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How do you stay focused when working on large projects that span many months? In this duo episode, we talk about Project Planning techniques and trends! We also cover solving personal data storage problems and building CNC machines & printers.
Programming Throwdown educates Computer Scientists and Software Engineers on a cavalcade of programming and tech topics. Every show will cover a new programming language, so listeners will be able to speak intelligently about any programming language.
Timestamp Speaker Transcript
00:00.00 digitalghost Okay, we're recording right? Yeah, it's actually better because the other 1 will just ah, we won't we will just get deleted won't have to um the is we won't have to trim it. Yeah.
00:08.21 Patrick Trim out the okay cool. Yep mind's recording now the levels. What good on my side. So all right? yep.
00:12.70 digitalghost Cool all right? Um, yeah, you're gonna lead it in because I have intro.
00:20.59 Patrick Programming throwdown episode 1 hundred and 23 project planning take it away. Jason.
00:27.69 digitalghost Hey, everybody so we are here having another duo episode to talk about project planning which is something that is you know super important I think that you know there might be a dedicated class if you take yeah I know I think at at my colleges there was a. Like a so was a class called software engineering but it was an elective and I I never took it. But apparently if you take if you had taken that class. They actually cover project planning. Um, but I had zero experience with project planning. Um you know. You know academic experience and so you know it would have been awesome for me to have this episode or something like it when I started I feel like um, um, it's something that that is super super important to make sure that you kind of follow through and also like so that you're not just overwhelmed mentally um with everything that you're able to sort of. You know, keep a lot of these notes to to say you don't have to you you kind of have a brain dump. You know? Um, yeah.
01:30.43 Patrick Yeah I think I also missed that class. So.
01:37.11 digitalghost Ah, yeah, that it's that's all right? We'll make up for it today. So if you are ah if you're in college and you you don't you're not going to take the yeah actually like I remember the reason I didn't take it was because they spent a huge chunk of the semester talking about uml. And I looked up uml on the internet and I was like no no I don't think I don't take I want to take this class. Oh man, what actually I do it.
01:58.92 Patrick Ah.
02:04.94 Patrick That rings right up there with I looked up the teacher ratings and the teacher is rated as hard so I didn't know I'm just I didn't say I did that just I hear people say that.
02:14.96 digitalghost Yeah I think ah I think Uml was and I don't even it's going to be very lucid here. But I think it was some kind of diagramming thing where I remember there's like a picture of a person and the person goes into a flowchart and then I guess a happier person comes out or something.
02:25.22 Patrick That's right.
02:30.30 Patrick I Don't know that the person goes into the flowch chart. But yeah, umml is interesting. We should talk about it at some point I mean I think it's like ah the idea that I think is it unified or universal modeling language I mean like the idea for describing architecture that way.
02:35.24 digitalghost Ah, but it was enough.
02:49.27 Patrick You? So but I think it had a heyday. Probably yeah like around the mid 2000 s the ats is that what they were calling them. Um the the zero xes anyways, they're on that time where they thought they were going to like auto generate code or like you would go into the box and like type your code in the box and then it would.
02:56.56 digitalghost Yep yep.
03:06.68 Patrick Ah, get hooked up.
03:07.53 digitalghost Yeah, oh I remember those autocode actually for for gui Stuff. Autocode is still quite nice like I used what did I use recently? Um, Oh yeah, I used the the Q T Q T Designer Um, which is is is a. Ah, for a project I was doing I wanted a cross-platform Ui and I mean oh man we should definitely do a show on cross-platform Ui because I spent so much time you know researching this and I Usually it's not like me I mean 1 of the things we tell people on this show is to um, you know is to. Pick something and just stick to it. Um, but I really couldn't find anything really you know that I wanted was that was cross-platform that worked well and I finally settled on Qt Um, yeah, ah original initially I was a little hesitant to use Qt because it seemed pretty heavyweight. And it has sort of Qt as its own style and all of that. Um, but but but from a programming standpoint Qt is really nice and they have this thing called Qt Designer where it um you know it Auto Generates Python code and then you go and fill in like when you click the button. What should happen. Um, so for that it works well. But I think that you know yeah back when Uml was getting really popular I think people had this vision that everything would all programming would work that way or you'd have this visual designer and then you would write like little bits of code in the designer. And that's never really taken off other than that 1 use case. Actually there was something Patrick you might you might remember this. Um, there was something where you could build like etl like data pipelines using this visual designer I think it's called a screwdriver or something. But. But you would like drag and drop blocks and then each block you would put in a bit of sql. Um, and then you'd sort of like assemble these blocks of like sql and then 1 of the blocks could be you know right to this key value store or something like that.
05:01.98 Patrick Um, oh.
05:12.72 digitalghost Actually was I also thought that was pretty nice but they ended up killing that project and I think I think what it was is the people who were much better at Sql and data engineering than I was hated it so it was like it was good for for novices like me. But then. But then somehow it was worse a lot worse than just a text editor for the people who really know what they're doing and maybe that's the general trend.
05:37.42 Patrick Yeah I I don't know exactly what you're talking about, but it sounds vaguely familiar I mean I think there are places where specifically like the opposite is true where describing the eel pipeline that you describe in code with pictures as like ah output documentation tools. Is still pretty widely used.
05:56.45 digitalghost Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, cool all right? So we're gonna dive into project planning. But first let's talk a little bit about home nas. So um, you know a lot of people have.
06:06.27 Patrick Oh yes.
06:12.47 digitalghost A lot of data at home Now I mean I have um you know a backup of all my photos. Um yeah I know Google photos. Ah they change the resolution of the photo right? So even though they'll store infinite and actually I think they're even they're going to stop storing infinite. But anyways so I just always keep a backup of all my photos and.
06:22.18 Patrick Yes.
06:32.19 digitalghost All sorts of other documents I have a folder called books I have a folder called research papers. Yeah, it has like ninety percent content I've never read it probably will never read. But it's there. Um, yeah I have ah we have a whole ton of information we have plex running which which um plex is a.
06:39.15 Patrick Oh.
06:48.91 digitalghost Way to stream video you know within your house and and so all this data needs to be accessible and even ideally accessible you know outside your house with the right security you know authentication all of that and what I used to do up until a week ago I used to just use the oldest desktop in the house and so um, um, and so I had this desktop that I don't even know how old it is maybe a decade old and um, you know and it has like a ton of hard drives in it and it's barely able to run the latest uubundtu like it's just chugging along. And trying to you know, keep all of these hard drives up and running and I had ah I had a drive failure and so it really like made me rethink like okay, what do I want to do here and um, what I ended up doing um is similar I ended up getting there's this thing called a yata mat yata. Yada master but it's basically a hardware raid enclosure. So it's ah yeah, you plug usb into your computer and then the other end is this enclosure which has I think mine has five drives in it and it does raid 5 in Hardware. So from your view. It's just like plugging in a ah you know a a usb drive but it's actually this five drive monstrosity and so you just get this like I don't I think it's like 12 terabyte usb drive is kind of how it looks to the computer. And so I have that plugged into a raspberry pi so that's that's my new setup. Um, but but yeah, what do you have patrick.
08:26.24 Patrick Um I have actually like an old proper was synology nas that ah I got from someone that didn't want anyone I was like older so I've used that before um and you know also interestingly and depending on your backup strategy.
08:33.65 digitalghost Um.
08:45.10 Patrick I Mean we have a similar thing like backing up to the various Cloud small parts of our data. That's like super important like you know, pictures and documents and stuff. Um and then for larger stuff. What I've done between various computers is ah we've talked about on the show before I think that used to be Bt sync. But now it's Resiliosync and so it it kind of mirrors over time between computers and even like some of the stuff that's like family important to like my brothers or my father or whatever we have 1 of those folders between Computers. So like some of the stuff that I put there and they put there as well.
09:06.35 digitalghost Yep yep.
09:21.82 Patrick And then it backs up multiple sites right? So like as long as if not both of our houses were taken out by some catastrophe in theory. Some of that data would be recoverable but also what I've come to realize is like a lot of stuff that I was backing up even if like hard drives are cheap.
09:24.90 digitalghost Yep.
09:39.90 Patrick Just like it's not worth it. It's kind of like storing stuff in your house like oh it's cheap to buy these clothes I'll just buy more and more clothes. But then you need bigger closets and then you run a space and you start being compelled to buy a bigger house I think ko it is at Marie kondo or whatever can come in here I don't know the whole story. But um I think the same thing. Ah.
09:48.32 digitalghost Yep yep. Yeah that's right me a digital Marie kondo.
09:58.93 Patrick I Think the same thing is true like I don't need to back up my entire steam library like whatever steam has its own issue I don't want get into that. But like if I have a steam game and the steam game is really big like part of having bought it on steam is the ability of like redownloading it and you can get into your own like do you really own it or not but for me personally what I've just made that decision is like.
10:12.10 digitalghost Yep yep.
10:18.14 Patrick And don't need my all my games backed up because I can just redownload them if if something were to happen and basically that can cut out a ton same thing like I don't need to backup core windows or even windows settings anymore like a lot of that stuff now the folders that have like documents in them. Yes.
10:21.56 digitalghost Yep.
10:35.58 Patrick All the other stuff like settings went like look worst case I'll just build that back up myself and so what I do is I do make like for certain of those things like clones locally on that computer. But for the most part like I just will reinstall and then bring back the data that matters and yeah, that would kill a lot of time but it's. Expectedness of it right? like it would take a catastrophyic hard drive failure which can't happen and does happen. Um, but what is it going to happen during like my usage Pattern. It's like maybe once every x year five years four years and like reinstalling to be honest is probably better than just like. Bringing forward all of that. Ah, ah, debris.
