MettaProgramming

In a previous post, I described the confusion of the term “friend” as a primary reason I left Facebook. Another reason I left was confusion over the term “interact.”

It just seems that much of Facebook is not “interaction.” It’s short anecdotes that people comment on. That’s not interaction. Interaction is real conversation with someone, where you learn about what’s going on in their lives, in their head. More importantly, interaction is where you learn what’s going on in your own head.

It’s growing, it’s changing, it’s becoming. It’s not talking about your cat and having someone else comment on it.

But that’s what I kept feeling. I felt as though we’d all sit with our Facebook comments and think that we’d really interacted with someone because we read about them being sick, or read about them mowing the lawn. I’d see people that I hadn’t seen for some time, and they’d start talking about things that happened a couple weeks ago that they’d read about on my Facebook page. Most of the time, this would not be comfortable- not because I was uncomfortable with them knowing details of my life, but because they didn’t know details about my life.

When someone reads a quick Facebook post about something anecdotal that happened in someone’s life, all they have is an anecdote about what happened. They don’t have the story, they have a soundbite. They just have a meaningless quip, because they haven’t actually interacted with the person, with the information.

This is especially true for me and my information. Since I felt that way about Facebook– that it’s not real interaction– I would liberally sprinkle my anecdotes with comedy, or spice them up to make them much more funny than they’d otherwise be.

Rate these two possible Facebook posts for comic value:

I didn’t feel too hot this morning, but after I ate breakfast, I felt a little better.
While sickness sucks in general, throwing up immediately after breakfast is a surprisingly effective weight loss strategy

See? Number one is boring. I generally shy away from boring– or at least things that make me feel like I’m being boring. So I’d… embellish a bit… and add some comedy… because really, it’s Facebook, no-one’s going to actually take it seriously, right?

Wrong. I’d see someone and they’d start talking about what’s going on in my life as if they know about it, and I would often think “Eh, yeah. Uh, so, that’s not even really close to what’s going on. You take Facebook seriously, don’t you?”

After enough of these interaction, I start thinking that either a) I need to start taking Facebook seriously too, or b) this is not the best place for my type of semi-realistic humor.
The joy of rumor

So, one day, my wife, Jessica, get’s a call from her sister saying that shit has hit the fan and she really needs to call her mom.

So she calls her mother, who starts immediately bitching at Jessica for keeping her in the dark and not telling her what’s going on and why does she have to learn about me getting fired by having Jessica’s aunt call to gloat about how maybe her son-in-law is not so great after all and maybe she’ll know what it’s like to have kids who are unemployed and maybe when one of us gets unemployed Jessica could think to call her mother and tell her her mother instead of giving her aunt a reason to call and gloat!

Now, I’m a contractor. I have a small business– me– that provides services to other companies that they cannot provide for themselves– software development. Most of the time, those services eventually, well, end. Not in a bad way, mind you, because hopefully I’ve actually done my job, which is to do something, afterwhich, since there’s nothing else to do, I leave. So, you could say that I am a complete failure unless I leave a job, because if I don’t leave, it’s probably because I never actually finish what I’m supposed to do.

But sometimes– most of the time really– I really like the people I work with, and grow to think of them as friends, and miss them when I’m gone. Also, quite often, I’m not sure about how my work is going to live in the context of the company. Usually, I build something near completion and then the company has to take it and finish it and/or use it. So, because I care about what I make, I worry that it’s good enough, that it lasts, that it solves the problem I wanted to solve.

So, one day, thinking about all of this, I posted something on Facebook:

“Last day on the job. Always a bittersweet experience. Gonna really miss it here and the people, and worried about what’s going to happen next”

This post is read by my wife’s cousin, who apparently tells his mom that I’m leaving my job. His mom, apparently assuming that I’m only leaving because I’ve been fired– which is good because she’s constantly in competition with her sister– i.e. my wife’s mother– so she calls her sister to gloat. This makes Jessica’s mom freak out because her daughter’s husband has been fired, so she naturally calls Jessica’s sisterto freak out and complain about how she’s been left in the dark about me being fired because her daughter doesn’t care to tell her anything.

Jessica’s response to learning all of this was “Huh, what?”
You could just ask, people

Now, admittedly, this isn’t Facebook’s fault. The family political firestorm that swept through Jessica’s family was entirely fed by the dry tinder that is “Jessica’s family members relationships with Jessica’s other family.” Which is to say that it’s basically the norm if not exactly normal. Facebook was, at worst, a match carelessly thrown from a car into a pile of dry grass.

