DEV Community: Daniel Sellers

A Simple QR Code Based System for Organizing Your Boxes

Daniel Sellers — Sun, 16 Feb 2020 23:05:15 +0000

Recently we had our second child, and that meant digging through a bunch of boxes in the basement to find leftover baby clothes and gear. After not being able to find a few things we were pretty sure we still had I realized that there had to be a better way.

Now, there are a bunch of solutions out there on the market that do this, but they all had subscriptions to use them. I was really tempted to write my own app… but then I started thinking about how I could create a system without doing any programming and in a few minutes. Time being precious with a newborn in the house.

I knew that a QR code could point to a url, so I just needed some sort of hosting that would give me a unique url for parts of a document. For the briefest of moments I thought about creating something on my website to do it… then I remembered that we already use Google docs for all sorts of things, maybe they would work here.

Then a little more experimenting with the mobile apps, and the various offerings and I realized that Google Slides was the best option I had. First, I didn’t have the app on my phone. This was crucial because the app doesn’t correctly navigate to a slide when you click a slide specific link in the browser. Slides also are a nice form factor for a list of items, and other information and can link back and forth to each other.

Ok, so here are the things that you need to make this work.

A Google Slides presentation
the-qrcode-generator.com/
A laptop
A printer
Some Tape

Now that you have those things let’s get started.

First, create a new slide in your presentation. Now, grab your box. Title the slide with a name that makes sense, and then type out a list of all the things that are in it, to whatever granularity you want.

Now, with the slide up on the screen you can copy the URL (from the URL bar of your browser, make sure you grab the whole thing), and head over to the-qrcode-generator.com/. Select the option for URL and paste it in. The QR code will change on the right of the page! Click save and save the image off for printing.

This is where you can do one of two things. You can print the code right now, cut it out and tape it to the box, or you can repeat these steps for a few boxes and print them in a batch. As I am typing this I am realizing you create a slide for every box you want, create QR codes for the links and then fill them in as you tape them on the box.

Either way… that’s pretty much it.

Now you can scan the QR code on the front of the box (on iOS just turn on the camera app, point it at the box and then click the notification that drops down from the top) and be taken to a list of its contents. If you have boxes behind other boxes I added links to the box in the back from the box in the front to make it easy to know what is there.

In the future I’ll be adding a photo of the box, and a small map of the basement showing where the box is to the slides. That will make it really easy to search for an item in the slides (ctrl+f for the win!) and know where that box is in the basement without having to dig through every box, or even scan every box.

Happy organizing!

I Started a Newsletter to share what I read each week

Daniel Sellers — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 16:34:24 +0000

A few weeks back I started a newsletter, lovingly called TIL, in which I talk about all the things I read, and learn, each week. The idea is that it helps call out things worth reading, and things not worth reading, in the same vein as my annual recap on my blog.

So, if you are interested in finding some interesting articles, podcasts, books, and other media. That are focused on software development, the world, and leadership, well then you should head over to http://til.designfrontier.net and sign up.

It comes out every Sunday night/Monday morning!

The most recent one can be found here: https://mailchi.mp/01f142f166d4/til-newsletter-5-experiment-on-everything-fight-for-what-you-believe

One last thing!

I'd also like to use it as a forum to answer questions for folks! A few weeks ago I talked about the difference between a software engineer and a software developer, at the request of a reader. So! If you have questions you want answered, sign up, and send them in response to the welcome email! And I'll try and answer them.

Tech Things I read in 2018

Daniel Sellers — Sat, 29 Dec 2018 04:26:42 +0000

This is going to be a pretty straightforward list of what tech related reading I did this year. It doesn’t include hundreds of blog posts and forum discussion. I’ll break it into two categories, things worth reading, and things not worth reading. Hopefully this will save you some time. I’ll also toss in a some notes or thoughts about a book where it seems reasonable.

Things Worth Reading

First and foremost I joined the Association for Computing Machinery this year on the suggestion of a coworker. They have an incredible collection of papers that are worth the price of admissions. Plus they have a reasonable code of ethics that makes a good starting place for developing your own code of ethics. By all this I mean... if you are inclined to read academic papers joining is a pretty solid decision.

A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout

This one is fine. It has some good stuff. It has some silly stuff. But the discussion about API first design, and appropriately sizing your modules provides a good framework.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

Another fine one. It feels self righteous and preachy. Almost put this on the not worth it list, but if you read it and think, "dang my company is nothing like this" you might want to start looking for a better company. There are reasons not to be exactly like what they outline (like not choosing the same business model as they have), but your company shouldn’t be the exact opposite of all the things that they have written. And it’s worth seeing a contrasting view.

