Josh Beckman

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Ergodox Moonlander Week 3

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I would not have purchased this machine with my own money. No one needs this nice of a keyboard. But it’s a damn fine ergonomic, ortholinear, mechanical keyboard.

As part of joining Shopify this fall, I was able to expense some home-office items. As I was already mostly setup in my (tiny) standing-desk-home-office, I took it as an opportunity to splurge on something I saw as an unnecessary investment - a really nice mechanical keyboard. I bought (and waited for) an Ergodox Moonlander keyboard.

I have never owned a mechanical keyboard. I haven’t typed on one since middle school typing classes in the computer lab. I purchase a Microsoft Sculpt keyboard earlier this year and was impressed by how much my hands relaxed and appreciated the split layout. There was definitely a steep learning curve, but I found myself typing faster and longer without interruption after a mere month of training.

So, I figured I could do it again - learn a vastly different method of computer input for physical and mental gain.

I’m only in week three of learning this new keyboard, but I finally feel like I’m catching up to this layout. The ortholinear orientation is very difficult for me to learn, mostly because I learned to use the wrong fingers for certain keys in my younger years (looking at you p, x, o, and q). Besides that, my struggles have mostly been around fully realizing the potential of an unlocked, configurable keyboard at my fingertips.

Speaking of Tips

Modify one key at a time. After being too eager to modify the layout with the (very nicely featured) editing system, I learned that you should give any layout at least a day’s worth of handache before you go modifying it and throwing away your new muscle memory. If, after a day, I still am not hitting the right key at the right time, I’ll then change its position. This means my layout evolves pretty slowly, but I know that when I make a change, it will be a step in the right direction. (The manufacturer recently released a heatmap visualizer for your layouts that I’m excited to try to handle this problem.)

This is an opportunity to re-learn the basics. This was a real turning point in me realizing that I learned to type with the wrong fingers early on. I think the only way to handle this is to embrace it.

But, every time you hit the wrong key five times in a row, change its position. For example, I was experimenting with having my Enter key next to my pinky. But I found myself hitting it way too frequently during excited responses in chat. I believe that there’s a line between modifying yourself and embracing this keyboard’s ability to adapt to you. Ditto for whenever you forget the position of a key five times in a row. Move it and move on.

Embrace your thumbs as valuable fingers. I never realized how little your thumbs are responsible for typing on a normal keyboard. With this Moonlander,I you have a cluster of 3/4 keys just for your thumb. And the best thing you can do is start strengthening and stretching those thumbs to reach all of them. I’m only just now starting to reach multiple keys reliably with my thumb, but I’m excited to use them in chording operations to unlock further layers.

Youf most used keys won’t be the biggest keys on the board. I naively looked at the layout and initially place my most used keys (looking at you, tab) under the biggest keycaps on the board. Those keycaps are big because they’re ultimately hard to reach and away from your four main fingers on each hand. Put quick, frequent keys under your four main fingers and chording keys at the large positions where you’ll be able to hold them down for a long time. (With this keyboard and it’s chording abilities, you will hold down chording keys for much longer.)

The built-in stands are not ideal for all desks. The board comes with very nice feet for angling the board into a more ‘handshake’ position. Unfortunately, this also requires you to angle the thumb clusters away and inward. When I used this setup, I was completely unable to use a couple thumb keys. Currently, I use a book to prop up both sides of the board, so that all keys remain on the same plane and the thumb keys are much more reachable. In the future, I plan to craft a wooden mount that fits this model.

Tell your coworkers! I spent a good week typing very poorly into work chat logs. I would hit enter too early or forget a letter and worse. I finally posted my excuse - that I was adapting to a new keyboard - and a rush of support fell upon me. Just like a change in residence or new baby, a vastly different keyboard is understandably going to slow you down for a bit and people will understand and smile.

Future

Layers, layers, layer. I only have three layers in my current layout. I’ve seen other layouts with up to six layouts! I feel like this will be the next level of optimization for me, but I’m restricting myself from engaging with more of them until I master my current three.

Currently, I also have 0 (zero!) macros set up under any of my keys (not too much room for them in my paltry three layers!). This will also be a new layer of exploration - I’m hoping to set up macros to switch audio outputs, refactor code, etc. All the things I think of in one second but take 30 seconds to execute.

Want to see (and hear) some typing on this keyboard? Here ya go:

img_0065.mov

An Autumn with Out of Office Hours

Sat, 12 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I registered for Out of Office Hours in July, then was invited to the August cohort, so I’ve been in the mentoring cohort for the last four months. I plan on mentoring there for as long as I’m useful - the commitment is so easy and I have an opportunity to have really uplifting conversations a few times a month.

