Code of Faith

To say the last few weeks have been stressful is an understatement. I have subsisted on 2-3 cups of coffee a day to stay focused. I am a part-time employee but it feels like I’m working full-time hours.

Last week my supervisor told me that I needed to create a site that handled event registrations and accepted ACH transactions. So I began working on this project and it needed to be done by Friday. I spent some time making sure that what I was coding would work with the current code base I had created. I was told repeatedly to not worry so much about making sure it integrated as opposed to just getting it working. That just goes against how I think. I know that Murphy’s Law will kick in at some point and I will end up wasting the “time I saved” by just hacking something together to get it working. As I came across areas of concern I expressed them. The responses I got were less than encouraging. The responses came across as “Keep quiet and do your job.” Read More

It’s interesting how the consequences of past decisions rear their heads and throw your plans for a loop. I moved to Ft Worth two years ago to attend Southwestern Seminary. I came here with some debt that I incurred from my try at self-employment several years ago. Instead of spending the intervening time saving money to pay off my debts, I squandered the opportunity. Each semester I went a little bit farther into debt. One month I might get ahead and save up some money and then something would break or some unexpected problem would arise and I would wipe out my savings.

Several weeks ago I began looking at the schedule for this semester and registered for only one class. That was mostly due in part to the fact that I waited until the last minute to register. Once I began calculating the costs for this semester, it hit me. I just cannot be a good steward and continue to finance my education on debt. On the one hand, if I sit out this semester I feel as if I’m quitting. On the other hand, if I go further into debt for school I feel like being irresponsible. So either way, things are out of kilter and my plans are out the window. So I made the lesser of what feels like two bad decisions. I’m choosing to sit out this semester and work as many hours as humanly possible and save money. I’m also cutting expenses wherever possible. It was sad after I looked at my budget and saw how much I spend on eating out each month. By the grace of God, I can start back this summer and be able to pay cash for my classes. It is also my goal to have started paying down my debts by then.

Over the last two weeks I’ve done a bit of traveling. I drove to Dallas three times in a weeks time. Now, for most people in the MetroPlex that is a daily occurrence. In my case however, I have lived in Fort Worth for two years and had not been to Dallas. My first trip was to attend the Dallas Open Source Group. I found this group several months again through Meetup.com but had not been free on a Saturday to attend.

I got up early that Saturday and bought me a large coffee to get me ready for the trip. I found my way there without too much trouble. We met at Atlanta Bread Company. The management doesn’t mind the group meeting there and they have free Wi-Fi. There were about 10 of us with a range of experience and vocations, but we each had an interest in using open source software and seeing its adoption increase.

We discussed the body of software available on Windows. We would get distracted and chase rabbits but it was a fun hunting experience. Afterwards a few of us went to have BBQ and continued our conversation. It was during this trip that I was introduced to Nerdbooks.com.

Tuesday evening found me leaving Arlington for another Meetup group, DallasPHP. This group is a collection of programmers, managers and owners involved in the use of PHP & MySQL. The meeting was held at the Yahoo! offices in Richardson. Jason Ragsdale, a Yahoo! employee, gave a presentation on scalability and optimization.

This presentation was beneficial because several of the concepts I could implement immediately. I am a decent programmer but being self-taught I do not know all the best practices. I have been programming in PHP for close to four years but I have barely scratched the surface.

Finally, last Saturday, the DallasPHP group had a Q&A session at Nerdbooks. It was a smaller group and this allowed us to bring up coding problems or questions and get advice and feedback. Being my second time to Nerdbooks I couldn’t help but buy something. I picked The PHP Anthology and High Performance MySQL.

It occurred to me later that I had engaged in two activities that I really enjoy. I like pulling out a map, locating some obscure or interesting place and then figuring out how to get there. I also revel in programming. Coding at its simplest is stringing logic statements together to accomplish a task. The fun is piecing those logic blocks together to complete the puzzle. “Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.”

A few weeks ago I was working on a project that included a store locator. It required the user to input his/her zip code. Then the site would return a list of stores in order of their proximity to the user’s zip code.

I have to admit that I’ve seen this functionality on a variety of sites but I was never sure how the distances were calculated. As I began reading the source code, I learned that the previous programmer was using spherical geometry. That is after reading a few of the comments he included and then making a trek to Wikipedia. I came across an article on Great Circle Distance. Because of the curve of the earth you can’t just use linear geometry.

To say I was stymied was an understatement. I took geometry in high school and trigonometry in college but this beyond what I had ever attempted. After a few minutes of confusion, I got a clearer picture. I understood that I was taking various angles and distances and running a multitude of calculations. My biggest problem at first was that I wanted to actually figure out the cosine or tangent of each angle. I finally reached the point where I understood that to make this work I didn’t have to understand the inner workings I just needed to plug in the right pieces in the right places. Once I began breaking down the equation by its orders of operation it made more sense. I coded the whole equation and it calculated the same distance as Google on the first try.

Granted, I didn’t learn spherical geometry in high school but it is similar to the type of things I would have lamented over, “I’ll never use this in the real world.” This got me to thinking. What other things that I learned in school have I used in “real life.”

• Spanish – I didn’t learn Spanish until college but I’ll include it. I’ve been to Mexico several times and it was a definite advantage. I also used it from time to tome while working at Pizza Hut. There were times when I had to converse with customers in Spanish. I would also eavesdrop on my hispanic coworkers who forgot that I could speak Spanish.
• French – Not so much. I wish I had remembered more for the time I went to Paris and Benin.
• American Civics – I understand how our government is supposed to work. As I have grown older, the current state of our political system just depresses me.
• Free Enterprise – I used the subject matter of this class during my brief entrepreneurial period. There was not enough demand for my supply, hence I went out of business.
• Keyboarding – We used actual typewriters in this class. I am so thankful for that class. I spend most of my day in front of a computer, so I revel in the fact that I don’t have to hunt and peck.
• Chemistry – I love watching the chemical reaction of Mentos reacting with Diet Coke. If we could have done that experiment in high school, then chemistry would have been a great deal more enjoyable.
• History – “A person who fails to understand history is destined to repeat it.” I didn’t learn that in my history classes. I think I heard it in a movie somewhere. Most of the time, I use my knowledge in history to point out people’s historical inaccuracies. It’s a bad habit, I know.
• Consumer Math – This is the class where you learned to balance a check book and calculate interest on a mortgage. That was an easy A.
• English Literature – “From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remember’d; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”
  Who hasn’t wanted to quote those lines from Henry V in a conversation to embolden their troops. Sadly, the opportunity has evaded me to this point.
• Physics – I didn’t take Physics in high school or college. However, after watching Mythbusters, I would really like to learn. Who doesn’t want to know how much kinetic energy is released when a car collides with the ground after being thrown by a trebuchet. Thanks to UC Berkeley, I can now take the equivalent of Physics for Dummies.

Well, it’s not an exhaustive list, but I think my high school years were well spent. But as the old saying goes, “You’re never done learning.”