Still, the family is flammable, and so we need to be exceptionally careful with sparks. We, I, need to be ever conscious of my matches. And it’s not just hers. My own family has mis-read sometime comic, sometimes off-color, posts on my Facebook wall and assumed the worst. The thing about all this is that, if it were honestly interaction, then there would be… well… interaction. Think of the two ways the situation above could have been handled:

Freak out and immediately assume the worst. Call all the other members of your family to ensure the firestorm is as big and as violent as possible. Start preparing your daughter’s spare room for her post-divorce life, and prep yourself for your unemployed son-in-law to start borrowing large sums of money and never paying them back
Actually talk to your daughter and find out that they are celebrating over a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir.

One of these really stupid and childish, the other is thoughtful and involves interaction. The thing about Facebook is that it encourages us all to take the stupid and childish path. Facebook does this because it tells us that it is providing interaction- and we all, me included, are dumb enough to believe it.

You see, true interaction would be “call your daughter and find out that everything is fine.” That would be interaction. But Facebook has already provided “interaction.” So we assume that the actual interaction has already taken place, so the next logical step is to freak the fuck out, right?
Another twist

Of course it’s an exaggeration. Just as with Facebook, I’m going for comedy as much as anything. Still, the point remaint, and the point is that if Facebook, as a system, honestly was interaction, freakouts probably wouldn’t occur at all. And if Facebook honestly encouraged interaction, then the freakout would be avoided because we would all… well… interact!

Rather, Facebook encourages us to assume we have the whole story. It encourages us to assume that the soundbite is all the information that we need. This is bad enough, but it’s worse when someone like me doesn’t take it seriously at all, and further obscures reality with comedy and embellishment.

But there’s another twist. Similar to the first. This wasn’t the reason I had for leaving. It wasn’t other people freaking out that caused me to have second thoughts, it was my own change.

I found that I had to be really conscious of what I posted. “Can I post this? Will her family freak out?” “If I post this, can I make it comedic without fallout?” It was becoming troublesome to make sure that what I posted was… safe.

And so I actually swung the other way, purposely posting stuff that was unsafe just because I shouldn’t have to worry about it being safe. I’d post about Jessica walking around wearing nothing but cellophane, not because it has (or ever actually would) happen, but because “dammit, if I have to worry about posting something that might upset her mother, that pisses me off, so I’m going to post something that will surely upset her mother.”

So I went from posting whatever I wanted, to posting only what I thought was safe, to posting what I hoped was unsafe. Which means I went from being angry at other people being stupid to actually being more stupid.

No. Stop. Time to leave.

That’s the real reason. Because, apparently, I don’t have the wisdom and self-control to fight stupidity with integrity. Maybe one day I’ll learn, but until then, I just thought it best for me to go away.

Recently, I deleted my Facebook account.

Deleted. Completely.¹ When I did this, many friends and family expressed surprise, sometimes outright frustration, that I would leave Facebook. According to them, there were a number of reason I should not have left, but primary among them was that I’d be eliminating that important way to communicate with me and see what I’m doing.²

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing a “why I’ve left Facebook” post and almost didn’t. After all, I dropped off the radar on a random day, at a random time, without any warning. I wanted a clean break, and writing a “why” isn’t really clean. But, I do want to express my reasons for leaving. They amount to three fundamental things

1. Confusion over what it means to be a friend
2. Confusion over what it means to interact.
3. My own personal tendency to obsess.

Because I’m a loquacious SOB, I decided that each of these warrants it’s own post. Here’s the first.

The meaning of “Friend”

One big reason Facebook drove me crazy is that way too many people just got way too caught up pouring as much emotional meaning into friending as they possibly could. I didn’t see Facebook’s use of “Friend” as meaningful as others did. When I started using Facebook, I made a rule for myself that I’d have no more than 100 “friends.” Why? Because I personally couldn’t honor more than that many people with the real, honest communication that I wanted to.

Now, this is a personal decision, I admit. Many people friend everyone on Facebook and don’t feel they have to “honor” them at all. I may seem ridiculous when I say this, but I truly believe that everything we use, we should use in the way that best supports our own personality and personal growth. Everything we do, we should do mindfully and with intention. For some people, that means friending everyone. That’s fine. My mindful– my personal– decision was to friend a small enough number of people that I could truly interact with them all.

I also made a conscious decision to friend only family, and people whom I actually considered friends in person. People whom I saw regularly, or for whom continuous strong communication was important. If I would regularly go out of my way in everyday life to see you, or to be with you, or to contact you (or you, me) then I’d probably friend you. If I didn’t have that opportunity (because, say, you lived far away), but wanted to, I’d probably friend you. If you lived in the same very small town as me, and I only saw you when we bumped into each other accidentally, then no, I probably won’t friend you.

Again, not the way many others use it, and that’s fine, because that’s the way I, mindfully, intentionally decided to use it in a way that best supported my own personal convictions.

What I found, however, was that people were often offended and angry with me because I didn’t not want to friend them.³ So, I would ignore friend requests from people whom I didn’t actually know, or from people whom I didn’t consider an actual friend, or people who I very occasionally saw around town but whom I never really interacted with. This caused a surprising number of “why won’t you friend me?” problems.