11:13.72 digitalghost Yeah, yeah, totally agree. Yeah,, that's a really good callout you know and I look at my nas I mean it has a lot of um books I thought I would read at things like that. But but I'm the same as you I don't put games on there I feel like anything I could read download. Um, yeah I don't really have on there. I mean I guess I could redownload the books and the research papers but it's more just like like ah I always feel like oh 1 these days Ill I'll need to know like what are all the graph theory research papers I've ever looked up. Um, so it's more of just like a personal archive.
11:43.60 Patrick Um, yeah, that's a great point though like I I feel similar and it's same thing with like my bookmarks like I constantly have not a good way to like bookmark things and like keep them organized is just like.
11:53.19 digitalghost Yeah, yep.
11:58.25 Patrick Now I have like a billion tabs open and a tab is like a lightweight bookmark and there's like shortterm long-term memory like substances short-term occasion I want it to automatically go into long-term and it's just because searching the internet for an obscure graph Theory Paperback I don't read graph Theory papers. Let's pretend I did.
12:11.86 digitalghost Um, okay yep, yep.
12:13.43 Patrick Like then you you know searching is really quite difficult sometimes and this has happened to me like I don't know that it's important in tola kind of it's too late so having like a history of what you looked at or whatever and for like you said books or whatever what you're talking about is you want to save the curation of them but like the data itself is not that interesting. But.
12:32.68 digitalghost Yep.
12:33.32 Patrick All of us fall into these traps that like the tools just aren't there yet to model that and Google will probably write us in and tell us some good tips which is great. Please do? um but I mean I think like what you're saying is even just having a recording of the file names of your file folders which is of course very lightweight.
12:38.88 digitalghost Um, yeah, definitely.
12:49.86 Patrick Has a lot of the value of actually recording the data but it's just easier to record the data.
12:55.45 digitalghost Yep, yep, yeah so so I think that the big reasons for a nas for me are pictures and videos. So you know we don't have I don't think well actually I take it back. We definitely have Subway to play Dvds in this house I don't know what it is I mean it's probably in a box somewhere like an old playstation or something.
13:08.23 Patrick In a closet. Yeah.
13:12.49 digitalghost But you know we have all of the Dvds have been have been ripped you know even like the dvd of our wedding and everything all of that is ripped and and on the on the nas and then and then all of our pictures are on the nas if it wasn't for those 2 then I would probably just run Resiliio sync on all the computers in the house. I mean I have that as well and so actually this is an interesting question is do you use resilience sync or dropbox for personal things I feel like I'm I'm kind of using both and sometimes I wonder like you know is someone going to hack my dropbox and and get like yeah, it's something.
13:47.23 Patrick Gosh and I can't think about this.
13:50.42 digitalghost I'm trying to think like I don't know if yeah yeah I mean like is I'm going to hack my dropbox and get forms with my address on them or something.
13:56.61 Patrick Yeah I mean look people will get your social security number or your tax returns or whatever and commit very targeted fraud against you like I mean it's the same thing like if so it gets really depressing if someone decides to rob your house specifically they will watch it. Will decide when you're not home. They will decide what's in it and what they're going to grab right and then to defend against that is very difficult what you're looking for is you know defending against someone just like getting onto your computer with some zero day worm and encrypting your you know your computer and then trying to like.
14:33.80 digitalghost Right? yep.
14:33.72 Patrick Blackmail you and a thousand other people that like you know pay or we're going to keep it encrypted right? like could they do that? Yeah and then what you're talking about is unless they the nas is good because it's probably a completely different stack than your desktop so the chance of it sharing a zero day. Although.
14:47.32 digitalghost Um, yeah.
14:51.77 Patrick Recently a lot of the Nasas had a really nasty vulnerability where they could get wiped. So I think like this synology ones or something. Um, so yeah, so be careful.
14:54.68 digitalghost Oh Wow I mean I think that yeah I think that dropbox like I Totally agree with you that if someone's targeting you personally and for whatever reason they like just really want to get you and they're willing to fish you and do all these things and you're you're in a bad spot. But for like the rest of us like for for all of us who are just normal dudes I think that it's really the the concern is that dropbox somehow gets hacked in a way where everyone's dropbox. But then I guess you know I used to follow that train of thought if everyone's dropbox was Leaked. My dropbox is probably. Not high priority like in other words like like seeing forms like like medical forms from like a hospital bill with my address or something is not what they really want to see they probably want. Yeah I know tax returns or something. But yeah, So so yeah I guess I have a mixture of resilience sync.
15:42.56 Patrick Yep.
15:52.56 digitalghost Which is syncing among all the computers similar to patrick I have it also synky with with my ah folks computers. Um, and then I have the nas for you know the pictures. We've just terabytes of pictures and um and and dvds and all of that. Um. And yeah, it seems to work pretty well I debated getting the synology. Um, but I felt like I already have several raspberry pies that run 24 7 and and so I just I kind of felt like I might as well. You know, installing plex on ubutu is pretty or on I guess. Ah, Debbie in for Raspberry pi is pretty easy. So I so I went that route but I'd be curious folks at home. Um, or actually patrick I mean like how would you think a synology compares to just like like running in a buntu machine.
16:39.91 Patrick I Mean better and worse. It's a more appliance approach. So it's not the I'm uploading everything to Google and subject to the whims of their terms and conditions or whatever like you Normally it's sort of your box. So there's some level you could pull the hard drive off.
16:53.50 digitalghost Um.
16:58.10 Patrick And like mount it on your own computer worst case or whatever. Um Abujazag is nice but then you got to like there's time spent like updating it choosing what to install getting it to and there's stuff like you know, talk about like unraid or free nas or is it openness which are more tailored to. You know, having a sambba share. So if you want to like mount it from windows or whatever which is stuff that sort of synology would come out of the but you could figure all that out. Absolutely and in fact, probably build a much more capable machine for cheaper unless you factored in how much like time you spend on it and put any value on that time.
17:33.10 digitalghost Yeah,, that's a really really good call out I think um, um, yeah I think ah someone had already done a lot of Samba and all these things and that was incremental. But yeah, you're right? if if I was just starting out and I had a linux machine I needed you know windows to see the hard drives and all of that I mean that is. That is like weeks to till I get that right and actually have it like be really smooth and like work when the machine starts and everything.
17:53.37 Patrick Ah.
17:59.51 Patrick But let's not lie I mean most of this is a hobby and it has a vague like in theory help to our careers longer term by staying up on tech and learning new things and being in that space. So.
18:09.50 digitalghost Yeah,, that's a good callout. So Maybe okay, here's our Advice. So if we were to if we were to sort of conclude with advice for people who want to set up a home nas. Maybe you have a desktop so you know in my case, you know I lost a hard drive in this machine and also the processor fan went out and so the machine won't boot. Because it actually it's interesting. It'll boot. But then it won't restart because the processor gets so hot that the bios won't let you Continue. So like I had to shut it off wait for the processor to cool down and then turn it back On. Um. Oh I think we had a we have a issue here hang On. Can you hear me? Okay, yes, there's so I had some issue with my computer but looks like we're okay, um, so the um oh yeah, yeah, So um.
18:51.76 Patrick Um I can hear you? Yeah oh okay.
19:05.23 digitalghost Ah, oh yeah, so so I lost the hard drive. The processor is dead on this thing. Um, but oh yeah, but I had a raid so so it was raid 1 or whatever so I didn't actually lose any data. But if if you have everything running just on your desktop and you have like all the things you've ever programmed in your whole life. Yeah, some of that stuff's like sentimental or you might have pictures or other things. You know that definitely think about getting some kind of nas set up and it could be as simple as just putting more hard drives into your computer. Um, if you don't have a lot of time I think the synology I know several people who have synology and like it. Um, but but I definitely think something like that would be really important. You should check into it if if you want to put in the time and effort I think getting a a ubuntu or debbieian or getting a linux box connected to a bunch of hard drives is for me at least it's been the way to go.
20:00.73 Patrick Agreed.
20:02.88 digitalghost All right? So jumping into news. My first news story is is pretty cool thing. It's ah it's a homebrew cnc machine patrick what does cnc stand for I don't actually know and so okay, so so what? what? I ah.
20:15.38 Patrick Computer numerical control.
20:22.83 digitalghost And so what that it means to me and maybe I'm totally wrong here is it's basically like a drill like a drill that you could control with the computer and you could you can like carve things out and did I get that right? How would you explain this.
20:32.20 Patrick No a mill.. It's normally a mill so it's normally like ah so difference a drill is ah braced to only go like up and down not side to side So No side Loading. So as Bearings meant to allow you to push into a material but not drag through a material versus a router. Is a machine that is braced with bearings on the side. So if you drag it across the material and they're side loading that's like engineered for and so a Mill or a cnc is it used to be a mill was he stinged with like handles and screwdrives and like.
20:56.68 digitalghost Oh really.
21:07.31 Patrick You would twist various knobs and move and shave stuff down and that's how most like heavy machinery is still built this cnc Ice stream your time I haven't looked at it yet is like a router that can go up and down but doesn't apply a lot of up and down force. But then side to side is braced so that you can go through a material. And like hog it out and it won't break the internals of either the thing that's moving the motor around or the motor itself.
