Andrew Montalenti - Code, Essays, Ideas

Uninterruptability

Paul Graham, in a footnote from his essay on “How to Make Wealth”:

One valuable thing you tend to get only in startups is uninterruptability. Different kinds of work have different time quanta. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. But the time quantum for hacking is very long: it might take an hour just to load a problem into your head. So the cost of having someone from personnel call you about a form you forgot to fill out can be huge.

This is why hackers give you such a baleful stare as they turn from their screen to answer your question. Inside their heads a giant house of cards is tottering.

The mere possibility of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects. This is why they tend to work late at night, and why it’s next to impossible to write great software in a cubicle (except late at night).

One great advantage of startups is that they don’t yet have any of the people who interrupt you. There is no personnel department, and thus no form nor anyone to call you about it.

David Foster Wallace on advertorials

In “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” (which also appeared in Harper’s Magazine as the essay, “Shipping Out”), David Foster Wallace discusses an “essay” he came across discussing a cruise, but which was really an advertisement.

In other words, Celebrity Cruises is presenting Conroy’s review of his 7NC Cruise as an essay and not a commercial. This is extremely bad. Here is the argument for why it is bad. Whether it honors them well or not, an essay’s fundamental obligations are supposed to be to the reader. The reader, on however unconscious a level, understands this, and thus tends to approach an essay with a relatively high level of openness and credulity. But a commercial is a very different animal. Advertisements have certain formal, legal obligations to truthfulness, but these are broad enough to allow for a great deal of rhetorical maneuvering in the fulfillment of an advertisements primary obligation, which is to serve the financial interests of its sponsor. Whatever attempts an advertisement makes to interest and appeal to its readers are not, finally, for the reader’s benefit. And the reader of an ad knows all this, too – that an ad’s appeal is by its very nature calculated – and this is part of why our state of receptivity is different, more guarded, when we get ready to read an ad.

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The content trading desk

Note: At the time of this post’s publication, I was the co-founder & CTO of Parse.ly, the company behind a a real-time analytics platform used by top publishers such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Slate, Fortune, TechCrunch, and over 2,500 others. This post was informed by that work experience.

My first job out of college was as a software engineer for Morgan Stanley. This 50,000 employee firm employed tens of thousands of software engineers. Though the most important employees were the traders, it was clear that software ran the place.

For anyone who has worked on Wall Street in the last couple of decades, this is no surprise. It may be surprising to people from outside the industry, who perhaps still associate Wall Street with traders wearing funny jackets calling out orders across a busy NYSE trading floor. That still goes on (though, probably not for long). Most of the trading activity on Wall Street is heavily computerized. Orders are placed and fulfilled mostly by machines.

Once the markets went digital, data analysis became a much more rigorous discipline on Wall Street. Whereas before, a trader’s primary edge was being personally connected to the most important players (think Gordon Gecko), today’s traders seek edge in systematic prediction models. In other words, other machines analyze the orders being placed and fulfilled on the market, and yet others try to detect patterns or make predictions based on all of this data.
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Python double-under, double-wonder

Python has a number of protocols that classes can opt into by implementing one or more “dunder methods”, aka double-underscore methods. Examples include __call__ (make an object behave like a function) or __iter__ (make an object iterable).

The choice of wrapping these functions with double-underscores on either side was really just a way of keeping the language simple. The Python creators didn’t want to steal perfectly good method names from you (such as “call” or “iter”), but they also did not want to introduce some new syntax just to declare certain methods “special”. The dunders achieve the dual goal of calling attention to these methods while also making them just the same as other plain methods in every aspect except naming convention.

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PyCon 2013: The Debrief

PyCon US 2013 is over! It was a lot of fun — and super informative.

The People

For me, it was great to finally meet in person such friends and collaborators as
@__get__, @nvie, @jessejiryudavis, and @japerk.

It was of course a pleasure to see again such Python super-stars as
@adrianholivaty, @wesmckinn, @dabeaz, @raymondh, @brandon_rhodes, @alex_gaynor, and @fperez_org.

(Want to follow them all? I made a Twitter list.)

I also met a whole lot of other Python developers from across the US and even the world, and the entire conference had a great energy. The discussions over beers ranged from how to use Tornado effectively to how to hack a Python shell into your vim editor to how to scale a Python-based software team to how to grow the community around an open source project.

In stark contrast to the events I’ve been typically going to in the last year (namely: ‘trade conferences’ and ‘startup events’), PyCon is unbelievably pure in its purpose and feel. This is where a community of bright, talented developers who share a common framework and language can push their collective skills to new heights.