I would also un-friend people whom I had been “friends” with, but whom I had not interacted with. Let’s call this “the normal dissolution of a relationship that’s happened quite naturally for at least 1.5 million years before Facebook existed.” I mean, seriously, I don’t read what you post, you don’t read what I post, yet you’re angry when I suddenly disappear from your stream? (A stream that might be active enough that you can’t actually read what I’m posting anyway).

Then there was what I would call “the regular culling.” I would end up with 150 “friends,” and decided to pare it down to my decided maximum 100. And people got surprisingly angry with my decisions, angry with my reasoning for why I would un-friend them vs. someone else. People would ask other people if I dropped them because of something that they posted that I never even read. It was ridiculous.

Facebook as emotional support mechinism

The result of all my mindful decisions on how I wanted to use Facebook was that I found myself needing to justify my decision on how I would use this piece of software strictly so that I could appease other people’s emotional security. If I un-friended someone, I would often get very stern demands for an explanation of why I unfriended them.

Really? I need to justify myself?

I found myself not wanting to explain, but to shout. Look people, it’s fucking software. It’s a goddamned tool. It’s like a wrench. It’s useful for some forms of communication. You don’t get all sobs and whines when I say I don’t have your phone number, do you? No! You don’t get upset and demand an explanation of my reasoning when I say I lost your email address, do you? No! Why? Because it’s not a statement of your worthiness as a human being for fuck’s sake! It’s a fucking tool!

I used Facebook as a tool. As another in a large suite of communication methodologies which I could use to transmit thoughts and information to and from people with whom I wanted to communicate. It’s nothing more than that, to me.⁴ I realized however, that to many other people, it was a statement of whether you cared about them as a person, or whether they were good enough, or whether their emotions could handle the personal decisions of other people– decisions which have nothing whatsoever to do with them.

I realized that it often felt like high school all over again. “You don’t want to take 5th period english?! But you know I’m in 5th period english! Did you drop it because you don’t like me?!”

No, I dropped you because I had 120 “friends” and chose 20 almost at random, and you happened to be one of them. Grow up, put on your big-boy panties, and

Get over it.

The truth of Reason #1

But here’s the plot twist at the end of the movie: That’s all bullshit– well, it’s all true, but it’s not the real reason.

I didn’t leave Facebook because because people were being emotionally childish about my arbitrary decisions at all. I left Facebook because I, myself, was becoming caught up in the personal politics. It wasn’t that people were demanding reasoning for my decisions anymore. It was because I, myself, was making decisions based on whether they might demand my reasoning.

I would look at my friend count and see “150″ and think “there are only about 90 that I’d really like to keep, but the other 60 will get grumpy if I un-friend them.” Even worse, I would friend people just because I knew that if I didn’t, there’d be fallout.

Really?

So, I’m all mad at people for playing stupid, emotionally immature political games because of a piece of software, and how do I fight that? I play stupid, emotionally immature political games!

No. Stop. Time to leave.

So, that’s my real, honest Reason #1 for leaving Facebook. Not that other people were being ridiculous, but be I was being ridiculous. It was affecting not only the decisions I made, but it was affecting why I was making decisions.

And I decided that wasn’t positive.

1. or, as completely as Facebook will delete any account, which is likely not very complete [↩]
2. This, I state clearly, is patently ridiculous. Twitter, blog, web, I have a rather active internet profile. Google John Metta to see why anyone can get a hold of me, and know almost everything I’m doing in real-time. I suspect that the real reason for any frustration is more honestly that it won’t be as easy to get a hold of me. [↩]
3. It’s an unfortunate reality that many people on Facebook expect you to use Facebook the way they use Facebook, and if you don’t, then you are #doingitwrong. [↩]
4. Well, that and a comic platform, but that’s the topic of another post [↩]

Dear friends,

I just emailed Congress to urge them to oppose the Internet Blacklist Legislation, known as the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. This legislation seeks to give the executive branch power to conduct slash-and-burn campaigns against websites that allegedly host – or even link to – content that infringes on intellectual property rights. That would “disappear” whole domain names, fundamentally undermining Internet security, and/or choke off their financial support. The Internet Blacklist Legislation puts more sites than ever at risk, effectively upending the DMCA safe harbors that have been crucial to the growth of Internet innovation and creativity.

Sadly, these short-sighted and dangerous bills won’t do much to stop online infringement – but they will jeopardize our ability to speak and read online with the kind of freedom we cherish in the offline world. Deep-pocketed Hollywood lobbyists are aggressively pushing to control and censor the open Internet, willing to sacrifice free speech and our Internet culture in hopes of controlling how people view their movies and products.