21:29.47 digitalghost So you're saying if I and this this shows how little I understand mechanical stuff so you're saying if I took like a drill like a power drill and I and I tried to go Well I'd need a special bit. Let's say I had a bit that had blades on the side or something.
21:36.56 Patrick Yes, yes. Um, yes, that's right, not immediately. Yeah, the basically like the.
21:47.20 digitalghost And I tried to like go sideways with the drill. It would like break the drill because it's like not meant for okay, but it would do damage.
21:58.30 Patrick Bearings in the internal structure isn't meant for side loading. So it's sturdy. But if you did it continue. It's It's more what happens is people try to do it on their drill press. So if you have a drill press and you're trying to move the material under the drill press constantly and you give it too much. You're gonna.
22:00.76 digitalghost Got it and so.
22:16.99 Patrick Going to like catastrophically break. It's called a runout right? The amount of error there is in the concentricity of the spinning parts. So the spinning parts begin to wobble and the reason why is because you're putting pressure on a piece that isn't meant to take that load and so over time it deforms and then you get you know, basically more error.
22:24.68 digitalghost Ah.
22:35.50 Patrick And the exact diameter of the thing that's spinning and when you're computer controlling it. It's open loop. So there's no close loop which means it it tries to do a thing and it doesn't know if it accomplished the thing so that's open loop close loop is you do a thing and then you take a measurement to see if you accomplished the thing you attempted to.
22:48.20 digitalghost Um, yeah.
22:54.58 Patrick Ah, yeah, change you attempted to actuate.
22:55.73 digitalghost Got it I see I see you see so so um okay got it. So so this guy built his own cnc machine from scratch with like 3 parts and he got a there is like like inside of it all is this. Thing that you could buy I've actually seen it at home depot I think it's called a router or something. But yeah, yeah, so so inside of all of this is like this cheap thirty dollars router thing but then he's 3 d printed all of this stuff around it and I think some of it you have to buy like you know, timing belts and stuff.
23:15.25 Patrick Yes, it is.
23:29.47 digitalghost Um, and he's and and so he's end up with his own cnc machine which looks like pretty big I mean I looked into this at 1 point and getting a tiny cnc machine is like at least a few hundred dollars and so with this, it's like looks relatively cheap and you end up with a big cnc machine. What's your take on this patrick does this look like a good idea or just like a fun thing to do but not a good idea.
23:48.58 Patrick I mean I've had 1 before the 1 I had was a branded 1 which is the brand has sort of changed over time called a shapeoko. Um, so it's it's more like a kit but it's this I'm looking at this now. Yes, that mekita router in the middle is meant for a human to hold and push through wood to to you know.
23:55.61 digitalghost Oh interesting.
24:07.75 Patrick Shavewood sideways. So it's it's using the right thing these are like industrial ah ideas that are being made for the hobbyists If you have a need for so I had to shape Oko which is the same idea as this. Um, when.
24:09.63 digitalghost Got it.
24:24.95 Patrick I had it when I was using it. The issue is that like it kicks up a ton of sawdust. So if you don't normally do woodworking or used to 3 d printing. They're relatively like 3 d printing is relatively clean when you start to do like power tool woodworking this.
24:29.55 digitalghost Oh.
24:42.62 Patrick Bit is spinning super super fast and it's throwing tiny bits of wooddust this picture I'm looking on their website is they're they're carving Mdf which is basically sawdust glued together. So when you cut through it. It's remaking sawdust and blowing it into the air and.
24:56.40 digitalghost Um I heard that Mdf is toxic to your lungs. Yeah right.
25:00.29 Patrick Has formaldehyde in it. Um, and so yeah, be careful with it. But basically it's making sawdust is going everywhere tiny bits and it's just flowing into the air and so ah yeah I mean it's cool if you need to vacuum it up at the end.
25:12.46 digitalghost So wait wait. What do you do about that. Okay, got it. Okay.
25:19.32 Patrick Wear wear a dust mask ah a lot of people try to put like a cover around it that has a vacuum attached to it. But even then like the vacuum fills up pretty quickly like it's ah, a sort of constant fight. Um, but yeah I would say like there's 1 I think it's called the mostly printed cnc mpcnc.
25:29.96 digitalghost Ah, okay.
25:38.62 Patrick That 1 I have heard about a little bit more. There's the shaoko which is like a consumer grade. There's several other consumer grade cnc's as well. I mean if you have a use for it like cutting out thick pieces of wood or making a sculpture in the face or whatever is definitely a super interesting hobby to be in. So.
25:55.15 digitalghost Cool, Yeah, well check it out I think if you have the time is similar to building your own nas if you want to if you want to develop a skill and you have some time. This is a really cool project.
25:56.90 Patrick Yeah I mean it's It's cool.
26:01.76 Patrick Um, ah.
26:10.67 digitalghost Maybe would start with building your own 3 D printer I've done that before and I'm as you can as you can hear I know very little about this stuff and I was able to to pull that off. So maybe start there. But if you've done that if you've built your own 3 D Printer. This would be a cool next thing to do and I just I think the. The video is really compelling like it does exactly what you'd want it to do.
26:32.36 Patrick Yeah I mean the small size I'm looking shape. Oko now they don't have the small 1 I had gotten so they start much larger, but the ones that you used to make were four feet by 8 feet so they were meant to cut up like an entire sheet of plywood that you would get from from like home depot or whatever. But four feet by 8 feet. Most people don't have that much space in their garage. Yeah that's right? Yeah ah I mean the big expense is the stepper motors and the the sort of like rails and the controller. But I mean.
26:50.11 digitalghost Um, and that probably costs like thousands of dollars right? Yeah, how much would this cost I haven't looked at the B O M the bill of materials.
27:04.61 digitalghost Maybe a few hundred dollars. Yeah, that's what I was going to guess to? yeah.
27:07.10 Patrick If I had to guess probably like 50600 dollars if you had to source it news new. So again, cool Hobby So um, related actually and unintentionally but ah and a bit vaguely related to a cnc machine is when Cnc machines make Cuts. You need to. Make curves through those ah through the wood to make your beautiful shaped ah electric guitar that you're carving out or even a surface. Ah, and if you were to look into modeling that surface you might run across something called Nerbs or besier curves. Okay.
27:29.28 digitalghost Um, yeah, nice. Yeah.
27:39.64 digitalghost Oh I've heard of that. Yeah.
27:43.85 Patrick Ah, so there was recently an article by I am I am not going to attempt to say the person's name bart by well. Okay, Bartahs c chaowski I don't know so he has a bunch. This guy hasn't there's link in the show notes. That's right, it's called curves and surfaces.
27:51.62 digitalghost Maybe yeah, there's a link in the show notes.
28:00.58 Patrick And so he walks through and this guy's done a number of articles. Check out all the articles on his site. He always has like a bunch of really really good interactive visualizations and so he starts through sort of like first principles of linear interpolations between 2 points and then what if you did that at like. Had 2 line segments that were you know of course drawn by a linear interpolation between them. But what if you had you know instead of going between the points you draw a line that connects an interpolation between the points and then a line that connects that line and that's how you end up defining bezier curves.
28:35.27 digitalghost Wow This is cool. It's very interactive.
28:36.77 Patrick And so I hope I'm saying that correct yes and then if you start dividing curves then you could define surfaces and patches and you know provide smoothing on the derivatives. The first derivative or second derivative and what the impacts of that would be and what would it mean to have kinks or you know sharp surfaces and. How would you handle that I mean just goes. It's actually rather if you make it through all of this and sort of really internalize all of it. You have a very good understanding of how a lot of modeling is done how a lot of 3 d graphics is done.
29:04.85 digitalghost This is so freaking cool. You guys have got to go on this website I'm on it on my phone here and even on the phone Actually the phone is probably even better because of the touchscreen but it is so freaking satisfying to play with these curves.
29:17.94 Patrick So This is how like these curves the hands up talking about is use like how pixar like models the characters like if you want to model someone's nose right? A nose isn't made of a bunch of triangles. A nose is made out of you know a sort of. Elastic material skin draped over a substructure of muscles and cartilage and whatever Anyway, so you have to have more an organic shape and so that organic shape. Ah, you need a good way of sort of defining it eventually you might end up reducing it to triangles. But anyway so this is really interesting. This comes up depending on.
29:40.75 digitalghost Present.
29:52.99 Patrick Obviously like what part of ah computer science you're in. But if you do much with graphics or rendering or even fonts how fonts are rendered fonts are defined using these besier Curves. So how you define the like curve on the bottom of the S. Shape right? like you define that in these bezier Curves. So Most all fonts are defined using these style of things. So It's actually used pretty heavily even if you kind of don't know it. Um and you might run across it and it's pretty.. There have been recently a bunch more like very easy to understand interpretations of this. Prior to that you would have mostly gone to a computer graphics book and tried to read and it would have given you a lot of math and a lot of linear algebra and said here you go here's how you define them and if that's not your background. You would have been like I don't get any of this. So.
30:38.13 digitalghost Yep! nope.
30:43.60 Patrick Leaning it in sort of Layman's terms really helps you at least when you go into inkscape and you're dragging the handles on the curve defining like you understand like what it's doing or why it loops back on itself like at a fundamental level like what is the computer trying to do So I. Definitely recommend people. Ah, sort of go and check it out if nothing else in like the cool graphics and learning a little bit more about like and like maybe fundamental is overstating it but like a very like core piece of a lot of ah modern, rendering and graphics and design and.