Verbal Judo, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Persuasion by George Thompson

So far this has been fantastic. Great book on communicating effectively and verbally defusing situations that are tense.

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder

Excellent Book on developing business models.

Radical Candor by Kim Scott

If you want to get better at being a team member or team leader read this one. Excellent book.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppmann

Read this book. It’s incredibly heavy at times. Totally worth it though. If you want to understand the tradeoffs and decisions that must be made in data intensive applications, there is no substitute. Excellent read. But be ready for a lot of intense theory. Really can’t recommend this one highly enough. Read it. Read it now.

Guidelines for Adopting Frontend Architectures and Patterns in Microservices-Based Systems by Holger Harms, Collin Rogowski, and Luigi Lo Iacono

An excellent paper outlining how various FE architectures play with microservices. Tradeoffs and advantages of each one. (Available in ACM)

Self-contained Web Components through Serverless Computing by Markus Ast, and Martin Gaedke

This paper proposes some really interesting ideas for creating fully functional web components backed by serverless functions. Makes for an interesting potential architecture for the future. (Available in ACM)

Things Not Worth Reading

These books did not live up to the hype... I most likely did not finish reading them, and leave them here as a warning to you. Hopefully saving you some cash and some time.

Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software by David Scott Bernstein

This book is terrible. Not worth it.

Your Code as a Crime Scene: Use Forensic Techniques to Arrest Defects, Bottlenecks, and Bad Design in Your Programs (The Pragmatic Programmers) by Adam Tornhill

This one has a few good parts but you can pretty much skip it. Read the Microsoft papers on bug generation causes and prevention and you will be better off than having read this book. (seriously Microsoft has done a ton of academic research on the root cause of common bugs and how to prevent them)

Neptune (Gremlin) Local Dev Setup

Daniel Sellers — Sun, 04 Nov 2018 16:36:10 +0000

I am playing with some graph databases right now, for a fun project I may write about later. When I first started out I was using Neo4j, which has an excellent local development story, a lovely web based UI for visualizing your data and CYPHER, which is a pretty easy to grasp graph language.

All great marks in its favor.

However, since the rest of the project was going to be a series of lambdas and api gateways, and it was going to be hosted in AWS I got curious about Neptune. Oh, and because I know less about scaling and maintaining graph DB infrastructure than I would like. Using Neptune, a hosted graph DB, freed me from lots of the infrastructure knowledge for now.

But there was seemingly no good local development story for it.

Then I remembered that in the world of Graph DBs the thing that matters most is finding a match for the query language your target DB uses.

Neptune uses Gremlin as its primary query language which happens to be the primary language of Apache TinkerPop. So I got a docker based instance of TinkerPop running. That got me the DB server at least. Let me tell you, I bashed my head on gremlin for a lot longer than I’d like to admit. You may do better than me, but take time to read the docs and intro. The querying concepts are likely different than what you’ve dealt with in the past. And gremlin feels more alien than CYPHER does.

So the second thing that I wanted was a way to easily visualize the data I was writing into the graph. It’s handy when you are trying to figure out how the query language works to be able to see if your query returns nothing because there is nothing, or if you’ve written it wrong.

In looking for what to use I stumbled on https://github.com/bricaud/graphexp which provides a simple UI for gremlin based DBs. Not the most beautiful in the world, but it is functional and lets you see everything I was looking for quickly.

Wiring all this up was pretty straightforward with docker-compose. My docker file for graphexp and docker-compose for the whole thing are on github for easy reuse.

Once I had it running locally it started to be a matter of reading through the TinkerPop gremlin documentation. There is a lot of it. But it is reasonably good. I also started reading Kevin Lawrence’s Practical Gremlin which was very helpful.

Hopefully some of this helps you on your way to using gremlin based graph databases!

Direct Feedback

Daniel Sellers — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 14:56:20 +0000

Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback,” he said. He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.”

—Ian Parker for the New Yorker.

Giving clear and direct feedback is one of the hardest things for me as a manager. I agree with Jobs on this, that the thing that usually holds me back is that I want my direct reports to like me. Ironically the thing I appreciate about my favorite managers was their ability to give me direct feedback, even direct negative feedback, so that I knew how to get better.

This quote reminds me of a a training meeting I was in a while ago for leadership in one of the local congregations of the LDS church. We were talking about this verse:

Reproving betimes with sharpness, when moved upon by the Holy Ghost; and then showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou hast reproved, lest he esteem thee to be his enemy;

— Doctrine & Covenants 121:43

The individual leading the discussion pointed out that the key here was clarity of feedback. Direct, clear and focused. Not sharp as in cutting, but sharp in its focus on what needed to change.

