Kevin's Weblog

I closed on the house a week ago, and I just got my first re-fi offer in the mail.

42) Buy a House

I closed on the house yesterday. Wow! I’m excited and nervous and overwhelmed. I’ve got 2 weeks to move everything in before I go off on vacation, but that shouldn’t be too bad. I started moving some boxes already; the big day of furniture moving will probably be put off until next weekend. And some point soon I’ll actually post some pictures.

Right. I keep meaning to update and failing. I’m closing on the house on Thursday. I’m in a sort of very low level, continuous freak-out at this point. I’m sure it’ll go fine; but the reality of moving and setting up a home, again, is sinking in. Oh, and have I mentioned that I’m leaving on a two week vacation two weeks after closing day? Some recollections of the past month:

The inspection itself was quite educational. I followed the inspector around and got quite a few pointers about maintenance and such. The big issue that came up is that the roof is close to finished. We had a tense day of negotiations, but did get the seller to agree to cover the cost of a new roof.

Settling on the mortgage was a little stressful, but only because I didn’t just trust my instincts. My feeling going in was that I wanted to use my credit union, who I have a life-long relationship with. Over the years, plenty of people have looked at me funny for continuing to do all my banking with a bank on the other side of the country, but they have never made me unhappy as a customer, which is a pretty amazing thing to say about a bank. So, I got my preapproval through them, but then I let my agent talk me into getting some mortgage quotes from a broker that she often uses. That ended up taking most of a week, due to some phone tag, and in the end the broker couldn’t beat my credit union’s rates (or their fees, or their guarantee not to resell my loan). Unfortunately, at that point when I called my credit union to finalize the application, the first person I talked to wasn’t sure they could do it, because they usually want 30 days to do an out-of-state mortgage (which would have been no problem had I not wasted a week getting quotes from other people). Then I talked to another person and said “Look, I really want to do this with you, but if you can’t hit May 1st I have to go elsewhere”, and he said he could make that happen.

Getting insurance was straightforward, although part of me really wants to know why they ask some of the questions they do and how it affects your risk (and premium). I don’t want to game them or anything, I’m genuinely curious why drywall vs. sheetrock matters to them.

Tomorrow I need to call the utility companies and take care of all that.

Okay, better post this now, or it’ll never happen before the purchase actually happens.

I’m now on Twitter. I’d been sort of contemplating it for a while, but Selena finally talked me into it while we were out #drunkgeeking last week. So far only 25% of my tweets are about what I’m eating.

42) Buy a House

On Sunday I had an offer accepted on a house! It’s a cute Victorian bungalow, just a block down the street from where I am now. Although there’s lots of small houses in this neighborhood, most of the houses on the market have been bigger than I need, and pushing what I can afford, leading to questions of whether I’d be happy renting out a room to someone, or buying a duplex and living in half of it. This house is just about perfectly sized for me, and comfortably priced.

We’re in the inspection period currently, but the house seems to have been well cared-for, so I’m hopeful that we won’t discover anything problematic. Beyond that, things still move pretty slowly at this point in the process. Stay tuned for updates (and pictures) later.

(Aside: please don’t feel that you need to comment on this post with your speculations about the future of the housing market or mortgage market. Suffice it to say that I’ve been paying attention too, particularly to the local market here, and given my needs and plans (and my ability to still qualify for a mortgage on excellent terms) I am comfortable with this purchase.)

I took the shotgun approach to this year’s OSCON call-for-proposals and submitted 3 talks. My biggest fear was actually that all three might get accepted. But, it worked out as I hoped and they picked just one. I’ll be talking about “Beautiful Concurrency with Erlang”. The talk will be an improved and expanded version of my presentation to PDXfunc last month, demonstrating how easy it is to convert sequential programs in Erlang into concurrent / distributed programs taking advantage of your multi-core machine, or a cluster of machine.

I’m slightly nervous, because I’ll freely admit that I was likely selected to give this talk more because I’m good at writing proposals, than because I’m the most qualified person out there to discuss Erlang. That said, I’ll make an effort to draw on the expertise of others to help make the talk as good as possible and as effective as possible at drawing new people into the community.

As a minor aside, I’m currently scheduled for Wednesday morning, which is ideal as far as I’m concerned. I get to give my talk, then relax and enjoy the remaining 2 days of the conference.

Paul Graham’s latest essay, You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss, has caused quite a stir. Although I thought the discussion of the pathologies of large organizations was interesting, the assertion that only startup founders are living life the way they are meant to (lions on the savannah, rather than caged animals) really rubbed me the wrong way. The Cliff Notes version attempts to smooth things over, but in a way also basically says that employees are choosing to live in cages.

Graham starts his essay with an anecdote about a recent experience that he feels demonstrates his point. After spending some time thinking about why I felt his point was wrong, I realized that I also have an anecdote with relevance to share.