31:14.34 digitalghost Yeah, totally I mean this is really really fun to play with and it'll give you a really good understanding of you know. But yeah, how 3 d geometry really works and it'll connect the the thing I love about this too is is it. Actually there's parts of it where it shows you an equation and as you are dragging these points around. There's updating the equations in real time and so you can kind of in your brain you can like create synesthesia between like this mathematics and then what's actually happening in this in this picture. Super cool man. Um. Okay, so ah, mine is also kind of a visual presentation which is cool. We have amazing flow this is this might be our best flow fastest flowing cleanest flowing episode. Um, Mine's a visual explanation of raft consensus protocol. So um.
31:55.49 Patrick Ah.
32:07.37 digitalghost So you know you have this issue where we were talking about your nas at home and having raid storage and so storing things on on multiple hard drives and that's not hard to do because you have this 1 usb cable or you have this 1 Back plane on your motherboard right? So there are all these hard drives are ultimately being controlled by 1 computer. Um, but if you go to like? let's say a database at a you know, really popular website like take Amazon or something. Um, yeah, they can't just have 1 computer controlling. Everyone's shopping cart right? and so they need to have this like massively distributed fault tolerant database. But then they also have to have like many different what they call leaders. You know places where you can write data and then also have many followers places where you could servers where you could read data but you can't write to them and so um, you know you have this this huge array of leaders and followers and and you know because it's so large you know. Let's say it's like ten thousand machines and if a hard drive lasts 3 years then I mean you could do the math but like there's hard drives failing all the time in these machines and there's other sorts of failures happening and so um. Um, and so you you could have situations where even leaders fail and now new leaders have to be elected. So imagine you know you expect to have 3 leaders 1 of the leaders has failed and so you now need to make 1 of your followers promoted to be a leader All the followers are running the exact same code. You know how do you do that? And um, you know if you you could you could imagine like heuristics like okay, let's have everyone report their ip address and pick the lowest 1 or something like that but any type of heuristic like that will cause you to have sort of catastrophic failures like imagine a subnet goes down. And now it's like really confusing for everybody. Um, and so someone a long time ago came up with paxos and um and and it's a way for machines to negotiate with each other without a lot of ah priori information and and to try and so eventually. You know there is something that breaks ties. It could be as simple as just like just like ah the the non you know, um, the the fact that the processors are not exactly doing the same thing and and they're not deterministic right? So there's a way to break ties. But but more importantly, there's a way to achieve consensus.
34:49.40 digitalghost So like once you have some way that ties are broken. Can you use this tie breaking to eventually pick 1 single leader when you know all the followers raise their hand at the same time and say I could do it? Um, and so you know Paxos is very very difficult. Um, to sort of explain intuitively. Um, and then there was a zookeeper which is an apache project which um dealt with some of the like paxos is an academic thing but then in practice just like anything in practice. There's real world challenges that you have to face. Um, and so Zookeeper was a project that was built to do this leader election and all of that distributed consensus and but that also became extremely complicated and as yahoo and google and these big companies were finding issues they were patching them in and then maybe like. They would fix a problem that required that that meant like these seventeen other patches aren't needed anymore but they wouldn't get cleaned out and it just became very bloated. Um, so someone wrote raft and I don't actually remember where raft came from um, but raft is like kind of a rewrite of you know, distributed consensus and. Very clean, very elegant and and what I'm linking to here is a really nice explanation of raft. You know how it works and the principles behind it and it has these cool infographics where it shows how you know? Okay, this leader dies and it represents everything with these little dots. Um, so this dot went away and now these other dots you know need to become need to pick a leader and it kind of goes through how all of that works.
36:30.20 Patrick I think if you when you start to think like you were kind of saying it's actually a little bit mind blowing like when you think about if I have ten thousand computers like trying to roughly mirror the state of each other and like decide what what information is correct and you start dealing with.
36:43.39 digitalghost Um, yeah.
36:49.36 Patrick Even the speed of light delays from 1 location to another data center. You know, halfway across the world and of course like it. It isn't strictly just speed of light relative to the speed of a hard drive or whatever or ram and then start thinking like you were saying just like power outages or.
37:01.52 digitalghost Yep.
37:09.40 Patrick Whatever is it Neutrino strikes or whatever you always you know attribute like getting a bit flipped and Ram to um, like when you increase your exposure like that the problem just so much more complicated.
37:09.59 digitalghost Um, yeah.
37:19.63 digitalghost Yeah, it's totally mind blowing and like you know, even just yeah I mean I mean all these leader all these ah followers. They're all you know the same. They're probably even running the same hardware right. So they all just raise their hand at exactly the same time and say oh we saw the leader died you know I'll be the next leader and it's like well what do you do with that. It's a scale of ten thousand right it's easy
37:43.66 Patrick I mean it's easy dude I mean everyone always says the thing you're saying like pick the lowest pick the lowest 1 well pick the first person who raised their hand is like well how do you even define first like.
37:53.34 digitalghost Yeah, like who is going to be the referee there like as soon as you have a referee who can define first then you've already solved a problem but like ah you didn't so yeah, yeah, it's like now you have 2 problems.
38:02.42 Patrick Yeah, you have the problem again. You just have 1 god machine that sits somewhere in a like you know, special housing that just you know guarantees to be up. Yeah okay I mean inframes.
38:14.40 digitalghost Um, but what happens on Sundays then I think like I I think yeah.
38:22.41 Patrick People joke. But like that that's like banks and mainframes and stuff is in part like because of trying to get around this with they call like big iron. It's just like 1 and really big powerful machine that you just fourway redundancy on every part inside and it it.
38:27.55 digitalghost Yeah, right.
38:38.55 Patrick It it sounds like in some ways silly because things like google facebook whatever went to commodity hardware roughly. But like there are cases if your like transactions per second are low enough that maybe it just makes sense to have like 1 or 2 really really like a leader follower you know, config and.
38:43.98 digitalghost Yep.
38:55.81 Patrick The 1 machine just has an uptime that is like so guaranteed and you restart it like you said maybe on Sundays when the bank is closed like every Sunday during this hour you restart the machine and the the you know follower does the failover test and then it goes down. You know the next hour or whatever and.
39:05.16 digitalghost Um.
39:12.95 Patrick You have like a team of people dedicated to you being just 2 machines alive.
39:14.81 digitalghost Yeah, yeah, I mean that's definitely a real thing I think even today there's companies that run that way and there's there's nothing wrong with that I think given as you said if the qps is low enough. It saves a lot of hassle. Um. But yeah, the raft thing is is totally mind blowing. Definitely check it out I'm I've always been fascinated by it I haven't had a reason to implement it myself. But but it's always been a fascinating and and it's very It's also they said with with patrick's article. It's like super fun to watch the animations.
39:43.79 Patrick I do not have a good segue so we're just hard cuttingtting to my article which is the mathematics of 2048. So ah, there's more to the art called heidel but I don't want to spoil it yet. So 2040 8 was a game that enjoyed. I don't want to call it brief because someone will say like oh no I still play. It's the best game ever. But you have ah a grid of oh man I don't even ah, 5 by 5 I think it was is sort of like 5 by 5 and then there are tiles that have a number on them. So you start with like maybe the number 1 and the number 1 somewhere else in this five by 5 grid.
40:07.24 digitalghost I don't remember. But yeah.
40:19.91 Patrick And then you slide a direction to the right up down or left I mean that's each of the four directions and all of the tiles slide to the side of the grid that you swiped to so like 1 tile is in the bottom left and 1 tiles in the upper right? and you swipe right. That bottom left tile is going to slide to the right side just like the other 1 and then if 2 tiles that are currently the same number crash into each other they merge and become double that Number. So if you like no to have to be the same number. So like if you have a 1 in a one
40:48.91 digitalghost Um, they have to be consecutive or how does that work.
40:55.87 Patrick And you crash them into each other. They'll become a 2 Yeah, so then if there's like a 2 and a 1 and then a 2 and you slide down like stack vertically and you slide down. You'll just have 2 1 2 at the bottom of the screen. So if you could somehow get the 1 to slide away then you could crash the 2 and 2 to each other.
40:55.99 digitalghost Um, but like what if there's another number in between the 1 and what.
41:05.78 digitalghost Okay, got it. Okay. Got it? No I get it I get it.
41:15.15 Patrick I probably butchered that. But but you get the idea. Okay, um, and so um, there's of course like a bunch of descriptions of how you would um like how new tiles Spawns. So sometimes when you swipe new tiles will spawn on the screen and. They spawn with like a given distribution and so like it's not always going to be It's most likely to be I don't remember like most likely to be a 1 a little less likely to be a 2 a little less likely to be a four and so numbers are going to spawn on and the idea is to keep collapsing down until you have a tile which is 2000 forty 8 so 2000 forty eight is what 11 doublings from 1 and wait now Jason's counting hang on give him a second that 125 is nine and 1024 is 10 yeah ah okay, so i.
41:55.87 digitalghost Wait that sounds right? So 2 56 is 8 right? Yeah, you got it right? man that was fast.
42:08.91 Patrick 24 is 11 doublings right? Ah so you need to keep doubling and doubling but each doubling requires 2 inputs right? So if you think about it if you only ever got ones you would need to eventually have like collapsed 2000 forty 8 ones together is a lot right? That's a lot of collapsing you would need to do. But what ends up happening is like like Jason was already asking about idea like a 2 and then 1 and a 2 stacked on top of each other like you really want to collapse the twos. But maybe you don't because maybe actually you're going to collapse that 1 into a 2 and you want to collapse it into 1 of the other 2 s to make a 4 so when and how you have to manage the board. So even if it's. You don't just always greedily take the you know, highest number or the lowest number like you need a bit of strategy because the more the bill board starts to fill up with this. You know new tiles generating it becomes too crowded and then eventually you lose right normally without getting to 2048? um.
