Out of Cheese

Almost three years ago now I moved from San Jose to Santa Clara, cutting my commute to work from about 25 minutes to a smidgen over 10 minutes and moving from an apartment to a new-ish townhouse.

The new place was great, with a few exceptions. First, while it was close to work, it wasn’t extremely close to, well, anything. There’s essentially nothing I can walk to, and nothing I can bike to which doesn’t involve biking along busy streets. None of my friends live around here, either. Second, it was rather loud. I’m not exactly a morning person, so it’s been frustrating to realize that if my window is open, I’ll be woken up by traffic around 8 a.m. Third, it’s somewhat small. Specifically, the living room is tiny, the garage is too small to comfortably fit my Honda Accord so I’ve always parked outside, and various other things are just a bit tinier than they should be.

For most of the past year I’ve been looking for a place within walking distance of downtown Mountain View or Palo Alto. I’m rather selective about what I’m looking for, and without a deadline to force the issue I could afford to wait for the right place.

Tonight I signed a lease for a townhouse that’s just a couple-minute walk from downtown Mountain View. It’s much closer to a lot of my friends (including being four doors down from the townhouse two of my closest friends live in), is a minute or two closer to work, has a much larger living room, and is in an area with a bunch of nice walking and biking paths. I’m rather excited.

I’m also rather busy and don’t really have time to move. Oh, well. Somehow I’ll figure out how to get everything over there two weekends from now. Maybe I can steal a trick from MirrorMask and get my books to grow wings and fly their on their own….

Today was the first day in almost a year that I didn’t head on over to Craigslist to look for apartments in Mountain View. Details tomorrow.

Update: In the comments, Daniel Jalkut pointed out that Craigslist supports RSS for every search. Cool! I’d never scrolled down to the bottom of a search page, I guess, since that’s where the link is. I guess the next time I do something like this I won’t have to go to their web site every day.

Raymond Chen writes, “Design for readability,” arguing that it’s important to write code with the expectation that it’ll have to be read and understood by someone — perhaps even yourself — sometime later. Daniel Jalkut replies to suggest isolating unreadable code and that it’s OK if some of your code is unreadable.

As much as I hate to disagree with Daniel, I’m in complete agreement with Raymond here. Maybe this is because nearly all of my experience is as a system software generalist. Most of my career — on Java, Rotor, the Intel project, and what I’m doing today — has been spent working on code on platforms or in environments where its original authors never expected it to run. That means I’ve spent lots and lots of time over the years trying to understand how someone else’s code behaves, then figuring out the right changes I need to make to get it to work in my environment. I’ve also frequently had to improve code in ways its original author didn’t expect, which is essentially the same problem.

In all of these cases, well-designed readable code makes a huge difference. It can be ported or improved faster and with less risk, and the resulting changes, if done right, are themselves far more maintainable in the future. In some cases this has been the difference between a single 5-minute change and weeks of work plus ongoing maintenance for me and other engineers. It’s a very big deal.

In short, readability, clean design, and good comments are very important. The time you spend making your code readable will almost always been a benefit in the long run.

The Freakonomics weblog points to a Wall Street Journal article reporting that U.S. airlines will start offering WiFi service within 12 months. I can’t wait. I already often pay the $8 or so to go online during the 30-45 minutes before boarding, and I’d love to be able to read email and get work done while I’m flying.

One interesting thing from the article: The company providing the service, AirCell, plans to block Skype and other VoIP services. This is one of the first examples I’ve seen of a company being very up-front about ignoring network neutrality. I can’t think of a technical reason to disallow VoIP. Cell phone calls won’t be allowed on flights quite yet, but the concerns there are different — VoIP doesn’t involve cell radio transmissions.