking for us right now because we killed all those people in probably the very tour we are organizing because they were standing in our way and we were bored. And in the dream I realize that every such permutation of reality is part of the dream, but also very real. I could stop at any moment and that would be reality for a while. So I switch again, I escape, barely conscious of where or who I am, I jump some stairs, a dog is chasing me, but I know he knows me and wants to play, I get out of the building, pretend to be a PTSD affected veteran to get clothes and stuff, including guns, until someone asks me where I served. So I just have to take out the guns and commandeer a vehicle. The fact that the people in the car are sexy women who can't help feeling terrified and also strangely excited by this display of violence is surely coincidence. And then cops show up and the girls run away. I shoot after them until the bullets run out, while the cops are weirdly apathetic, standing next to me on the hood of their car. "Are you done?" they ask, and I sigh and acknowledge and give up, allowing to be handcuffed and thrown into a car that doesn't seem to be a police car. And a woman is there, old, crow feet eyes, one of those people who can laugh at anything, you know, smoking nonchalantly.

I realize it is all part of the great machine that revolves reality, like one of those game machines that gives you a prize on TV when they rotate it, only it seems the real good prizes are never chosen. And I know now what this is and I look into her eyes and I know that she knows I know, but maybe she could stop smoking, since it irritates me, and she laughs. Told you she could laugh at anything. I am proud of not panicking, of taking it all in and being cool with it, I can see the old woman nodding appreciatively, too. "So what now?", I ask, but I already know the answer.

It is clear to me that anything could happen, and it does happen, the whole world dies and I get that fast talking graphic that explains why everything alive is not alive anymore except one thing, me. And it doesn't make any sense at all other than what if it could happen and if it could happen why wouldn't it and I am it, the thing that can breathe what nothing else can and still draw fancy pictures of what happened while explaining itself how it survived. But then surely I could animate one of the dead, just for fun, so it can be irritated (as I was) at how fast I am talking when depicting my inner monologue. And I try variations on the same theme, all wonderful and terrifying and apparently dangerous, only that I can change them even after something bad happened to me, so they're not. I especially enjoy the ones where I am enjoying what I am doing, even if it doesn't seem like something anyone would enjoy. I congratulate myself for choosing a reality I enjoy what I am doing so much that I need to congratulate myself about it.

I am trying to describe the experience as accurately as possible while fully knowing that the memory of it is fading and that even if I would still be part of it I couldn't express it fully. It stank of multidimensionality, it purposely lacked any purpose, anything at all was possible and it was, overlapping and existing at the same time and space. It had a soundtrack, and even if I knew, for example, that Come Together was taken directly from my recent viewing of Justice League, I also knew that it had a completely different meaning in this context, except maybe for the YouTube bots who would flag my whole life as copyrighted. There was no moral to it, no catharsis, no epiphany. It refused definition and I relished it. It was the polar opposite of a spiritual experience: no hope, but infinite potential, no lessons to be learned, but filled to the brim with experience, no gods other than myself.

I could have been anyone, anything, everything, but I chose the reality where I would wake up, recognize the room, the laptop, and blog about it. Maybe only then see life extinguished, just for the kicks of knowing that everything I spent horrible confused lonely moments (while aware of the singleminded and boring nature of this chosen reality) typing was pointless, no one would read it, even attempt to understand it and fail miserably, because the Internet would still work for a bit, but everybody would be dead. Fortunately it was all a dream, and you will read and fail to understand this post, not even the least bit grateful for being all alive and shit and not the punchline to a joke that I alone (pardon the pun) would find funny.

I am sure I've tested this, but for some reason the icons in my blog disappeared for Internet Explorer. They are using Font Awesome SVG background images, declared something like this:

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}

I had to try several things, but in the end, I found out that there are three steps in order to make this compatible with Internet Explorer (and still work in other browsers):

1. The definition of the utf8 charset must be explicit: data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf8 instead of data:image/svg+xml;utf8
2. The SVG code needs to be URL encoded: so turn all double quotes into single quotes and then replace < and > with %3C and %3E or use some URL encoder
3. The colors need to be in rbg() format: so instead of fill='#2f5faa' use fill='rgb(47,95,170)' (same in style tags in the SVG, if any)

So now the result is:

.fas-comment {
    background-image: url("data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf8,%3Csvg height='511.6' version='1.1' viewBox='0 0 511.6 511.6' width='511.6' x='0' xml:space='preserve' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' y='0'%3E%3Cg fill='rgb(47,95,170)'%3E%3Cpath d='M477.4 127.4c-22.8-28.1-53.9-50.2-93.1-66.5 -39.2-16.3-82-24.4-128.5-24.4 -34.6 0-67.8 4.8-99.4 14.4 -31.6 9.6-58.8 22.6-81.7 39 -22.8 16.4-41 35.8-54.5 58.4C6.8 170.8 0 194.5 0 219.2c0 28.5 8.6 55.3 25.8 80.2 17.2 24.9 40.8 45.9 70.7 62.8 -2.1 7.6-4.6 14.8-7.4 21.7 -2.9 6.9-5.4 12.5-7.7 16.9 -2.3 4.4-5.4 9.2-9.3 14.6 -3.9 5.3-6.8 9.1-8.8 11.3 -2 2.2-5.3 5.8-9.9 10.8 -4.6 5-7.5 8.3-8.8 9.9 -0.2 0.1-1 1-2.3 2.6 -1.3 1.6-2 2.4-2 2.4l-1.7 2.6c-1 1.4-1.4 2.3-1.3 2.7 0.1 0.4-0.1 1.3-0.6 2.9 -0.5 1.5-0.4 2.7 0.1 3.4v0.3c0.8 3.4 2.4 6.2 5 8.3 2.6 2.1 5.5 3 8.7 2.6 12.4-1.5 23.2-3.6 32.5-6.3 49.9-12.8 93.6-35.8 131.3-69.1 14.3 1.5 28.1 2.3 41.4 2.3 46.4 0 89.3-8.1 128.5-24.4 39.2-16.3 70.2-38.4 93.1-66.5 22.8-28.1 34.3-58.7 34.3-91.8C511.6 186.1 500.2 155.5 477.4 127.4z'/%3E%3C/g%3E%3C/svg%3E");
}

White Sands is a collection of essays that try hard to come together as a coherent book. Some are short travel anecdotes, examining places that are either too touristic to be anything or too artistic to be objective and needing a critical analysis from a cultured person like Geoff Dyer. I liked these the most, since they were both teaching something about places I probably will never visit and also showing the sarcastic internal thoughts of the author, complete with interesting references and in depth research. Well written, too.

Two chapters try to explore not just short visits to distant places, but places Dyer lived in, like Los Angeles. These are so packed with references and quotes and longer than the others and I almost didn't finish the book, short as it is. One chapter is about a mild brain stroke he had, almost robbing him of the thing he identifies with most: his brain. It is weirdly distant, like it happens to another person, as probably during those times he was either in complete shock or some kind of denial. I couldn't believe that neither he nor his wife recognized the medical signs of a stroke and chose to go for a coffee and a croissant before going to the hospital. Then again, he was probably listening to jazz while reading artsy books when I was watching Dr. House.

Bottom line: I recommended the book to a friend while reading the first chapters. I found it fresh, funny and intellectual in the same time. I wouldn't recommend the book now that I have finished it. As I was saying, it is hardly a book and more a collection of various things Geoff Dyer wrote during his life, different in style, scope and how much they interested me. It is not by any means a bad book, and probably people that enjoy a different sort of art and culture will love it, it just wasn't for me, in the end. Since the chapters are unrelated, one can take whatever part of it they enjoy most and discard the rest, though.

There are two girls standing right in front of me on the subway escalator, riding up towards the gray, unforgiving, cold Bucharest weather. I am standing there, looking at their backs and my mind starts to wander. I imagine their long young hair hiding one of those smiles to yearn for, expressing both calm and potential, contentment and desire, purity and mischief. I imagine the skin on their back and neck, clean and unmarred, smelling faintly floral, not because of some stupid perfume, but coming from its rose petal smoothness and their very inner nature, tasting like heaven. The long coat and pants hide the perfect ass, not fat and not muscular, not big and not small, not even sexual, the ideal origin for two perfect legs. One of them turns to the other and they start talking and in a completely involuntary act of political correctness they become human, ordinary, just like me, and I resent them for that. Why couldn't you remain goddesses? What is wrong with you?

I am a pretty constant guy. I've repaired and used my computers well after it was cheaper to buy new, much better ones, and the same thing applies to my smartphone, which has now the venerable age of four years (yeah, it was sarcasm. My Nokia phone still worked for a week on a single charge after 8 years of use). Anyway, my problem is not actually the phone as it is the battery, which is "spent" and for which I need to buy a new one. Good luck finding anything for four year old hardware!