43:02.50 digitalghost Well I see so if the board gets full up and you can't collapse anything then you're done. Got it.
43:04.55 Patrick And yes, that's right, yeah, then you lose and so of course not every game is is winnable I don't think or at least not with every decision and so you kind of don't know what's going to happen so you play and you just kind of mindlessly mindlessly Swipe right. So then the question is like what's a good strategy. So um, you know when you're playing so in a game like Tic tac toe right? like the user. The other person can put in 1 of the nine spaces so you can kind of like yeah I actually saw a t-shirt with it on. Ah, you can have a pictorial diagram of like the optimal tic tac toe strategy in like I a very few states that you know each you only have x or o it's your turn then their turn they can only go in so many places the branching factors are really low. You can actually represent the whole tree in like a very small amount of things like if you start in the upper left. Basically and then no matter where they play you can like predeterminedly know the next state. Um, but then what about if you listen to people talking about like alpha go where the number of branching factors really high and their mistakes is gigantically big. There's there's a whole you know another class of Problems. So.
44:00.80 digitalghost Um.
44:15.57 Patrick This 2048 article the reason why I have it here is not for building general game my eyes but it's talking about something which I was hearing a lot about as you start hearing about machine learning artificial intelligence depending on your feeling about that. Um, but is is ah hidden markov models and markov decision processes which is.
44:34.80 digitalghost Yep.
44:35.50 Patrick Ah I'm going to butchers Jason's gonna tell me I'm wrong, but my takea away from reading this article which the reason I bothered to read it was because I keep hearing about these mdps mdps you know trying to figure out what you're going to do and this modeling is that? Ah for this game as I describe First of all, there's this random.
44:44.21 digitalghost Um, yeah.
44:52.43 Patrick Part right? It isn't like you battling another person. The game is just randomly generating what happens next So you.
44:57.43 digitalghost It's like sudoku right? Oh no, but it's not because ah when you swipe thing I've never played this game So I'm just trying to piece it together when you swipe things. There's empty space there. What happens like more numbers go in that space.
45:02.43 Patrick Um, yeah, yeah.
45:07.93 Patrick Yes, so the the the game will roll some dice and decide. You know it'll generate a random number and decide where and what number to place there with some probability so you control your action but you don't control.
45:17.14 digitalghost Got it? Okay, yeah.
45:24.68 Patrick The other person's action. It's not only the game is trying to beat you right? It's just randomly happening so you can't even apply really game theory in that like the opponent is like I can know what they're going to do because strategically they're going to do this So at each state you have a choice you can swipe left right up or down and.
45:29.10 digitalghost Nope.
45:36.64 digitalghost Yep yep.
45:43.85 Patrick Depending on what the game is going to do we'll determine if that was a good or bad thing but that doesn't mean you just pick randomly you can know that hey I swipe up the game State is this the distribution is that the probability that that's a good move is you know point 2 best move and this other move is point four best move. And the way you might try to do that is by basically marching the states forward figuring out like if you're in a winning or losing state and then propagating it. You know back to your state. So roughly I'm giving you a high level vision of without going in a full explanation of markov decision processes because I'm no expert. But sometimes you'll end up in a state where you'll lose.
46:11.30 digitalghost Um.
46:22.62 Patrick And there may be a choice where no matter what you do there is some probability of losing. But maybe you pick the 1 that minimizes that probability and maybe there's a really good state. You want the computer to give you and so you want to like try to increase the likelihood that you'll get ah, an improvement.
46:25.36 digitalghost Right.
46:37.78 Patrick So he starts with or she I don't I don't know the article writer starts with a 2 by 2 grid and I think getting to 60 four and then running this this markov decision process as a way of showing how this would happen in ah in a sort of much more bounded problem set where you can sort of reason about this and then talk about how you would extrapolate it to the full game. And to playing to 2048 where you may not be able to hold all possible game states in your memory at 1 time because it become too high and how would you apply heuristics. How would this markup decision process work and just a ah, really good introduction. So if you in your ramblings about the internet have come across. Ah. Markov decision processes which is related in a not way that I'm entitled to speak about hidden markov models themselves. Ah then you know this may be an article that is pretty interesting to you.
47:25.77 digitalghost Cool. Yeah I mean you did a really good job cover. So just like ah people don't know like that was my whole Ph D was on mdps and Palm Bps and everything but no, you did a really really good job covering it I think you nailed it and yeah, the article is super super interesting.
47:33.37 Patrick Ah mean I have talked about it then crap. But.
47:45.10 digitalghost Definitely check it out if you've played 2048. It's really cool to see something that you've played Um, you know, connect connect. Ah this tech to something that you've played it really like makes it real. But yeah I think you nailed it I think it's. You know you could say that like maybe it's a partially observable mdp because you don't know like what's what's coming next but you could model it with an mdp and as you said it just means that sometimes you'll lose Anyways, just because you're unlucky and that's okay and you just kind of model that. That into the into the system.
48:18.91 Patrick Okay, well I'm glad that you reaffirming that I like got a takeaway actually makes me pretty happy because that means ah maybe I'm advancing. You never know right when it's a topic you don't understand you read a thing you're like oh I kind of get it. We don't know if you're right or wrong.
48:32.30 digitalghost Yeah I know I think you nailed it man. Um, yeah' ah yeah I've always had a big fascination with the with you know, puzzles and games and and and the way that they're solved and so this this kind of stuff definitely like scratches that itch Definitely check out this article. It's It's really solid.
48:50.56 Patrick Um I think it's time for our book of the show.
48:53.81 digitalghost Book of the show my book of the show is a podcast I'm totally cheating but I've been binging on this podcast. It's called manager tools podcast um, you know originally I I found it through a literal search I actually I literally wanted tools. Um, to make me a better manager. Um, but but um, but what I found instead was was their their interpretation of tools. They really mean like techniques or skills or advice and so. While I didn't get any literal tools out of this podcast that I could use to make me more efficient I'm learning a ton of information and I would recommend this to anybody I mean not just managers like anyone who is working in a job or plans to have any job at all. Should check out this podcast. Um, you know I have a lot of these situations or things that I've had in the past um and you know it's it's um, some of these are lessons I learned the hard way and they kind of explain it in so much you know, better detail in candor candor. Um, some of these things are things that I was doing that I think I'm going to change some of them are are some of the things they talk about are reaffirming things that I felt like were good ideas but in general it talks all about um, um, you know, kind of being a leader and I think it's it's. They do a lot of talk about project planning which is our topic today. So it's it's also a good reference there and um I was listening to an episode today and 1 thing that really you know, um, was funny was was they were talking about sort of How do you delegate? So imagine you have a giant project that you're leading and you need help with that project right? You could be a manager and you given a project with large scope. You could be ah, an engineer you could be just a high school or a college student and you have some. Team project that you're working on and where you're trying to get help with other people and it talks about you know how do you sort of share that responsibility and 1 of the funny things is they said that 1 of the people that they um. Talk to said oh I wish I was ceo because then I wouldn't have any direct responsibility and I think the idea there was like if you're the ceo you just tell people what to do and then then when you tell them what to do now. It's their responsibility and ah.
51:33.58 digitalghost You know I mean most people I think don't you know could see could see where that where that's going but just to like make it explicit that doesn't work that way when you when you ask someone for help what you're doing is you're just doubling the responsibility now. You're responsible and that person's responsible. Um, but um. You know, but it's necessary because you can't do everything by yourself. But but it's not you're not actually um, reducing any responsibility by becoming a leader. It doesn't work that way that was a really funny thing that came up in in today's episode of their show but but definitely check it out I've been having a blast. Ah, listening to it. The people have good candor. They're ex-military people and so they they speak like ex-military people and so um I kind of enjoy it It's kind of gruff and like straight to the point and stuff which is that that is I think kind of good for easy for me to listen to? um. But but give it a give it a listen I've been bingeing on it and I've been really enjoying it.
52:33.96 Patrick My book of the show is also not a book but is print So I guess it counts more has pages. Ah it's make magazine. You know I'm I'm pretty sure that I probably had this like as a reference or something on here before.
52:38.79 digitalghost Ah, ah, you beat me? ah.
52:51.94 Patrick But I mean people probably at this point have heard or seen make Magazine I it's gone through. Yeah I think it still is I mean when you if you ever go to those stores I go it goes through Ebbs and flow of like I guess the popularity you know there was like the really big boom of like cosplaying and hobby.
52:52.99 digitalghost Um, yeah, used to be like at barnes and noble on stuff. It might still be right? Yeah barnes and Noble even exists I yeah I don't know.
53:11.61 Patrick Stuff like when the internet with stones and busy and like instructibles was really huge I remember yeah I mean it probably still is around I mean I know it is around I think it got bought by a company. Anyways, you know this thing has become went from like the first making it big to like actually even though it was a niche magazine.
53:12.87 digitalghost Oh yeah I remember that.
53:30.40 Patrick It became too generic and more niche magazines that were you know like Hobbyist electronics hobbyist causeplay makingking hobbyist cnc like all those things became their own topics with enough you know ability for people to look into them that you know maybe it sort of robs some of the like make magazines you know, ah kind of.
53:45.76 digitalghost Yeah, yep.