That is the type of feedback I appreciate, even when my initial reaction is negative to it.

One final thought on all this. Setting up a space for direct feedback is important. I have found that when I have a time set aside to receive I can become used to lowering my defensive walls and allow in the feedback more quickly.

So making time to discuss needed changes, and progress allows me to prepare to receive it openly. This is why having regular 1:1 meetings is so important.

Making the world more beautiful

Daniel Sellers — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 18:01:30 +0000

Prompt: "You are tasked with making the world most beautiful. Where do you start?"

My first reaction is that I start with furniture. I believe that our perception of quality and beauty, which I don’t think are separable, are largely shaped by the environment that surrounds us. I’d love to say architecture, the thing that defines our environments, but good architecture is inaccessible to the majority people. But if we can shape the furniture, the objects that occupy that space to be more beautiful and of higher quality then we can inculcate a higher sense of beauty into society.

As for what I would do with that furniture... I would drive it aesthetically towards the Japanese traditional and the Scandinavian contemporary. Why these two? Because they both espouse simplicity of form and honesty in materials. Both of which are things that are generally lacking in the modern sense of aesthetic beauty.

How much more satisfied with ourselves could we be if we acknowledged that imperfections in the surface of a piece of wood furniture were in fact marks of beauty, that the wear of use represented the love placed on an object. That a work bench and a table with dings in it represent the highest form of praise for design?

Of course this all falls apart if experiencing Japanese wabi-sabi, the aesthetic of use and decay, in our surroundings does not instill an acceptance of wabi-sabi as beauty in ourselves and other people. If we could accept that honesty as a source of beauty in our furniture was truth, perhaps we could accept that honesty in our person and in the person of others was beauty.

That last part would dramatically shift the world, as we accepted that maybe beauty is something we innately posses, something that needs little augmentation, and that the process of becoming over time is true beauty indeed.

Vetting Information you read on the internet

Daniel Sellers — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 04:46:44 +0000

Hi friends!

I realized that because of the certain set of skills I have been honing at work for the last decade I have some quick ways of vetting websites for content accuracy that the average non-nerd (read cool person) hasn’t been exposed to. So read ahead for a quick summary of how I vet web media outlets. <3 you all.

For anyone interested in how to quickly vet websites as to their reliability:

Suspect there might be some bias in an article. This most easily done by starting to question any article that agrees too perfectly with your pre-existing opinion. If it is just confirming what you think it needs extra questioning to avoid confirmation bias.
Look at the site posting that article to see what else they have posted. Evaluate if those articles seem reliable
open a terminal and run whois domain-name-goes-here look at the results for age and location of registration. if the terminal isn’t your speed try this website: https://whois.icann.org/en. Location is probably hidden, doing so is cheap and easy. But definitely look for a short registration period, and recent creation date. Both of those are red flags of a throw away site being used to manipulate opinion.
Find a particularly salient passage of text, copy it, paste it into google, wrapt it with double quotes to force exact matches, and look at the results. Does it look like a network of sites posting the exact same thing? If so this is likely an attempt to mislead people/influence public opinion. If this turns up any sites that seem unreliable that should be another red flag for you.
If any of the above raised red flags, don’t share it, don’t post it, forget that you read it. It is most likely someone trying to cement false information in the public’s mind.

And seriously if one of the sites that is in the network that google search returns is ufomania.com, that should be the only red flag that you need.

One last thing: This isn’t about liberal or conservative. This is about recognizing truth wherever it is. See an article you don’t trust? Expose it. See an article you do? Verify it. Truth is the only thing that matters. Seek it.

PS: I should have mentioned this: make sure that you copy and paste the domain. There are a lot of characters in the UTF-8 character set (sorry nerd talk) that look like other characters. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack for nerd details. But just know that ’A’ and ’А’ are not the same character.

design and the internet as ephemera

Daniel Sellers — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 14:05:46 +0000

Hang tight... this is going to get a little esoteric.

The expirement really begins with three realizations. 1) That no one seems to agree on the direction that previous and next should be in blog navigation, 2) that no one really goes back and reads a blog’s archive, and 3) that the web is both a new age of ephemera and completely permenant.

Ephemera, if you are unfamiliar, are the cheap printed pamphlets that you often receive from people trying to get your signature on a petition. Or, the cheap signs pasted up for local band’s concerts. (More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemera) With the rise of the internet, cheap domains, and cheap hosting, the internet has become the source of most of our ephemera.