Ridiculously, the problem only occurs in a specific situation which I am going to detail next. For the rest of the usage, the battery, as it is, is good enough. I can talk, I can read books, I can watch movies, I can use WiFi. But when I am turning on Mobile Data, it first lags, then freezes, then restarts and keeps restarting until it gets to 0% charge in a matter of minutes. The only solution to stop this is to remove the battery or plug in the charger.

So what is going on here? When you turn on Mobile Data, all the apps you have installed are trying to access the Internet - some want to load data, some to load ads, some to check for updates - the problem is that they are all doing it at the same time. The phone is trying to use too much power and it fails in ways no one had predicted (or bothered to fix). Funny that it doesn't happen with the Wifi, which is probably more optimized for power use. The solution, then, it to prevent the apps for using the internet on mobile connections.

In order to solve the problem, follow these steps:

1. Go to your phone Settings
2. Open Data usage
3. Check the Mobile data box
4. Scroll down to the list of applications using the data
5. Select the biggest abusers and the ones that you won't use with mobile data
6. Check the Restrict background data box

For me, the worst was Google Play Store and Google Services, together with Facebook, Twitter, WhatsUp and TripAdvisor, but also some unexpected applications that have nothing to do with Internet use, such as Alarm Clock or Office Suite. This also has unexpected secondary benefits: stops you from going to Facebook or Twitter in places without Wifi, which are usually transit zones or transportation vehicles. Instead, read a book.

There is this TV show out there, called Travelers, already well into its second season, that no one seems to be talking about. It's not based on comic book characters, it is actual original content (gasp!). It's Canadian, of course. With no flashy budget and subtle acting, it manages to slip through some ingenious ideas. For one, it is the only show I've seen so far where humanity's fate is controlled by a benevolent artificial intelligence, something I feel it is inevitable.

Groups of people are being "directed" to do things, using the huge computational resources of the AI called The Director and the convenient fact that it resides in the future. Its role is to change the past as to avert the horrible future humanity got to. So called Travelers are being sent to inhabit the bodies of people in the present, essentially killing them and taking over their lives. Very interesting dynamics based on the merging of the traveler personalities and the connections of the people they replaced, too. Considering changing enough of the past would change the circumstances that created The Director, it is a fine line that the show needs to thread. I also find it amazing that a show involving time travel can actually be good, considering most stories break horribly when exposed to the cheap time travel stuff they usually employ for movies and TV.

The cast is great, too, with talented actors in strong roles. You probably know Eric McCormack, Patrick Gilmore, Jennifer Spence or Leah Cairns, but all the others have shows to their belt. The individual episode stories feel fresh, too. They could have gone with the tired storylines of the "team" that solves problems used in a zillion shows before, but instead they go their own way, with a different feel that reminds me of European sci-fi, rather than American.

My recommendation is to give it a go, watch a few episodes, see if it grows on you. It is not something that people see a few scenes of and fall in love, but something that needs a bit of a grind before you become a fan. It is worth it.

I think Richard Kadrey didn't know exactly what he wanted with this book when he started it. The full title is Butcher Bird: A Novel of the Dominion, but it's his only book related to the Dominions as far as I know and Butcher Bird is a rarely used name for a secondary character in the story. Even the Dominions didn't really feature for more than a few pages in it.

Leaving the title aside, this was a pretty fun book. Not a masterpiece, but one of those fish out of water fantasy stories where the hidden realm reveals itself to the main character, then pulls them into weird adventures. This one features angels and demons as ordinary denizens of the "spheres" among other crazy intelligent species, magic, flying ships, trips to Hell, getting friendly with Lucifer, old gods, cities of old memories and lost things and so on and so on.

It was an easy read, so it didn't take me much to finish the book. It wasn't so much wanting to know how it ended (which was obvious - the heroes win) but what other weird visions Kardey can conjure before it does. The lead character is a bit uncommon, as well, as a motorcycle riding tattoo artist called Spyder who is still a nice romantic at heart. At least it's not an adolescent child in an English boarding school!

Bottom line: I am kind of curious about the many Sandman Slim novels by the same author, so this book was a success. If you want something easy and fun, this is it for you.

People know that I sometimes like to hold controversial opinions, sometimes just for the kicks. So first I will ask some questions, ask you to find your own answers, then read about what I think.