And push them, we did.

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Rapid Web Prototyping with Lightweight Tools

Today, I am teaching a tutorial at PyCon called “Rapid Web Prototyping with Lightweight Tools.” I’ll update this post with how it went, but here are the materials people are using for the course.

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Uruguayan President: a radical farmer as president?

He was a former guerrilla militant who violently rebelled against the government. He lived in solitary confinement in prison for a decade. He was elected as president of Uruguay, one of South America’s most liberal nations. He has pushed for abortion rights, marijuana legalization, and sustainable energy.

His net worth on taking office was $1,800 — the value of his 1987 Volkswagen Beetle. He donates 90% of his presidential salary to the poor. He lives in a small house on $800/month with his wife, even as president. He has sold off presidential vacation homes and believes public officials should be “taken down a notch”. He believes serving consecutive terms is “monarchic.” He hopes to return to farming after serving his presidential term.

Solidify your Python web skills in two days at PyCon US 2013

PyCon US 2013 is coming up in March. It is in beautiful Santa Clara, right outside of Palo Alto / San Francisco.

The main conference is sold out, but there are still a few spots open for the tutorial sessions.

(Here’s a secret: the tutorials are where I’ve always learned the most at PyCon.)

Most of PyCon’s attendees are Python experts and practitioners. However, Python is one of the world’s greatest programming languages because it is one of its most teachable and learnable. Attending PyCon is a great way to rapidly move yourself from the “novice” to “expert” column in Python programming skills.

This year, there is an excellent slate of tutorial sessions available before the conference starts. These cost $150 each, which is a tremendous value for a 3-hour, in-depth session on a Python topic. I know of a lot of people who are getting into Python as a way to build web applications. There is actually a great “novice web developer” track in this year’s tutorials, which I’ll outline in this page.

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Going mobile in 1998

My first mobile device was a Palm V. I understood the power of mobile really early. I was 15 in 1999, when the Palm V was released. I first came across the Palm devices in 1998, when the Palm III came onto the scene. I never owned one, but played with the one my Dad owned, but barely used.

This device was comically under-powered in retrospect. It had 2 megabytes of RAM, which had to be used as not only the working memory of the device, but also the storage. It had a 16 Hz processor, a 4-greyscale screen, and a stylus-driven interface.

The Palm V was an amazing device. In lieu of the plastic of the Palm III, it had a finished anodized aluminum finish, very similar to the kinds of sleek devices we would only begin to regularly see in the last couple of years. It was nearly half the weight of its predecessor, and as thin as the stylus you used to control it. It had a surprisingly well-designed docking station (imagine this: since USB hadn’t yet been developed, it had to sync over the low-bandwidth Serial Port available on PCs at the time).

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Questioning the Canon

I was in the best of settings when I realized that Shakespeare was indeed great. My freshman year in high school, I had English class with an esteemed teacher, Mr. Broza—hailed as the Paul D. Schreiber High School Shakespeare aficionado, founder of Schreiber’s Annual Shakespeare Day, and, perhaps most heart-warming of all, a self-proclaimed Shakespeare lover whose posters of The Bard could be found as wallpaper in his small office. How lucky I thought I was. Indeed, if I wanted to appreciate Hamlet, I was in the right hands.

But how misled I actually was—at least, in Walker Percy’s eyes. In his essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” Percy recalls a scene from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter:

…the girl hides in the bushes to hear the Capehart in the big house play Beethoven. Perhaps she was the lucky one after all. Think of the unhappy souls inside, who see the record, worry about the scratches, and most of all worry about whether they are getting it, whether they are bona fide music lovers. What is the best way to hear Beethoven: sitting in a proper silence around the Capehart or eavesdropping from an azalea bush?

Percy here contrasts two different approaches to viewing art—the girl who informally and spontaneously encounters the work of art, out of context, as opposed to the “unhappy souls inside” who formally prepare themselves for a kind of pre-packaged listening experience. Percy wonders which is better—a question meant for the reader’s pondering. But his essay offers his answer: we can only truly see or hear a piece of art by “the decay of those facilities which were designed to help the sightseer”. Perhaps Percy is right—it might have been better if my experience with Hamlet had been an accidental discovery rather than a guided tour, an “eavesdropping from an azalea bush” rather than “proper silence around the Capehart.” Perhaps I should have encountered the text unaware of its origin but intrigued by its mystery. After sitting by a tree and reading the text front-to-back, perhaps then I would be able to “see” Shakespeare in Percy’s sense of the word.

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