53:49.62 Patrick Shine but I always thought that you know although there's been very few projects I've ever done out of make magazine always appreciate that like they go through document describe and have a way of ah, kind of covering a wide variety of things. From like crazy dangerous like tesla coil making to like you know, hey here's ah, air pressure. But ah you know soda bottle Rocket you can make in your backyard and you know I just I still subscribe to it I even keep the magazines because I feel like having it in hard copy. Ah and is just cool. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
54:19.65 digitalghost Oh you have the physical magazines like recent ones. Wow I'm looking right now and I'm seeing thousands of just ki.
54:24.83 Patrick Oh I would I would show people but we for only audio Oh I would hold them up the right behind me I I don't know that I've kept everyone but you know I keep them always like oh there's something in here I want to make or reference or look at is good I don't know maybe I'm an old old person now. But it's nostalgic.
54:38.52 digitalghost No I think it's kind of like the nas right? It's satisfying to just have it. You know it's like it's like the research paper nas thing.
54:44.63 Patrick Um, but also yeah, exactly and and you know just physically thumbing through it. You know when you're on an airplane or whatever where it's still like electronics is a bit of a chore. Although that's even becoming less and less.
54:59.96 digitalghost Um, you know.
55:01.88 Patrick Um, I kind of used to look forward to going to an airplane and not being allowed to use electronics I catch up on reading but now like that's not even a thing. Well not going on airplanes but also airplanes that allow your electronics and having wi-fi.
55:08.18 digitalghost Well yeah, that's true. You know what I've done now is I've ah I've put my phone and in even when the airplane has internet I still put my phone in airplane mode. You know without the wi-fi and that way it's like I'm at least unplugged and I can.
55:20.63 Patrick Um, ah yeah, yeah, but also the thing I'll recommend is like you know of course say all they have a blog lots of articles I appreciate what they do they have which I think I've also sort of tapered down or even you know gone away to some extent especially now with covid.
55:25.30 digitalghost I won't be able to use the internet.
55:39.30 Patrick But they used to have maker fares where you know people would come and just celebrate me that was always really cool. Yeah I have yeah yeah I went to the 1 in the Bay area and that was applied 3 years ago it was super fun I always wanted to go back and then I wasn't able to go the next year and I think it rained and then the the next year was covid or whatever. So yeah.
55:39.54 digitalghost Um, oh yeah, have you ever gone to that.
55:56.10 digitalghost Ah, yeah.
55:58.33 Patrick I don't think that happened and then I think they've gone through some sort of restructuring I didn't follow it exactly. But other thing I'll say is you know if you have other people who are peripherally interested. It may be very hard to spam them a link or convince them to go to a website or watch a youtube video or if you have a children or whatever. Like having the magazine around and someone picking it up and just looking at it and like you know the sort of lower commitment of that and then becoming intrigued. Um, you know my kids call it the Robot magazine like I want to look at the robot magazine yeah and look at it and I think you know just having that stuff.
56:26.40 digitalghost Nice. Ah.
56:32.98 Patrick Laying around where you can sort of bump across it as opposed to your you know, normal kind of filter bubble for maybe other people even if you yourself you know could find it and look for it. There's some value to that Anyways, but I I appreciate what you know make magazine sort of has done in the influence. It's had.
56:46.44 digitalghost Very cool man I kind of on a related note I actually learned to solder So I've soldered. Yeah I've soldered things before but usually soldering to me was like I would just turn the temperature of the soldering arm way too hot.
56:52.84 Patrick Um, oh.
57:02.40 Patrick Oh guys? yeah.
57:04.88 digitalghost This was the yard thing I bought the soldering iron from Ali Express and it it didn't tell me Celsius versus Fahrenheit and I just assumed Fahrenheit being an American and it it was actually Celsius I was like man. It's like so freaking hot. Um, and so so that was a big problem but then also I would basically just.
57:14.57 Patrick Yes.
57:24.72 digitalghost End up with this huge glob of of ah was it flux I guess or solder. Okay I don't know but this just and and I've never had to solder something on a pcb before so I've never had to be that precise. Anyways, it's usually just repairing like you know like my son pulled a plug out of the wall too hard or something so like you didn't have to.
57:24.94 Patrick Oh no short pins. Yes, no solder.
57:34.87 Patrick Okay.
57:40.50 Patrick Okay, okay, yeah.
57:44.66 digitalghost But I know but just this huge glob of metal like and you just be this giant like ah state Puff Marshmallow Metal man just hanging off the end of everything and that was my way of fixing things. Um, but I bought a a tiny speaker which are music for an arduino project for Arduino Halloween project which which we did.
57:47.99 Patrick And s.
58:04.58 digitalghost And um, as someone who doesn't know how to solder I was like well I'll get the 1 where I can screw you know? yeah like it has like a screw when you screw it puts 2 plates together and squeezes the wire. Yeah screw terminal there you go? um.
58:11.31 Patrick Yep, Screw terminal. Yep screw terminal.
58:18.30 digitalghost But the screw the the wire. The speaker was smaller than I expected and the wire was smaller than I expected and it wouldn't stay in the screw terminal and I flipped the Pcb over and there was like contact points there that you could solder to and I was like okay I rolled up my sleeves like I'm gonna learn how to solder for real like a real. Ah.
58:20.26 Patrick Ah, tislata.
58:35.41 Patrick Engineer. Okay, oh professional solder. Okay.
58:36.30 digitalghost Like ah like a professional solder and so um, ah yeah, well I'm going to try I mean ah I mean at least get to the amateur level and so ah, you know it just took me a lot of practice and and yeah I got it to where like I had this really nice shape and it was like also holding the speaker wire.
58:56.12 Patrick I mean I will warn you like I assume though Speaker wire was probably stranded and not solid. Um and soldering stranded wire is much harder than solid wire and soldering wire in general is harder than soldering like actual components like resistors diodes. You know.
58:56.22 digitalghost Ah, you know pretty? well. So.
59:12.69 digitalghost Yeah.
59:14.91 Patrick Through whole components. Um, so yeah, you didn't take on the easiest thing for sure.
59:17.96 digitalghost Yeah I mean it was just thrust on me right? but ah, but yeah I mean I also yeah I was worried that 1 of the strands would you know cross over and short circuit. But that hasn't happened yet so I was so satisfied I did all that work and then um I started darduino up.
59:26.35 Patrick Oh no.
59:35.68 digitalghost And it was ah maybe even an instructibles site but it was a project where it would play like the Mac bootup sound like that hm you know and it worked and like it came out of the speaker and I was like oh it felt so satisfying. It was unbelievably satisfying.
59:40.78 Patrick Ah.
59:51.23 digitalghost To do that and then I looked around at like all the other really terrible soldering jobs and I'm like 1 day I'm going. Ah I'm going to fix these? yeah.
59:56.23 Patrick You're gonna redo it. Yeah, this wait till you learn about doing surface mount soldering with like point 1 millimeter pitch like pieces of pins between things and so those people get crazy. But then of course I also use like.
01:00:06.72 digitalghost Oh may I can't even imagine.
01:00:13.14 Patrick Ovens to basically melt the solder and the pieces together in 1 go.
01:00:15.50 digitalghost Oh okay, yeah yeah, 1 thing I realized is I'll need some kind of I think they call it helping hands. But it's like these hands with a magnifying glass thing or something. Yeah, right.
01:00:21.61 Patrick Yes, yeah alligator clips on them. Yep yeah, Also the trick with the wire while we're at it and then we can move on is gets to it is they call it pretening the wire. So if you twist the strands together. Right? Like just twist them just like 1 wires strands like all together. So and then take your soldering gun and just apply solder only to the wire and then cut it to the length you want and then what happens is you have basically already solder on the wire solder on the pad So you just have to touch them together and briefly touch the iron.
01:00:54.60 digitalghost Ah.
01:00:56.47 Patrick Soldering iron to both of them and then the solder will flow together and the solder more readily flows to itself than it flows to either of the other metals and so you basically reduce the like time you have to spend sort of trying to get that to work.
01:01:08.73 digitalghost Oh interesting, very cool all right? Well in interest of time we'll we'll go a little quicker here. We've had so many cool things to talk about but we'll we'll want to give time to the to the to the task at hand. So my tool this show is Workflowy Um, this is very simple. It's a.
01:01:12.71 Patrick All right? anyways. Ah.
01:01:28.45 digitalghost Recursive google doc. So so um, you know you can write a google doc or you can write a workflow you write a document and at some point in a document if you're doing something involves planning or something at some point you're going to have a bulleted list like it's inevitable right? It's like things to do or what have you. Anytime you create a bulleted list in Workflowy. Um, you know you you can have a nested list and you can actually collapse the list. Um, and then if you tap on 1 of the bullets. It actually opens that bulleted list as like its own sub document. Um.
01:02:01.57 Patrick Um, oh.
01:02:03.92 digitalghost And so that way you don't have this enormous massive bulleted list and so like like with all the levels like instead you have you know, maybe five bullets they're all collapsed and when you tap 1 it takes you straight to that you know it it it unfolds that in a new document. So. The high-level thing here is Workflow. It's on desktop. It's on mobile so it's on all the important platforms and I've found it really really useful in keeping track of stuff I think even for project planning I've found workflowy to be super useful. Um, so I've used it for many many different things I highly recommend it. Tie it all together.
01:02:38.83 Patrick Nice is it on your nas. Ah next next next up mine is Github desktop I don't always use github or git. Um well I should say I do do use git for for our workflow at work. But um I am not very good at it.
01:02:55.77 digitalghost Same year. Yep.