Why is sexual harassment different from any other type of harassment?
Why is leaving from a job where your boss or colleague is an asshole any different because they are sexual harassers as opposed to regular assholes?
Why is offering sexual services, including just dressing or behaving a certain way, a natural way of expressing oneself, but asking for them is illegal?
Why do these things seem to happen only in the US?

Now, I am a technical person. While I am certainly not for sexual harassment at work, I need to understand why some types of behaviors are punished so differently from others that are very similar. Consider an employee who is humiliated and disrespected publicly at work, but not in a sexual manner. How could they ever support this outcry against sexual harassment, when their own plight is getting ignored? I mean, do we need laws to tell us when we crossed the line while being jerks? Why is there a legal segregation of jerkness? Why is someone abusing their power more or less guilty based on the type of abuse they chose to exercise?

And, as you might think, my opinion extends to a lot of these special exceptions to civilized behavior. They are called positive discrimination, affirmative action, employment equity and so on, but they boil down to one thing only: another type of discrimination. In the end, like any sort of forced empowerment, they will get abused. The rallying cry of Gretchen Carlson will fizzle out in a sea of false claims and malicious law suits. In fact, it only takes a few to invalidate all the others. It's like trying to make a drink less bitter by adding sugar, rather than removing the bitter ingredient. Or paying someone after you had sex with them against their will, if you see what I mean.

But what am I advocating? Certainly if we abolish the special rules, then all one can do when sexual harassed is to find another job. The asshole in power will hire more and more people until some are weak or desperate enough to accept their advances. If we extend the rules to cover any type of harassment, we expose employers to abuses and tie their hands in how to run their business. Neither option is acceptable, but neither is cherry picking which type of behavior is bad enough to be illegal based on its popularity. This entire issue is systemic: there is no way for the system to self regulate.

When all this #MeToo business started going on, I went and asked women about this. And girls here were supportive of the women who were coming forward, but not supportive of the ensuing publicity circus and these arbitrary lines being drawn in the sand. While the virality of discussion inspired so many people to come forward, which is a good thing, we have to consider why they failed to do so in the past and what will happen when fatigue will inevitably remove this from the public interest. Company policy and employee training, harsher laws? No formalization of common sense (which doesn't seem to be so common anymore) is a good idea.

To summarize this, if you behave like a douchebag and people around you don't call you out on it, then it is culturally OK to continue. It is not right, but putting it into a law won't stop it from happening. The recent publicity around this seems to be coming not from the gravity of the behavior, but from the number of people who suddenly came forward to expose it. If that would have been naturally possible, it would not have been news, it would have just been the normal process of weeding out assholes, so it is clear to me that the problem is not as much the specific type of harassment, but the system that makes difficult the public exposure of it and a subsequent moral censure.

I don't have a solution. I am sure if I could figure it out, so would a lot of other people, and this would be solved already. However, it doesn't hurt to look at these cases from a different perspective from time to time. Like from a different country, with a different culture. Or from high enough to understand which of the social values you foster lead to assholes in power getting more and more power and then abusing it. Let's not get hung up on local solutions for specific problems, turning everything into a legal and moral labyrinth where no one is comfortable, and solve the big problems first.

Sleeping Where I Fall is an autobiographical book from Peter Coyote. You might know him as a Hollywood actor, a man with a stern face, playing congressmen, detectives and conservative dads or other such people in authority. What you probably don't know is that before he was 40, when he decided he would try his hand at an acting career on the big screen, he was a "live off the land" hippie, a fervent believer in alternative cultures that eschew capital and personal property and value human connection and respect of the land and of the spirit, a man who chose his last name as most representing of himself. The guy on the cover is Peter Coyote, too. This book is an amazing recounting of those times, one of the works that I believe need to be read, whether you like them or not.

Personally, I found it amazing. It's not the writing style or how it played with emotions, but the information buried within that makes it a valuable experience reading it. In fact, if I was to critique anything about it, it is that is so packed with anecdotes and mind blowing ideas and descriptions of people, groups, ideologies and places, but does little to bring the reader to the emotions of the writer. It is too intellectual, trying so hard to be accurate and objective as to make the reader numb. Everything else, though, is top notch.