Most events, even one time events, have websites now. We crank out brochure sites for marketing campaigns. Manifestos, love letters, political discourse, these all now live on the internet instead of the printed ephemera that they occupied since the printing press was created.

Really the articles that we all churn out on our blogs are ephemera as well. They are popular now and gone tomorrow. Up to date information today and completely out of date six months from now. And yet they are still there. Still present in search engines indices though they have slipped from the collective conscious. They are permenant ephemera, like a concert poster trapped on the corner window of a dillapiated building that somehow sticks around for months after the concert is over.

In thinking about this I realized that the most important thing on any blog is the most recent article. That no one really dives into the archives unless they are directed there from a search engine. So in the pursuit of minimalism in design it felt pretty clear that most navigation could be visually hidden since it is mostly a detractor from the experience of reading which is why people are there in the first place.

Other design decisions have been drawn from this as well. Things like having the root of designfrontier.net redirect to the current article’s permenant address. Having swipe gestures for linear navigation through the "timeline" of posts.

This swpie based navigation and the next/previous links at the bottm of the page represent the most obvious forms of navigation. The rest is hidden behind the logo, much like a hamburger menu.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry famously said, "It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove." That has been the core design philosophy behind designfrontier.net. That anything not essential, anything that doesn’t serve the main reason the user is there should be removed. So nav gets hidden, gestures for touch devices get added, an API for consuming content, and the option to navigate to past articles presented at the bottom once you have finished what you actually came here to do.

I am generally trying to get out of the users way, so they can do what they need to.

There are a few things I am still trying to work out with this approach. The chief being that google doesn’t seem to handle the 302 redirect to the permanent URL for the current article nicely. So... I am working on that. There are also a few visual tweaks I’d like to make to the hidden nav and I am playing with the idea of adding a menu button, though that takes away some of the theoretical beauty in exchange for better discoverability. I am not sure if I want to do that yet. The last thing I am working on is a good way to measure the results of this. To identify if usage is going the way that I think it is. Because without measurement this is really more of an artistic manifesto about the internet then it is a design experiment.

The right Tools for the right job

Daniel Sellers — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:23:54 +0000

Last week I did a bit of programming for Game Of Codes in my "free" time which lead me to a couple of interesting observations.

1. Number of passing tests is more important then compute time

This makes sense right? If you pass more tests then someone else then the speed with which you did it is kind of irrelevant. This is a decidedly startup mentality. That getting things done is better then how well they are done. And I agree with it.

2. node’s startup time is great for servers and terrible for CLI tools

With the caveat of when those tools need to be really fast to win a prize. JS is my sketching language and I typically solve first there and then convert to something faster, like Rust.

The reason is that the startup for node includes compilation which is costly. Not a problem when you are a server that starts up once and stays up for a long time. More of a problem when you have to pay that cost as part of your run time.

node does some great stuff in that startup but it is expensive.

3. I wish I was better at algorithms

These sort of things always make me feel this way.

Which is part of why I like doing them. It forces me to think about computational complexity. I just wish I had picked up enough algorithms knowledge already to be able to fly through some of these. Someday... maybe soon... hopefully.

4. These things are probably terrible as recruiting tools... but dang fun

Most people who have the chops to do well at these things already have jobs they love. They’re just in it to snag some $$$ and a shirt. But man it is fun to have quick computationally intense problems to work every once in a while.

5. I really like Rust’s syntax

It’s really nice. Fighting the compiler on types is something I am not used to... but it’s errors are usually pretty sane and understandable. Plus it’s fast. I don’t know how to performance tune it really... but it’s still really fast and it’s compile times aren’t bad either.

Last thing on Rust... cargo is pretty rad. Love it.

Conclusion

Coding contests are fun. You should do them. Great way to push yourself and force yourself to try new things and new languages. Plus they are really good practice for interviews.

Office Hours

Daniel Sellers — Fri, 15 Sep 2017 04:55:24 +0000

If you hadn’t noticed from this post and the last one... I am feeling grateful and like I need to give back to the community a bit. So while Hack Night SLC is ramping back up I thought it would be good to try out office hours.

I recognize that the fact that I can do this is a deep privilege, and that I’ve been lucky enough to have mentors and friends help me throughout my career. I really wouldn’t be where I am without many blessings, and lots of help.

So I am going to try and help others with the same sort of things.

What do you do in these office hours?

So far I’ve done 2 office hour meetings. We talked about career stuff. We talked about interviews and how to handle them better. We talked about where they wanted to be in their careers. We talked about some ideas for how to get there.