01:02:57.69 Patrick I often find myself googling. How do you do this thing again. Um github desktop which if you have specifically if you're using a github at all or even if you're just I think it works even if you're just doing it locally. Um, the nice thing is that it's a a. Gui for the Github git workflows I'm sorry I'm going to interchange them incorrectly repeatedly for the get to workflows so it allows you to visually see some of the things especially for me helpful if you get into more complex circumstances or so.
01:03:30.56 digitalghost Like rebasing and all of that.
01:03:34.10 Patrick Yeah, somethings like not going quite right? I don't normally need it if I'm just doing you know git commit dash a dash m check-in you know I don't need you know Github desktop to do that for me but visualizing if I have a whole if I'm doing a refactor or a whole bunch of files are open or I'm wanting to see something right? I think. It actually has been really nice and I'm appreciative that they you know, kind of took time to make that and it really shows. Github desktop is what it's called yes I you know? Ah I'm going to assume it is.
01:03:55.73 digitalghost So why is it Github is it because they made it but is it is it called github because they made it or or okay, got it. So it's for any git it just made by Github oh here I can look it up for you.
01:04:12.39 Patrick But I actually don't know Github desktop or not github. Um, but yeah I mean a lot of people for hobby projects are using of course like open public github repositories and so you know I still think it has use even for there.
01:04:14.64 digitalghost I'll look it up. You keep going.
01:04:31.42 Patrick Um, but yeah, being able to visualize this if you have a github workflow and I think super valuable for a lot of those more complex things that really help by being visual.
01:04:43.50 digitalghost Yeah, it's um I think it has extra features if you're using a Github Git Repo but it works for for regular git as well. Yeah, yeah.
01:04:50.46 Patrick Nice I also learned about some really powerful like git tooling and then it required me to first learn emacs and so I bailed and this is my this is my alternative.
01:05:03.84 digitalghost Oh man, port emacs I used to use emacs every single day all the time and now it's like visual studio code just really is just so nice. It's very hard to to match that to to convenience and the the integration with os is just a lot nicer. A shame shame for Emacs um, that's right project planning. So what are different types of tropes like there's a lot of these.
01:05:25.61 Patrick Um, all right? Well I think it's time to plan our projects.
01:05:40.38 digitalghost Like waterfall and agile and.
01:05:41.71 Patrick Yeah, um, when we were preparing for the show. Jason and I were talking about this which is a whole other subt topicic. First of all, you know this is by no means expert and we're actually going to talk about these briefly and then not talk about them again and talk about more practical, ah thoughtful common ways of ah you know, planning projects.
01:05:53.80 digitalghost Um.
01:06:01.27 Patrick But there are um, rigorous approaches to this process and in fact, if you are which I I suspect most people are of a software engineer inclination or um, you know, not a product or project manager who regularly interacts with this, you will probably um. Be more at home with what we're going to talk about if your profession is managing projects. You will probably find this appalling so I apologize in Advance. Um, but you know the traditional way people kind of built software is I guess you would call it waterfall. You do step 1 you get it kind of done. You get your thing then that flows into step 2 then more work is done or you have flowing to step 3 and if you found a problem or issue you would go back to some previous step and and sort of start over and then once you got to the end of your waterfall. Your product would be built. Um. People realized that was pretty inflexible that requirements change that there are issues then really popular was the agile method where the as a name applies. The idea was to be more agile to sort of get something up and working and then sort of. Find the next bit to be added the next feature to be added and work in smaller units of time so you could get feedback from your customer and I think they had a lot of really positive impacts on the industry I think there's a lot of cases where maybe some of the assumptions about how you could or couldn't get feedback and how long stuff would take like. There were adaptations of the agile method and maybe some people took it to be more of a stricture than even the originators intended it to be and so it got its own sort of like you know stigma. But what I would say is at least in the people I work with and the domains I work with. Most people fall into some sort of hybrid approach. Definitely not a very rigorous you know the agile tm you know methodology with the full scrum. You know all of that stuff but definitely not the you know original waterfall you know with its you know strict representation and now I think there are uses for both.
01:07:41.36 digitalghost Yep.
01:07:55.65 Patrick And important features are both but most of the stuff that I see happening fall is kind of like somewhere in the middle with some hybrid practical adaptation of learnings from both but I also will say that in the industry and current part of the industry I work in that there is project planning is needed because we always need organization. But the interaction with the customer isn't a contractual thing where ah, you would definitely you know want to make sure that your organization was such that it could be communicated externally.
01:08:23.76 digitalghost Yeah I totally agree I mean I think patrick and I both are in a similar position where we work on longer term projects that don't have like ah like a lot of like tight slas where there's there's someone you know someone files an issue and you have 24 hours to respond to it type thing.
01:08:40.87 Patrick Yeah.
01:08:43.66 digitalghost Um, so so it's going to have that bent to it. Um, but but I think that yeah patrick I think pat is truly right? I mean think you you always have a waterfall in a sense because you always you want to accomplish things that that like you want to scaffold like you want to build something then you want the next thing to be derivative. Um, but then at the same time you want to be able to respond to the environment which changes massively you know someone might write a research paper that scoops your idea and now you have to pivot or they write a paper that that causes you to have to change the way that you want to go about doing something. And so you have to constantly adapt to that and so you need some of those agile methods as well. So that you know there's a lot of different concerns. 1 is you know you adapted so many times at the end. It's really hard to know what you really did. So you you want to keep track of all of those changes correctly and you and ultimately. Give people like this this ah security that that they're working on that they're marching towards a goal even when things are really erratic I mean that's what agile is really good at um so 1 thing no matter whether you choose 1 of these. Approaches or you do a hybrid or you go your own route. There's going to be several different factors of project planning that are always going to come up in every plan. Um, yeah, the first thing is headcount. So how many people um or how many portions of people's time is dedicated to this project. Um, the second 1 is is going to be scope right now typically for a project. Well the second 1 is going to be scope and that third one is going to be time right? and there's this famous triangle. It's like a head count scope and time and you can only control 2 of those. So if you want things done quicker you can add more people or if you want things done quicker you can reduce the scope. But if you're not willing to do either of those things you can't get things done quicker like once you've once you've solidified 2 of those 3 points in that Triangle. Um. then then the third one is is is automatically decided for you? Um, so I guess diving into all 3 of these. So um, your headcount is relatively straightforward I think where headcount gets more complicated is its relationship to the other 2.
01:10:51.80 Patrick Constrained.
01:11:07.27 digitalghost So so being able to answer at the margin and say okay, you know if we hired another person then x would happen right? Then we would have x more scope or we would be done this many weeks quicker and so that's what makes the headcount part kind of interesting. Um. Similar to to to you know, entering these counterfactuals You're also prioritizing so you can answer counterfactuals the other direction you know if I took a person off this project. What would happen and so that's I think what makes a headcount part. Not just an accounting thing.
01:11:42.14 Patrick I think also the tricky part about high to account which kind of everyone knows but everyone always forgets is like chasing is saying like if I add if I have 1 person and I add another person I can do 2 times scope or half the time and like the no, no, no, that's definitely not how it works.
01:11:53.13 digitalghost Um, oh no, yeah, no, not at all.
01:12:00.54 Patrick And it's not even an equation right? It it really depends on the work and sometimes you don't know when you're getting started like can you easily segment this work. What is the communications barriers and I think there's just so many nuances that but it's something I see that everyone forgets constantly.
01:12:08.86 digitalghost Yep.
01:12:15.62 digitalghost Yep yep, and also I think that you know the teams are usually heterogeneous, right? And so and so if you have we had a situation where we ended up with way more research scientists than engineers on the team for a portion. And so there were things that couldn't get done that were high priority even though we had the headcount but we didn't have enough of the right type of head Count. So So that that becomes an issue as well. Um, and then even there's there's some things that you know you have to look at the team.. There's some things that people just don't want to do? um.
01:12:48.30 Patrick Um, yeah.
01:12:50.40 digitalghost And so that becomes part of it too right? so so I think all these things make Headca a little more complicated but I would say it's the simplest of the 3 um and for that I've generally just use a excel spreadsheet what about you patrick like what tool do you use for headcount planning.
01:13:05.00 Patrick Ah, and nothing so formal I don't know that it's always been. You know I Guess not 1 monolithic project where we brought people on it was always We have a variety of projects and the question kind of like you're saying to management is like if I could get to another person I could keep. This up or take on more work if you took a person away. Please don't then you know we would not be able to do these things and so it's never required. There's always been I Guess at least for us like ah a pretty hard constraint on getting new people so it was always make the most with what we have and then occasionally.
01:13:40.33 digitalghost Yep.
01:13:41.53 Patrick You were successful enough that people wanted more of something and then basically you were offered like would would it be useful to have another person and then the answer was already kind of a given. Yes.
01:13:49.68 digitalghost Yep yep Yep yeah I totally agree. Yeah so I think for headcount planning you don't need anything too fancy. Um I think just a spreadsheet or a google doc is is more than enough. So the second 1 is scope. Um, now for scope. Um. This is where I think having you know some kind of task reporting tool is really important because because scope usually is is you know a set of work items or things that you could be doing and you want to track those things. So um. What I've used in the past has been some variation of canban boards. So canban is basically you have and I'm I'm probably going to butcher this too. But you have you know, different different categories. You have 1 category of um things that you know we want to work on or things that we're going to work on.
01:14:28.99 Patrick Knees.