So far, I’ve had 11 calls - two were scheduled in that time but the mentee never showed up. One thing to remember: the commitment is low on both sides, so you will occasionally have people bail on the meeting last minute or show up with no real topics to talk about. But for every one of those, you will most certainly get five others that leave you buoyant and appreciated.

It was very easy to set up as a mentor. You fill out a bio, wait to be selected, then you just get mentees adding themselves to your calendar. It’s pretty ideal from my perspective. Coming from the past where I would spend time attending meetups and conference talks to try to help the software engineering community, I feel almost guilty that I do nothing and still get to mentor and give back.

Mentees

The majority are early in their careers, or switching roles or careers. Most want to know how to interview or what interviewers are looking for or what course they should take online to look best in an interview. Those formed the majority of a category of questions I would call ‘what should I…’ questions. These are the hardest for me to answer, because I only know these people for the call we have together. Largely, for these, I just end up asking them questions about what they want in the future and together we can arrive at a recommended plan based on what I have seen work or not work in my own past.

Others ask a second category of question about what I prefer, what I do in certain situations, etc. I have been thinking of these as ‘how do you…’ questions. These are my favorite, as I can launch into a story about my specific experience and then together we can work to shape it into something that they can synthesize into their own decisions. These are the most rewarding conversations - I don’t feel like I’m being overly prescriptive, and I feel like my own years of experience can save them mistakes and headaches.

There has been a reassuring ratio of women and minorities on these calls. I’m not sure if it’s just a sign of this generation of software engineers (best scenario), a factor of the medium, or self-selected from my bio, but it’s been a happy surprise.

What I Would Ask

I wish more people would come with concrete examples of how they have been operating now - that’s largely what I begin asking about and it usually takes them by surprise. I have a field on the booking form for the person to detail anything I can read up on before the call - their website, their current company, anything. Only about half of them have put anything into that field. I am going to be making it required in the future, just so that I can know they have spent some time thinking about what we should talk about together. (I’ve had a few people clearly forget we had scheduled a call).

No one has asked me to review their resume or to practice interviewing or what programming language they should learn next. That’s great. All of our conversations have been about how their career path will be perceived, communications strategies, etc. That’s good! Those are the toughest topics, in my experience.

Future

I think this pandemic and forced-remote situation is a golden opportunity for normalization of mentoring and calls like these. Before, mentoring revolved around meeting someone at a conference or presentation and then coordinating coffee or a drink after work or whatever. Now, you have only one way - to schedule a low-friction zoom call with anyone, anywhere in the world! I have had multiple international mentoring calls and I’m hoping more people realize this opportunity! We now effectively have a normalizing force to give us access to anyone else in the world for free.

After Reading: Domain Driven Design, Quickly

Sun, 06 Dec 2020 06:00:00 +0000

I read this on recommendation from other people at Shopify. The concepts were good, and I highlighted several sentences, but the text was heavy with jargon.

I was a bit familiar with the concepts of DDD already, but this expanded with helpful examples and additional branches.

At least it was a quick read, and will be good as a reference text.

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 06:00:00 +0000

After Reading: Working in Public

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 06:00:00 +0000

I’ve been a distant fan of Nadia Eghbal for years, following her wonderful notes and speaking. When she released her first book this summer, I eagerly pre-ordered a copy (and with beautiful printing from Stripe Press no less!)

I initially thought the book would be more of a summary of my own lived experience - an overview of the open source development landscape. I’ve been consuming and contributing to open source since before I was ever paid to write software. And a good portion of the book is just there to explain open source mechanics to non-developers.

But, excitingly, there was also a substantial amount related to categorization of that lived experience - putting names and borders to the groups I had seen form over the last dozen years of open source project growth. If you’re involved in open source work and want to gain a clearer lens on things, it will be useful.

I was most interested in her sections on the current and future patterns of making money in open source. If you’ve been paying attention elsewhere, I don’t think anything in these sections will be new to you or will provide a definitive answer on how you can best monetize work, but they’re thought provoking.

Some thoughts that I wrote down while reading:

GitHub is a social network almost on par with Twitter and Facebook now (work gets done on those platforms too…)
- Should I treat GitHub more like a megaphone and less like “just” a code distribution platform?
- Should there be more dedicated tools for code collaboration as opposed to project promotion and open source consumption?

Open source developers are chronically undervalued because, unlike other creators, they’re tied to a platform that doesn’t enable them to realize the value of their work.

There are competitors to GitHub in terms of code collaboration and distribution (that I think are better than GitHub in some ways), but no competitors in terms of developer valuation and network (even though I think GitHub is bad at this, hopefully getting better).
- Could something better be built on top of GitHub?

Is [this person] “doing open source” or “doing code stuff in public”?

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 05:00:00 +0000

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 05:00:00 +0000