I don’t really have a plan for what to cover. If you sign up you can leave a note there about what you would like to talk about. Could be bikes. Could be programming. Could just be that you need to talk. Whatever. I am here as a resource for you for the 20-ish minutes that our meeting lasts. So whatever questions that you have about I’ll do my best to answer.

I’ve really enjoyed it so far and hopefully it’s been useful and fun for the folks that I’ve met with.

How do I sign up?

This is the easy part! See where it says designfrontier up there? Click on that. There will be a link there to office hours.

Jumping on the AMA bandwagon

Daniel Sellers — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 17:37:16 +0000

Today I am at React Rally in SLC and after a particularly inspiring talk by Preethi Kasireddy I created an Ask Me Anything on github.

It feels a little bit ego-centric... but I am hoping that I can build this out with the questions that I am often asked so that people can have a resource to learn from my mistakes. And hopefully so that people new to the industry have an easy way to ask questions and get answers.

So please ask anything, by opening an issue there, and I’ll answer them there in the readme. If a question deserves more space I’ll answer here and put a link there.

Ohhh right... you can find a link there permanently in the navigation above.

"Wait?!" you say, "What navigation?"

Click on the designfrontier up there. It expands into navigation. Yes I know that isn’t very discoverable. That is on purpose. I really should write about the design experiment that this site is. Maybe soon. Or someone could ask in the AMA :-)

So I got Scammed on Amazon

Daniel Sellers — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 23:11:13 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I fell for scam in the amazon marketplace. Yep me. It was a clever one and not one I have seen written about so I am writing about it.

The Setup

I was in the market for a truing stand for building wheels and truing them for my bicycles. Because I’ve done this for a while I knew the stand I wanted, the Park Tools TS2.2. It’s solid, accurate, fast, and the industry standard for wheel building.

With that in mind I was scouring amazon and ebay looking for a reasonable deal on one. They run a bit over $200 new and I was more then happy to pick up a used one if I could. So when I found one for $145 on Amazon marked as used it didn’t raise too many alarms for price. I’ve seen them sell for that locally a bunch of times. So, I hit order quickly so that the "used" item wouldn’t get sold to someone else.

With the shipping it was soon on its way to me for the reasonable sum of $158.39. Awesome!

Well... I thought it was.

The Switch

Everything seemed normal for the first while. In fact everything seemed normal until the delivery of the package. Which... didn’t come to my house. In fact it didn’t come to my state. USPS delivered it on time... to Pompano, FL. I am in Salt Lake City, UT. Thousands of miles away. Here is the actual tracking data if you are curious.

That made me a little annoyed, but I still didn’t have an idea what was going on. I suspected an innocent mistake had happened in shipping. It happens right?

Amazon requires that you contact the seller before you file an A-Z support request and allow the seller 2 days to respond. So I did. They of course did not respond. Why would they? They have had my funds for ~7 days at this point.

It looks like what they did was ship a small package with a USPS tracking number. Either to an accomplice or to a random address... doesn’t really matter for this to work. Once they generate the tracking number and it ships Amazon releases the funds to them so they got their money.

And I got the impression that the package was on its way.

Why USPS? It doesn’t show you the size, or weight, or destination city of a package. It hides all the information that would have let me catch this earlier. It is the perfect unwitting accomplice just as I had been the perfect unwitting target.

The Settlement

After a few days I heard from Amazon. They were going to refund my purchase amount. Which was great, sort of.

I don’t know what happened to good old wakefield622. If you see that name popup as a seller on Amazon avoid it. It’s a scam. Currently their storefront is empty... which hopefully means that Amazon shut them down.

Thoughts on avoiding this stuff

This scam is super easy to pull off. It’s simplicity is mind-blowing.

So to avoid it in the future I am going to check the reviews of sellers for things I buy that aren’t fulfilled by Amazon. I don’t remember even noticing the reviews on the seller. They may have been fine at the time I ordered, but by the time I was digging they were down to 1%. I suspect they dumped it and ran knowing this would happen.

But check reviews of the seller. If a price seems like a deal, it might be a scam.

I am also going to be more biased towards seller’s who handle their fulfillment through Amazon. Can’t scam that with the same ease.

Hopefully this is interesting to others, it was eye opening to me. I am glad I got my money back but I still feel a little embarrassed that I got duped.

Me.

Dang it.

Keep your eyes open, and be careful out there. With the ease with which wakefield622 pulled this off I am sure they have other names and that others are doing the same thing. The money is too easy for this scam to disappear.