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As an engineer I think my main purpose it to solve problems. Of course engineer has little to do with engines any more but the concept is the same. The word 'engineer' is originated in the eleventh century from the Latin ingeniator, meaning one with ingenium, the ingenious one. I serve many roles but engineer is a core one that I claim. I'm as much an engineer as I am a human or male. It's embedded in my make-up. I've been a tinkerer since I was very young and at some point I would assume that I graduated to become an engineer. I guess I'm kinda just rambling in this article but more or less I want to describe what it's like to be an engineer. This may serve to assist people who are considering a path in engineering - whether it be software engineer as I selected or some other type of engineering. 

One of the core elements of being an engineer is having a deep desire to understand how things operate and why they operate the way they do. Have you ever disassembled the TV in your mind or thought about how your phone works and if you could alter it to use it for something else? Well, if you want to rip things apart and put them back together and it's no big deal for you to do so then you might be on the path to be an engineer. I know personally I even disassemble people and relationships to better understand how people operate and why (I'm being figurative of course). 

Another element of being a good engineer is questioning standards. I think this goes hand in hand with the above element but questioning the norm is a big part of being an engineer. I guess this is because the norm or status quo rarely makes perfect sense to an engineer. Many of the things we consider social standards are open for investigation to the mind of an engineer and have a deep potential to be ignored or changed in their life. Though many engineers will follow social standards begrudgingly. This is why engineers tend to gravitate to the more geeky and seemingly odd tendencies that are edge culture in most people's opinion. But geeky has been popular and more welcome as the norm for a while now. This is because of the power and position that geeks hold in an increasingly technological society.

There are many more elements but these are the ones I chose to describe. So, I'll talk about one more. An engineer is rarely happy with good enough. This is a drawback as much as it's a motivational force for good. It can tie a good engineer in to all sorts of pursuits that suck the time and life out of them because nothing is good enough. Being that I serve the role of businessman and engineer I'm constantly pushing between the two roles because being an engineer is sometimes not cost effective and being a businessman is sometimes willing to accept good enough on a cost to benefit analysis. 

I'm very proud to be an engineer and I love the insight on life that it gives me. I even love it when it doesn't serve me because it keeps me in balance. I guess this was my "I love engineeering" article. Here's a cool link to a very brief history of engineering. 

Dear Open Source Developers,

I’ve lived in Nashville for over four years now and for a good while I’ve been thinking about what my contribution can be to Nashville as a developer. Nashville is a very heavy closed source business environment and has been for some time from what I can tell and what other people tell me. Now, my company and myself are very much in to Ruby and Ruby on Rails. But, we use many of the same open source technologies to deploy and run our software on as all open source developers do. It seems instead of the fighting between the different open source languages and the different platforms we could find some way to meet in the middle and create more opportunities for all of us.

What I’m discussing is creating an open source marketing & communication movement that hasn’t been a huge success in the past. It can and will take place here in Nashville. Marcus Whitney, of the Enterprise LAMP group has lead the charge and I have followed to work on uniting the Ruby community locally under the Enterprise LAMP group (Nashville Ruby Group). There are still some people I haven’t gotten to be a part of the movement and who strongly disagree with my approach but I feel strongly that is necessary. Many Ruby programmers get caught up in detail that the ‘P’ in LAMP doesn’t represent Ruby. It represents PHP, Perl and Python as choices. That is currently true but there is no reason that Ruby shouldn’t take it’s rightful place in that acronym (even without the ‘R’ in place of ‘P’). Marcus and his group has asked us to participate and we should do what we can in this area because it will only increase our impact and range as Ruby developers.

There have been many efforts in the past by companies such as IBM that adopt and market open source technologies. But we as developers and those who have financial interest in open source technologies should also be marketing these technologies in one concerted effort. Even at the smallest level of one contractor or employee who earns money from development using these tools should be responsible for it’s promotion in the business and development world.

I would like to put a call out to all open source developers to become a part of this movement and help us with whatever resources you can. If you can help financially you can do that, if you can help with knowledge please do that or if you can help by spreading the word to other open source developers that’s awesome too. We all benefit from the progression and understanding of these technologies as a whole. We need to raise the bar and speak in a unified voice. There is a way to be unique and love your own open source choice technology such as Ruby but then make sure you are participating in the open source community as a whole. Together we all benefit and if we can make this work in Nashville we can make it work anywhere.

Lastly, here in Nashville, Marcus and his group has managed to get the PHP, Perl, Ruby & Python developer communities involved under the umbrella of the Enterprise LAMP movement. There is a big conference coming to Nashville in November called the "Big LAMP Camp". Check out the website… there are some big names coming and this is our time to unite and make a push locally.