I happen to have a friend(1) who is in this YCombinator round. Last week I was in the Bay Area for a couple days, so I dropped him a line to see if he had time to meet up for dinner. He replied that my timing was good, because I was there the day after “demo day”, so they had a day off(2). We met up in downtown Mountain View and went looking for a place to eat that fit his budget: $10 entrees would be okay, but $15, as was common at most of the restaurants, was too much. At dinner, I kvetched about Yahoo, and he kvetched about YCombinator. I talked about my jaunt up to San Francisco the previous evening to meet up with friends for excellent cocktails (on another trip it might have been a great restaurant, or an art museum, or hiking on the beach or Mt. Tam). It turns out he’s been in Silicon Valley since December but has yet to make it into SF. He also only gets to eat out once or twice a month.

Unlike Graham’s conclusions drawn from a couple minutes of observing strangers, I’ve know this person for over 10 years. I’ve seen him go through good times and bad times. I want to be fair; he’s far from the least happy I’ve seen him. But I also definitely wouldn’t say that he’s the most alive I’ve known him to be either. I definitely didn’t feel like a caged animal in comparison.

Even in the case of these founders that Graham describes who are passionately consumed by their work, I still question the assertion that they are living life as they were meant to. How much time do they spend with friends and family? Do they get to enjoy the amazing city they live just outside of? Can they go out to dinner without having to count their pennies?

By some argument, perhaps this is how we were “meant” to live, in an evolutionary sense. Historically humans spent almost all their time hunting and gathering and performing other essential survival tasks (i.e., working). The modern concept of leisure is, perhaps, evolutionarily unnatural. But regardless, the fact is that productivity has risen to the point where most people can work 40 or so hours a week and produce enough to cover their needs (and a reasonable amount of their wants). We can accept being less than fully self-actualized at work in exchange for the ability to pursue a variety of other activities during the remaining 60 hours of wakefulness we have each week.

Furthermore, Graham seems to assume that all people share the ambition to produce exceptional results at work. I assure you, they do not. I know plenty of people who wouldn’t complain too much about the “team-building” exercise he scorned because, hey, they’re getting paid to run around Palo Alto on a silly scavenger hunt, rather than having to sit at their desk. While coworkers who accept average results may sometimes be frustrating to those of us who aspire to greatness, I still have to admit that I sometimes envy the folks who can manage to just not be bothered by whatever is going on at work, and who can just go home at 5 and put it out of their mind until 9 the next morning.

Are there people working big company jobs that deaden their souls? No doubt. Are there startup founders who are fully alive, in all parts of their life? Probably. But in both environments, there’s a more diverse set of experiences than Graham is admitting to. Furthermore, there’s also a diverse set of goals — people don’t universally agree about what living life fully means. Failing to acknowledge that, and putting down people with different values as a result, is the fundamental flaw in Graham’s essay, in my opinion.

(1) For a couple reasons, I’ve chosen to keep my friend anonymous, unless, of course, he chooses to reveal his identity.

(2) Does it strike you as odd that the startup founders at YCombinator apparently get told when they can take a day off? Me too. My friend informs me that what he meant was that he had granted himself a day off. My apologies for misrepresenting the comment.

Yesterday, I finally made it to one of the Calagator code sprints. I’ve been interested in this project since I first heard about it a few weeks ago, but the timing just hadn’t worked out until now.

The code sprint format was a lot of fun. Often I struggle with focus and motivation to work on my side projects, and getting a small group together all hacking on the same thing seems like a great idea. Also, because they are using pair programming I felt like I could contribute right away, even though my Ruby and Rails knowledge is minimal. I know just enough to be able to read other people’s code and usually understand the gist of it, although on my own I would spend 99% of my time looking up stuff in the docs. But, with someone else doing the typing while we talked through a new feature, I could help distill the algorithm without getting bogged down in the syntax.

During the couple hours I was there, we implemented de-duping of events and venues when a specific source is re-imported. I believe this code is now live, although it looks like there’s still some old duplicates remaining to be cleaned up. Something that was particularly nice about implementing this feature was that it was one of those satisfying cases when the codebase actually ends up cleaner and better factored when you’re finished adding as feature than it was before.

I’m definitely looking forward to participating in more of these sprints in the future. In the mean time, I’m going to spend some time trying to get familiar with the code base, and picking up my Rails reading again; and try to get to the point where I could contribute on my own. Perhaps I’ll try to squash a bug or something.

First tulip spotting of the year. Unfortunately, I only had my crappy camera phone with me, so apologies for the poor quality.

I spent most of yesterday hunting down a segfault in one of our unit tests. Here is a greatly simplified version of the code: can you see the bug?

#include <string>

void bar(size_t* len)
{
  *len = 0;
}

int main(void)
{
  std::string buf;
  int len = 255;

  bar((size_t *)&len);

  return 0;
}

Here’s a hint: maybe it doesn’t segfault for you.

Hint #2: the segfault is in basic_string::~basic_string().

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