01:14:43.31 digitalghost But we haven't got to yet but like they're imminent things that you're working on things that are done and then you have this other category called like the icebox where it's these are things that we haven't you know, committed to working on them yet. But there are ideas that you know we. So usually things get put in the ice box. They're not created in the icebox. Um, and so you know most of my scope planning has has followed along those lines. Um and then with each of these items. You'd want to assign some type of priority. So so again, answering that question if somebody leaves you know what's the item you would kick out. Um you know definitely would be the constraints notwithstanding. It would be the lowest priority item and if people join you know what things from the icebox could we bring and start working on. Um. And and yeah, that's that's effectively I goes. The issue is is people are constantly adding new things if you're planning 6 months in advance. You know, halfway through that plan. There's a Hundred different things that have been added so so there's this scope creep that you have to deal with.
01:15:50.77 Patrick I guess I'll try to tackle the third 1 and then ah and maybe since it was yours you you can follow up with whatever I missed. But when we talk about time. Um I think you were mentioning right? like this is a triangle. So if you have headcount and scope then like sort of the question is okay, well fine. Time is constrained but what is the time going to be and I'll call it here that for me at least I find it very difficult for people to remember the distinction between the number of hours. A person can work the project versus what calendar date the project will be delivered on and so.
01:16:23.30 digitalghost Yeah.
01:16:26.37 Patrick People will say oh you know you ask an engineer how long would it take you to do this thing and I'll say oh it takes me 6 hours like okay, well's cool I'll put it down for you to have tomorrow and it's like well no, no, that's not how that works like I'm not going to work 6 hours until next week or until these five dependencies come in. Um and so.
01:16:35.56 digitalghost Um, yeah, right.
01:16:45.16 Patrick Saying time is ah correct. But yeah, a little bit ambiguous and then also you know when we talk about you've had scope and then now you say time so you try to define the feature well but there's always variability to how long it's going to take to implement that feature and so you know. People do oh it's t-shirt sizing is is it a small medium or large ah you know project. Um, and you can take those approaches and try to roll them up. Give them points say the points don't matter. But then someone has a rubric for how many points equals you know how many hours it it always kind of ends up that way. Um, and an interesting discussion I kind of want to try is if you sequence out all the things that you need to do and and your estimate for not just how long you think they would take on average but how sure you are about that time. So in other words, there's some uncertainty on each then what you could kind of roll up and get the minimum and maximum right. So if something takes one week plus or minus a day and then something else takes two week plus or minus five days. You could roll all those up in all those plus or minuses and you get some absurd I'll finish somewhere between one month and 1 year right like you're going to It's going to be not super useful.
01:17:52.14 digitalghost Yeah, the variance.
01:17:57.46 Patrick Or what you could do which I saw someone saying is is sort of place some Monte carlo. Ah you know drawing from those distributions and actually show like oh the bulk if you assume that they're normally distributed. They're not um and then you you write drew drew each of these you know sequential things and did a stackup. And you're randomly choosing and then looked at the outcomes what you'll find is ninety five percent of the time you're going to finish you know around six months plus or minus a week and then that way you can kind of communicate what the spread of that distribution kind of looks like what the shape looks like not just the extends. And then people can kind of internalize like oh as it gets closer. You would expect it to narrow in and you know hey that they landed you know 2 weeks out from what they said is actually perfectly reasonable. They did a good job. You know, but I've never seen someone be willing to play this game but it sounded interesting.
01:18:46.60 digitalghost Yeah, yeah, yeah I mean no, it makes sense I mean I think the the high level thing is to definitely record these kind of interactions. So if if you're chronically over budgeting or under budgeting you want to be able to adapt to that.
01:18:58.35 Patrick Yeah, that's great.
01:19:06.50 digitalghost Um, you don't want to just like ah um, you don't want to just like continue to sort of like recursively fall victim to like your own hallucinations. It's like you over budget and they be kind of forgot you over budgeted. And then well you know nobody got fired and then next half like you double the over budget right? So you want to actually have that accounting so you can say oh no I actually thought we were going to get a lot more done this half and I need to sort of like you know, realize that and pivot for next time. Um, another thing that's really important you alluded to this with time is is is the dependencies right? So if if something's going to take a day but you're waiting on another team then it's going to take a day plus however long that team takes to do that thing that you're waiting on and that could be a month it could be a year right and so ah for for time tracking for for project time tracking. It's good to use a gantt chart which a gantt chart if you haven't seen it is. It's a way of representing sort of a graph of events and so the events that depend on other ones start. When those events end and so the way the gantt chart works is you know anything that could be done right away just starts at time to equal zero and then when those things end the new things that are now possible start when those things end and so you can kind of see you know if if you had the way the gantt chart works is you know if you had. Um, yeah, if you have effectively infinite headcount and your goal is to just like go through these items taking however long they take this is how long the whole thing is going to take and some things that might only take a little bit of time they might be really tiny intervals on this gantt chart. But they might be way out into the future because they depend on so many other things. Um, so so yeah I mean I think ah the timing part of project planning might be the most important because um, you know, especially if other teams. You know, let's say another team you see a project that you think is going to take 3 months and your whole project plan is 6 months but it depends on something and then that thing comes you know four months late. Well now you know in advance that you're going to be late. Like you know that you can't get that done in time because you weren't able to start at the right time and just kind of a meta point here but in my opinion, you always want to announce your failures as soon as possible.
01:21:43.76 Patrick Yes.
01:21:46.21 digitalghost That's yeah, okay you agree with me on this because this is my opinion on it I haven't actually asked anybody's else's opinion on this yet. But but yeah I mean if something is going to fail 2 months from now and you know it you want to I mean not announce the whole world like write an email to you know everyone at company hey I'm a failure like that's not it worked.
01:22:01.83 Patrick No.
01:22:03.76 digitalghost Like you want to tell like the stakeholders like this you know it's 6 months out and it's I'm already telling you. It's not going to happen and this is why you want to do that quickly and project planning especially a living document will give you that information when you need it.
01:22:21.39 Patrick Yeah I mean I think there's a whole thing we could get into here that talks about like risk and the critical path and we're like really running out of time so we have to zip through these things. But I mean I think what you're saying is exactly right? Jason that. You can't know what parts you should decompose or de-risk or bring forward earlier parallelize until you sort of see like what the transition of features you need to go through that is going to take longest and therefore determine and also if you run ahead of schedule which seems to never happen.
01:22:50.56 digitalghost Um, yeah, good luck. Yeah.
01:22:52.71 Patrick Then like something else could move into the critical path that wasn't before or if something stretches longer you need to know when it moves from off to on the critical path at what time delay and so a ganttra is really in some ways underutilized and other words overly prescriptive in some cases. But. There There is a balance there where it's a very useful tool.
01:23:10.98 digitalghost Yeah I guess to to wrap this up I think um, a couple of things 1 thing is don't get too caught up on tools when I started I I mean I was looking at the manager tools podcast and what I realized was the tools actually aren't that important like you could use a spreadsheet you could write it by hand in a notebook and the tools will help. But unless you're project planning you know, ah, all day as your job. Ah, you know if you're spending. Let's say five hours a week or ten hours a week project planning the tools aren't going to shave that much time off of those 5 or ten hours. um Um, so don't worry too much about the tools. It's really about building those processes and gaining that experience. Um one last bit about project planning is is to be cognizant of the time scale um, and recognize that all 3 of these scalesman I mentioned are important for different reasons so you know in the short term. So let's say you know 2 weeks or a month ahead you want to have very clear kind of work packages. So you know people are being productive. Um, you know people aren't frustrated if someone's overwhelmed that you know about that as well and so that's you know we call it. The agile would call those sprints right. But but effectively you think of it as like the short term you know a couple of weeks to a month um you want to have in the medium term. Let's say six months you want to have Milestones or maybe a year you want to have milestone and you want to be able to have sort of a state of the union where you kind of reflect and say okay in the past six months. Um, you know I have you know our team has done these things and then the next six months we're going to do these other things and you want to really broadcast that and announce that and make that part of the sort of ethos of your team and so that's in the medium term now the long term. Um, is looking out maybe three years four years and you might say well. Why do I even need a long-term vision you know and and you know, especially if you're doing. Let's say research or you you know you're working on some or you're doing some project that's in maintenance mode like why do you need a 3 year for your vision. And I think the answer is because ultimately your project planning and your sort of culture will start to kind of blend together and you know setting that long-term vision will also kind of set the kind of culture and the kind of environment. That you're going to have on your in your project or on your team and so even if your long-term vision. It might be hard to say 3 years from now you know what research are we going to do like practically speaking. There's no way to know that you're really going to use that.
01:25:59.88 digitalghost Long-term vision to describe kind of your overall philosophy and and and sort of delusions of grandeur that you can create about the future where you want it to go and so depending on how you structure that. Um, it will kind of guide The the people who are interested in working on that project I think a person put it to me in a really good way that basically said you know someone's going to take a sort of big risk on something that has a big reward and so. That long-term vision is a way to sort of show that big reward to people so that they feel like they're jumping into something something has a lot of Mass. Um, so I think all 3 of them are super important Again. Don't worry too much about the tech but we gave hopefully a lot of good tips here on on how to do that effectively and how those.
01:26:43.69 Patrick Um, yeah.
01:26:53.40 digitalghost Things interplay cool all right everyone thanks again for supporting the show on Patreon we really appreciate it and I hope you all like the transcripts that we were able to add and the variety of other features that us our our producers have been putting together.
01:26:53.70 Patrick Um, nice. That was really fun.
01:27:12.75 digitalghost Um, thanks again for for listening and will catch y'all in a couple weeks