Another Poem, Hymn Text

Here is a poem that came out when I couldn't sleep and was thinking about an earlier attempt at writing a hymn for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which I am a member.


Learning and Growing

Learning and growing are part of life's purpose,
Even when happiness seems far away.
Peace in this life comes from completely accepting
The plan of our Savior, beginning His way.

Jesus desires to teach us and guide us,
He will protect us as we find our way.

When evil conquers it cannot remain long,
If faced with commitment and faith in the Lord.
Confidence, trust in our saving Companion,
Is what will enable our learning His Word.

Jesus desires to teach us and guide us,
He will protect us as we find our way.


We are making another hymnbook, and I think I'll submit it.  See https://www.lds.org/church/news/church-announces-plans-for-new-hymnbook-and-childrens-songbook?lang=eng.

HELP: Happy, Evolving, Learning, Productive - Journaling template

Sometimes I go to write in my journal after lots has happened, and I find myself at a loss.  Too much has happened, I don't know what's important to record, it's all a jumble.  So I end up staring out the window and attempting a half-baked job of mentally processing things.

Here is a set of headings in an attempt to provide a skeleton for my journaling:

• H: Happenings
• E: Evolutions / Progress
• L: Learnings
• P: Plans

Or described more fully:

• H: just neutral reporting on what random stuff has been going on
• E: progress reports on things that have moved forward in some significant way in the last while
• L: what you've recently learned that sticks out to you
• P: what's coming up that has your attention

In an attempt at finding a mnemonic for HELP, I came up with the following:

• H: Happy
• E: Evolving
• L: Learning
• P: Productive

And here are some more detailed descriptions of the emotional states in the mnemonic:

• H: just starting to write can keep you happier than not, see this post
• E: highlighting progress, however small, turns into a sense of gratitude for me
• L: seeing that I'm still learning is encouraging to me
• P: putting rough plans on paper has a reassuring effect, and helps me move forward

Those adjectives have enough affinity to the headings that it might help me to remember them, and enough positive energy to help them to stick in my mind.

HPLP: Happy, Progressive, Learning, Productive - Journaling Ideas

Post rewritten here:
- http://deliberate-thinking.blogspot.com/2017/05/help-happy-evolving-learning-productive.html

With a better acronym.

Why Instead of What

Writing a good commit message is an important collaborative skill on a software project.

See:
- http://who-t.blogspot.de/2009/12/on-commit-messages.html
- http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html
- https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5661185

While all the formatting advice can seem pretty nitpicky, there are a couple principles that stand out to me:

1. Above all, clearly and concisely state WHY you are making the change
2. Also, include all the considerations that went into this change and why you are making THIS change instead of any others you considered

Even if the formatting isn't perfect or wouldn't meet the linux kernel mailing list standards, just having the context later when you are scratching your head wondering "why?" - that is invaluable.

Code doc: "Responsible for ..."

Instead of writing class documentation like:

/**
 * This class does X.
 */

Instead of that, please start writing class documentation like:

/**
 * Responsible for X.
 */

The difference seems subtle at first, however the latter is better because it sends you down the path of the Single Responsibility Principle as a default way of thinking about things.

If it's hard to write a sentence fragment "responsible for X" because X is really X, Y, and Z, then that is a code smell that can point to a need for more refined subdivision of responsibility.

Missed Tweets Through News.me

I've never really been a twitter nut.  There are already enough sources of distraction for me, I don't need to add another source.  It just seemed really noisy.

However, people have been saying and linking to important things on twitter for a while now.  I'm just not discerning enough and don't have enough time to filter the firehose in a useful way.

The most helpful summary of interesting news I skim regularly is the weekly LinkedIn emails.  In fact, I think it may have been through a link chain from one of those emails that I stumbled on unionfs, as reported in the last post.  If I could have the same thing for twitter, but personalized to the people I follow, that would be really helpful!

Ironically, as part of the effort to make this blog more stuble-upon-able, I was looking for a way to auto-post on twitter and facebook whenever I post on this blog, and I found twitterfeed.com, which does all of that and more.  And it's easy to set up.

After setting that up this morning, I wondered: "What is the company behind twitterfeed.com?", and found betaworks.  They run some very interesting sites/companies, some of which I knew about (bit.ly), some of which were new to me (findings.com, chartbeat.com).  The interesting one for me right now was another site called news.me.

Turns out that news.me is just the kind of thing that has the chance of making twitter useful to me.  If things go well, you'll probably hear more about it.

Heralds of Life

My sister, Ann Sumsion wrote the following poem on Thursday, and I asked her if I could post it here. She said yes, so here it is:

Heralds of Life

Daffodils, the Trumpets of the Lord,
Speak peace and courage, love and faith,
To souls cold in world's winter.

Their warm and yellow blooms
Are testament of His enduring Grace
And Tender Mercies.

They cry, "The Lord is my Light,
And my Strength, and my Song.
He is my Salvation."

Heads bowed in strong Humility,
They nod in gentle breeze and bend in mighty tempest.
As leaves of grass, they die and fade,
In heat of summer's day.

But the memory of their bright nodding heads
Brought back in dark of night, and chill of frost,
Recalls Life, death overcome.

Their clarion trumpets echo their Master,
And cry, "Spring forth,
And Rise again."

I'm grateful for Ann's friendship and love for me. Her love for and confidence in her Savior are also qualities that I admire in her and want to emulate.

Starting a box with git

In The Creative Habit Twyla Tharp talks about "starting a box" to keep track of all the creative ideas that come on a project.

I've used git to just start tracking ideas in digital form. A brand new git repo is my digital box. Usually, the ideas start out as a whiteboard diagram or scratching on paper, which I then scan to PDF and put in the folder. The organization varies, but chronological file naming has worked for me, as has thematic subfolder organization.

Being able to just capture the work frees me up to try new things and not worry about whether that stuff I just did is safe or whether I can get back to it if I try something new out.

Git does such great cross-file compression that even after several revisions across binary files, the resulting repo sizes are surprisingly small.

Blog by writing post titles

I got sick of trying to think of profound things to say here.

So I just started writing post titles until I found a topic I wanted to write about. Maybe that is what I can do the next time I'm feeling like a post is over-due.

Opening Post

Some kind of inhibition? Write until it goes away.

Can't sleep? Write until you can.

Can't code? Write until you know what to do.

Stuck on a problem? Write until the problem is defined.

Unlike prior efforts at perfection, this blog is a work-in-progress. And unlike my prior standalone efforts, I hope to start deliberately existing in a much larger world.