I don't think I would do the book service to summarize it in this review, but it goes so many different and interesting places: hippie communes, motorcycle gangs, famous artists, drugs, politics, road trips, changing the world, personal stories, psychology, acting, music, environment, native American culture, Wall Street, Easy Rider and so on. I do feel that the man who wrote this book is a great human being, but I have the nagging feeling that he misrepresents some of what he describes. Perhaps it is the somewhat neutral tone, the elevated language to render heart wrenching moments or just the fact that I find it so hard to believe a man could go through all that in just under two decades. I don't want to read Emmett Grogan's book Ringolevio on the same period, but you might want to, in order to cross reference and get a more accurate picture.

I recommend this book to just about everyone. It is one of those things that open your eyes a little to what was lost and what could be different and what you never thought about.

As additional resources, you might want to look at The Digger Archives online, where the site is terribly out of date, but the information there is (as is the Digger way) free. Frankly, I am disappointed to see that neither Sleeping Where I Fall or Ringolevio are offered free on that site.

Growing up I always had this fantasy of writing a journal. My sense of privacy - being sure someone would read and judge it - stopped me from pursuing that, as well as the simple fact that I didn't need a journal, I just saw it as a cool thing I should do. Little did I know that in my older years I would want some sort of record of my forgotten youth and find none. Yet the idea persisted.

I started an actual journal as soon as I had a computer and I understood the concept of encryption. It didn't really work, either. It was full of self serving bullshit and it described a person that I really wasn't. One could (and should) read between the lines in order to understand the smug and ignorant state of mind of the author. Later still, I started to write a book, something called The Good Programmer or something of that sort. Phaw! Even if I could have gotten past my chronic impostor syndrome, being a good programmer is nice, but not my goal in life. If it were, I would have made other life choices. And again, it was full of self serving bullshit.

You may detect a pattern here and it might inform your reading this blog post. Anyway, its point is to generalize my experience as a programmer, as fast and as clean as possible. Hope it helps.

Every time I write software - that I care about and have influence over its technical quality - I tend to generalize things: reuse components, refactor duplicate code and so on. In other words, find similar problems and solve them with the same tool. It is not Golden Hammering problems away, that's a different thing altogether, since it is I who is shaping the tool. So how about doing that for my life? I should care about it and have influence over its quality.

First time I started writing code I was actually writing it on paper. I didn't have a computer, but I had just read this beginner's book and I was hooked. The code wouldn't have worked in a million years, but it was the thought that counted: I played around with it. Later on I got a computer and I started using the programs, understanding how it works, not different from getting a smartphone and learning how to phone people. Yet, after a while I found issues that I wanted to solve or games that I wanted to play but didn't have, then I made them myself: I found a problem and solved it. But writing code is not just about the end result. As soon as I explored what other people were doing, I started trying to emulate and improve what they did. I played around with compression and artificial intelligence, for example. And I was a teen in a world of no Internet. I went to the British Council and borrowed actual books, then tried the concepts there a lot.

It was years before I would become a professional programmer, and that is mostly because the hiring process (in any country) is plain stupid. The best HR department in the world is just looking for people that have already done what is required, so that they do it at the current company as well. But that's not what a developer wants. Software is both science and art. The science is a bit of knowledge and a lot of discipline, but the rest, a very large chunk, is just intuition and exploration and imagination. People who want to do the same thing over and over again are not good developers; instead they are probably people that just want to make a buck with which to live their "real" life. For me, real life has been writing code - and I still think I am being paid for putting up with the people I work for and work with, rather that for doing what I love.

Professional work is completely different from the learning period. In it you usually don't have a say on what you work on and the problems that software is supposed to solve are at best something you are indifferent to and at worst something you wouldn't understand (as in will not, even if you could). Yet, the same basic principles apply. First, you are required to write good code. By this your employers mean something that works as they intended, but for you it is still something that you feel pride in having written, something that is readable enough so you understand it a few weeks later when you have to add stuff or repair something. You are expected to "keep up to date", by which they understand you would keep studying in your spare time so that you do work that they don't know they need done, but for you it is still playing around with things. Think about it! You are expected to keep playing around! As for the part where you see what other people do and you get to emulate or improve on that... you have a bunch of colleagues working on the same stuff that you can talk to and compare notes and code review with. Add to this the strong community of software developers that are everywhere on the Internet.

Bottom line: Just keep doing three things and you're good. First play around with stuff. Then find a problem to solve (or someone to provide it for you) and write code for it. Finally, check what other people do and gain inspiration to create or improve your or their work. Oh, did I say finally? This is a while loop, for as long as you are having fun. Hey, what do you know? This does scale. Doesn't it sound like a good plan, even if you are not a software dev?