the flying squirrel

When I started at my current employer (about 18 months ago), I got it in my head I should take advantage of their training budget and proximity to uWaterloo (like the kids are calling it now) and take a course.

For one reason or another (sanity, mostly; also scheduling), I wasn’t able to take the compilers course in my 4th year. Compilers is one of the big project courses. In terms of workload, it’s well behind real time (the train course) and graphics, but it’s still nothing to sneeze at.

When I was an undergrad, I think I would have probably preferred to take graphics. But as you get older, you mature. Or something. Yeah, graphics is cool and fun, but I think it would be a harder sell to get my employer to pay for it. Particularly when your employer has its own proprietary language to maintain.

For my part, I want to encourage people to make their own languages, because doing it makes you a world-class programmer. Seriously. Not just a better programmer, but a best programmer. I’ve said it before, and I’m sticking with it: having a deep understanding of compilers is what separates the wheat from the chaff. I say that without having the slightest frigging clue what “chaff” is, but let’s assume it’s some sort of inferior wheat substitute, possibly made from tofu. --Steve Yegge, The Next Big Language.

I don’t know if I’ll actually make my own language, or move to the compiler team at work, but I do know that understanding this stuff is really, really useful and fundamental to software development. There’s a lot of computer science-y stuff that’s not especially useful, but compilers are everywhere.

2010! All in all, I think it was a good year. Personally, I mean. I have some issues with it geopolitically, but I don’t think we need to go into that. And, for a change, it went by without any significant job turmoil. That’s something!

• Back in January, I got myself dragged into the long-running Northdale neighbourhood debate in the city of Waterloo. Not something I enjoyed greatly, but I felt I had to dip my oar in. I even presented to city council about it.
• I was interviewed by the (now sadly podfaded) The 100 Podcast about transportation issues and the LRT. That’s kind of cool.
• I made a failed attempt at live coding for Kwartzlab’s latest 5+5 event. Fun, though. And I’m glad I did it.
• [[Kwartzlab]] continues to be a great thing in our community, that I’m happy to be a part of.
• I ran an [[Ubuntu]] Global Jam, two release parties and helped host a LAN party with Eric. I started holding Ubuntu Hours in Kitchener-Waterloo and IRC meetings for Ubuntu Canada online. In the end, txwikinger and I became the new “contacts” for the Ubuntu Canada Local Community organization.
• I joined the office dodgeball team, leading to a number of minor injuries.
• I went to Bill and Tara’s wedding. Eric and Alex get married tonight.
• I co-presented on unit testing with Alexei at the local agile software development group. More live coding!
• Speaking of the Agile P2P, a number of us got together to start a technical book club, starting with Uncle Bob’s Clean Code. A number of agile development luminaries, including Uncle Bob, have joined our conversations.
• My blogging output flagged a bit, with everything else going on. I took out some of my local politics frustrations on the [[Waterloo-Wellington Bloggers]] Association, but that site is now defunct, merging with Wonderful Waterloo. That site has asked me to contribute as a blogger, but I haven’t pulled together a post yet.
• The new season of Doctor Who was awesome! I thought so, anyway. Also, I now have a ridiculous amount of Doctor Who toys.
• Ellen is still awesome.
• I became an uncle. My sister Erin’s son Grady was born in October.

As I was leaving for work yesterday, there was an interview with a guy on The Current on CBC yesterday morning about the Marshmallow Test.

Basic premise is you sit a kid down in a room with a marshmallow and tell them that they can eat the marshmallow whenever they want. However, the experimenter tells them, if they can wait 15 minutes until the experimenter comes back, the kid gets another marshmallow. [[wiki:Deferred gratification]].

The [[wiki:Stanford marshmallow experiment|original Marshmallow experiment]] followed its subjects for twenty years. It found that the kids who were able to defer gratification were more likely to do significantly better in school, have more friends and were generally considered more competent. Whether or not you can hold off stuffing a marshmallow in your face for 15 minutes when you’re 4 years old is a strong predictor of success later in life.

Anna Maria Tremonti (the host of The Current) wanted to focus on what this means for kids today (Kids today!) with their twitters and facebooks and ended up glossing over the most significant thing in the interview.

The marshmallow test is predictive, but it’s not fatalistic. Impulse control can be learned. It can be taught.

More than that, we have this image of self-discipline being stiff-upper-lippedness. Stoic resistance to pleasure. But the kids in the marshmallow test who were successful were the ones who were able to “strategically allocate their attention.” They were able to use distractions–singing songs, running around the room, study the ceiling tiles–rather than agonize over not eating the marshmallow.