Thanks,

Will Bridges

CEO / Cogwise Software LLC

http://www.cogwisesoftware.com

Let me preface by saying that I love Nashville. I read this article about Luke Kanies leaving Nashville for Portland. I have considered moving back to Portland as well. The only reason I haven’t, is that my girlfriend is somewhat hesitant to it. We have a son together and live just outside of Nashville, in Hendersonville. The main reason I’ve wanted to leave is I feel socially estranged in Nashville. It’s been almost impossible to build any good group of friends with common interests. The parties I’ve thrown (with free alcohol, music and plenty of space) have had about a 30-50% rate of people actually showing up. That’s around 15-25 people, which is good but I keep inviting the same people (who seem to be friends) and they keep not showing up. If you are one of those people there are many of you that have valid excuses and that’s cool as I’m probably not mad at you or I would have told you. But a friendship has to go both ways. If I show up when you request my presence and I can never count on you to call me out of the blue and ask me what/how I’m doing or show up when requested then there is a problem. Maybe the problem is I’m not important enough )-: But people in Portland never made me feel like that. I would get calls from people out of the blue on a regular basis and I still have contact with people in Portland even though I haven’t lived there in 7 years. I visited last year and it was like I never left. Friends came together and welcomed me back.

I’m pretty sure it isn’t because people are assholes here in Nashville. Generally people feel (IMHO) self-absorbed, conservative and don’t go out of their way to contact you. But they are very friendly in person and talk up how much they enjoy your company. Then you never hear from them again. I’ve met people I really liked and there are couple people who I consider good acquaintances  who I hope will eventually become friends. It just seems like a lot more work that I even had to put in to the effort in Portland, Oregon.

The tech community here as I said on my comments on the other post is not very great. I have put some considerable effort to help but it has not been returned and I have been mostly ignored when I put in effort which is discouraging to say the least. The NASHDL group is okay… and I have people within there that I don’t want to offend but I have had a lot of people tell me they felt uncomfortable going there and it’s not very inviting. I understand what they mean to some degree.

Marcus Whitney went to great effort to create user groups and encourage the local development community. Others that have encouraged the community in one way or another are Nick Holland (as previously mentioned in another article), Jackson Miller, Ted & John Chapin and Dave Delaney. There are others but I’m not as well connected as some so these are the few I know of. Many others keep to themselves and I feel this is due to some of the resistance I have mentioned. I have invested financially once with meager but reasonable returns and invested with my time/effort twice only to be outright ignored and sidelined. I’m an entrepreneur and don’t have time to be bothered developing things and investing in things that are a waste of my talents and energy. As far as that goes it would be difficult to get me to start anything by myself. I want to but I’ve seen how that goes and the only way I will do anything is if I can help someone who already has "the wind underneath their wings".

My business has not survived or thrived due to Tennessee but generally in spite of location. The only thing good about this location for my business has been the cost of living and the outside perception by our clients in more expensive areas of the world. We have been able to give a perception of cost effective due our location in part. There have been some relationships I have built recently that have been helpful for my business and my knowledge of business but that has been a long time coming. The good news is it doesn’t just apply to the tech community in Nashville. I have dealt with other industries in Nashville for my research on a website we are building. Seems they are all about the same way. They are not very trusting, have a secluded and competitive mentality, conservative and even combative when it comes to business. There’s a strong mentality that there is only just enough to go around and we must fight for the scraps of opportunity. However, if we would all open up a bit, lighten up a bit and relax we would find a world of opportunity at our feet. I operate my business as if there is enough to go around and we can all build more opportunity for ourselves through the sharing of knowledge and general cooperation. I hope that we are a beacon for others who want to operate this way.

Let me be clear. I don’t want to complain and just be part of the problem but I do want to feel free to state my observations from 4 years in this city. I’m willing to be a part of any proposed solution that people may have that has any chance worth of working or adding to the solution. My memories here have been a good part of my life that I love. I really came in to my own here and my son was born here. I would like this to be a place I would be proud to raise him and be proud to operate my business as it grows but so far I’m not convinced. I see some awesome efforts on the part of my colleagues and I hope they snowball in to the community becoming super awesome.

Here in Nashville on the last Thursday of every month the interactive development firm Centresource throws a mixer with good beer and better company. We always see the best and brightest new media professionals and entrepreneurs at these mixers. I’ve been to most of them. They started throwing them at the beginning of this year. During which they give out some schwag (Sivery Beans and Golden Kraut). I, uh… should know what these are because I’ve been so many times but it always escapes me. There’s always some type of interactive contest or drawing to get the much sought after items. Basically, they are two cans of food with some very symbolic meaning but it adds some fun and humor to the event and usually just about the time you have a buzz. Nick (Nicholas Holland) could tell it better than I could. The free beer and wine is definately an awesome touch.