We need to stop this bill before it goes any further. Will you contact your representatives in Congress and urge them to oppose the Internet Blacklist Legislation? Visit: https://eff.org/r.C8A

I remember this day 25+ years ago, when my mother came home with it. It was a box with a silver keyboard looking thing that said “TI 99/4a.” That big, blocky hulk of a purchase that was one of the best decisions of my mother’s parenthood.

She wasn’t always the best role model, my mother, but this decision was superb. It came with intent, a reason: She told us that she couldn’t afford this thing that she didn’t understand, but that she knew that it was the future. She wanted us to have access to this thing called a computer. She hoped that we didn’t get left behind like so many other children of The Projects would.

Over 25 years later, I own two software companies. They are small, barely worthy of the title “company,” but they are extant, and they exist entirely because a small, poor, geeky kid in the projects had a mom who was smart enough to go out one day and buy a cheap computer she couldn’t afford.

I’ve been a programmer ever since that day.

Today, I bought an iPad.

I already own an iPad, as does my wife. Among other things, I’m an iOS developer. I didn’t buy an iPad for myself. Today, I bought an iPad for my sister, and for my sister’s children.

It wasn’t planned. It was impulse. Strangly, suddenly, I felt strongly compelled to buy it. Compelled to make an impulse purchase in a way that is rare, to say the least. For some reason, I wanted them, I needed them, to own this thing that they should have access to, this thing that defines what we think of when we say “the future.”

Today, I bought an iPad. At almost the same time, a man died.

He was a man who re-wrote our world. A visionary who didn’t wait for the future, but created it. The man who changed the way we think about computers, about music, about information, about movies. The man who changed the way we think about life. At almost the same time as I bought an iPad for the same reasons my mother bought a computer, the greatest visionary and CEO of the modern world passed away.

And so as my sister plays with her new “iFun,” and my niece plays Plants vs. Zombies on mine– as they discuss email settings and games and calendars, I find myself needing to periodically leave the room to hold my head and sob.

It had to happen. I wish it wasn’t so soon, but it had to happen, and he himself said why:

“No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Steve Jobs, by describing why death is so good, you described what it means to live. You changed entire industries that laughed at you while showing us all what we could achieve. You’ve touched us, you’ve inspired us, you’ve shamed us. For the forth time today I find myself weeping for you, a man I’ve never met. A man who has changed my life.

Today, I bought an iPad. I bought it for my sister, so that she and her family would not be left behind by the technology of the future– the technology you created. The future you created.

Today, I bought an iPad. I bought it for you, Steve, so that my sister’s children can grow to be the new that sweeps away the old that was you, the old that is me.

Thank you, Steve Jobs. You have changed me.

Scott Chacon from Github wrote a post describing the workflow that Github uses internally to manage projects, and I found that it cleared some issue up for some projects that I’ve been working on, specifically, how to keep your project deployable.

So, why don’t we use git-flow at GitHub? Well, the main issue is that we deploy all the time. The git-flow process is designed largely around the “release”. We don’t really have “releases” because we deploy to production every day – often several times a day.

His article describes a workflow based on working in branches and using pull requests before merging into master. I’ve used pull requests before, of course, but never thought to use them internally on a project.

Because I have a couple teams that this workflow would help, and because I tend to like rebasing on branches instead of merging, I thought I’d describe my slightly modified workflow in my own words as a way to formalize it for my teams.

Github Workflow

Modified from Scott Chacon, with minor adjustments based on my preferences:

• Anything in the master branch is deployable
• To work on something new, create a descriptively named branch off of master (ie: new-oauth2-scopes)

git checkout -b new-oauth2-scopes

• Commit locally and rebase your branch to master regularly. Push your branch to the server often- so we all know what’s being worked on

git commit
git checkout master
git pull origin master
git checkout new-oauth2-scopes
git rebase master
git push origin new-oauth2-scopes

• When you need feedback or help, or you think the branch is ready for merging, open a pull request
• After someone else has reviewed and signed off on the feature, you can rebase the branch to master, then merge it into master

git rebase master
git checkout master
git merge new-oauth2-scopes

• By rebasing your branchto master, you put all of your changes on top of the master branch. This allows your commits to be grouped (not interwoven by date), reduces the ubiquitous (merge) commit to something that never needs to be explored, pushes all requirement to fix merge conflicts onto the branch, and always results in a clean merge to master.
• Once it is merged and pushed to ‘master’, you can and should deploy immediately

Coda

I really like the Github mentality of having the master branch always deployable. It forces good development practice in so many ways. I also love the idea of using pull requests to have an at least cursory code review before merging that code into master. Finally, I like the idea of pushing all the branches to the server- although I’ve always been hesitant to do that before. It always seemed like it was making things messy, but as Scott points out, it gives an easy way to look at, and track, what’s being worked on.

This Github workflow is my new “gold standard” for development. Thanks Scott!