The group of people at Centresource are really good. I consider Nick a friend and have had several conversations with them about their development work. They seem a very qualified group of developers. They primarily develop in PHP but put together awesome designs and other media as well. The best thing about them is they foster the development of interactive media Nashville and bring the community together. They have sponsored many of the tech/new media events in Nashville and we should all be grateful for that. I have mentioned before that sponsoring tech events doesn’t get you a whole lot of new work (IMHO) but does increase your position within the community, beneifts the local community, can attract talent and is very good for the image of a company. So, they should be praised for what I would consider an investment in the development community in Nashville.

Lastly, to anyone considering on coming out to the Centresource mixer I would say it’s a good idea. There are a lot of good contacts to be met out there and consider your presence your own small investment in the Nashville Tech Community. The address is 1313 4th Avenue North in Nashville and it usually starts at about 5pm. If you come out this Thursday, I’ll be there.

I haven’t done any posts about Twitter. But, I really like twitter because I think it encapsulates what the new movement in software development is really about. People always bitch about them not adding new features or being slow to add new features but that’s not what Twitter is about. When you are thinking about what features you would add to Twitter think about what features you would add to a piece of notebook paper to make it better at being paper. The answer is you can do very little to a piece of paper to make it more useful than it is for it’s purpose. Twitter has an open API which anything can be built on just like I can fold a piece of paper and make this amazing origami bird.

But this article is about what Twitter says about Humans and not about what Twitter is so let me get back on track. What do we do with a piece of paper to make the writing on it more understandable? Well, there are social conventions created over time that in Western culture writing goes from left to right in a straight line across the paper until you get near the edge and then the next words go to the next. There are also other social conventions for writing of all kind… such as signature at the bottom of a letter, address at top left, greeting on first line, indention on each paragraph, so on and so forth. These social conventions came about so things would be easier to read. There aren’t laws about how to do it as much as it’s just a commonly accepted convention that makes things easier to read.

In Twitter you have hash marks # to identify a tag such as #news would be related to the news or #eventname would be related to an event. This is not functionality that came about because of a feature but it came about from the community using it. Same goes for @twitter_username which was born out of use. The use of small website addresses in place of large ones was the same as well. They came out of necessity and were born of the community to represent a function. So, if you give a sufficiently large enough group a canvas they will agree on the method that makes the most sense in order to use that canvas. It seems many times these rules will be born without saying but they will be born of use. That use will then reach a tipping point where the masses will identify the use as the most efficient method to get the idea across. The networks inherent to the internet drive this much, much faster than other mediums in the past but the result is the same. Left to our own devices and given a blank medium we will generate the most efficient conventions at the given time. I added that part ‘at the given time’ because many times we create conventions which are not overturned in a timely fashion when the ability for better conventions come along. The speed at which a convention is overturned is slower than which a convention was created but is still much faster with a network like the internet.

UPDATE: This recent release (beta 2 of iPhone 3.0) is much more buggy than I would like. Though I get a lot of cool features it’s almost too buggy to be worth it now that I’ve spent some time with it. It’s a beta release for sure… be warned. I can’t get it to work with my usb hookup to my car stereo any more…. have to use aux hookup )-: and further it crashes ever so often. A few apps don’t work very well or at all. Use extreme caution because you cannot downgrade once you have upgraded to 3.0.

If you have an iPhone developer license this is easy because you can just add your phone to the dev phone list in your account and download the beta version of iPhone 3.0. Then you apply a simple carrier update and you’re good to go. Sure, you have a 5gb cap that you should keep a close eye on but you can have internet everywhere with nothing but your iphone and laptop. Here’s a good tutorial for mac users:

http://www.myappleguide.com/blogs/iphone-world/2280/how-tether-iphone-3g-over-att

I’m currently using bluetooth on my phone to tether with my macbook pro. If you are using windows you are on your own. If you are not an iPhone developer there are ways to get the 3.0 OS and hack your iphone to get it on there. You might have to jailbreak. I heard that 3.0 has been jailbroken already. Use google and you can find it.

Be very careful of your cap on data transfer as AT&T will charge you for overage (for real). Go to Settings -> General -> Usage on the iPhone to see what your current data usage is. Second, tethering swallows your battery whole! I suggest pluggin the phone in to your computer even if you are using bluetooth. The connection seems reliable… every once and a while I have to reconnect to the network.

Lastly, the iPhone OS 3.0 is a bit buggy at this point. I’ve had to restart my phone now and then and their are quirks in some apps. It does have copy & paste and I love that because now it feels like a real tiny computer. It has a universal search, a search for contacts and a search for email… love that too. Now it has landscape mode for sms and for email. I’m sure there are some other features but those were the most noticable. For an early beta it’s not too bad. I have the second release of the beta. Overall, I think 3.0 will put the final death blow on it’s competitors. Apple, I’m waiting on a 32gb version and some updated hardware this summer!