Computers

Realizing your potential, as a developer

/ hsoi

Maybe that I’m a graybeard programmer means I’ve finally realized my potential as a programmer.

I’m reading this list of “10 Reasons Why You’re Failing to Realize Your Potential as a Developer“, and I’m just nodding my head the whole time. I’m going to add my own comments to the author’s “10 reasons”, so you should read the original article first.

1.  You’re too afraid of failure to learn new tools / languages / frameworks.

I’m not sure it’s fear of failure as to why people don’t want to learn other stuff. It may be as simple as having a comfort zone and wanting to stay there. It may be that they have a cushy job and want to keep it (maybe fear of losing job). There may be business reasons.

He’s right tho, that people are afraid of throwing away all those years of investment in X. The reality is, you are and you aren’t. You may well throw out a specific set of languages or frameworks, but so what? After you’ve learned enough languages, another is “just another language”. After you’ve learned enough frameworks, it’s “just another framework”. A lot of the concepts and approaches carry over, and it’s those things that matter more. You have a larger set of experience to draw from to solve a problem, to create an architecture, to see a flaw or a risk before it becomes too costly. Those things are far more important than you silly language wars.

It’s good to learn more languages, to learn more frameworks. The more you know, the  more cool stuff you can do, and ultimately the more valuable you can be. That said, be sure to acquire depth in those areas. Having a list of languages a mile long doesn’t mean much if you can’t actually be useful in those languages can can’t speak to the depth of what they offer.

2. You won’t push your commits until the feature is “done.” (It’s never done!)

I think this is “fear of what others think” or “fear of judgment” or “fear of criticism”. That people won’t think you’re a god, or that you’re stupid for how you’ve done things. This is a reasonable fear. We’re human, we have egos. The geek and programmer are held up as some sort of wicked smart superman and the exception is taken to be the rule. It also doesn’t help that there’s often someone on the team that doesn’t know the meaning of the word “tact” or even “polite” when looking at someone else’s code. We basically always think the guy before us was a moron and can’t believe they wrote such stupid code!

Screw it.

You will write stupid code. You will write imperfect code. Your code will have bugs. You are human. You are learning. You will do the best you can at the time you can with what resources you have. I find this is where comments are useful because they can expose the hidden “why” behind something. Maybe you have to write an ugly hack, but at least the comment can explain why you had to do it (because we had to ship right now else lose a multi-million dollar contract and the company would have closed up and none of this would have mattered then). It may not excuse the choice of hack, but at least it becomes understandable.

Just commit, often and early. In the long run it will suit you better because you’ll need to roll back or have a good checkpoint, so your workflow is better served by doing that. And in the end it really doesn’t matter WHEN you commit your code, because we’re always going to think it’s wrong and wonder what moron wrote it. 😉

3. You know just enough to be dangerous.

I’ll just say you need to read and understand, before you do.

Sometimes you have to “do” in order to fully understand. If so, take time on the side to write a small project that allows you to fully explore and come to understand it. Often tho, a little sample project isn’t enough and you just have to drop it into the larger more complex context to really grok it. But then this goes back to #2, where you should commit often and early, so we can follow what happened and unwind it when something bad happens.

4. Analysis paralysis.

This is a tough one, and one that only comes with time and experience. Plus, it’s different for each person.

You cannot sit there and analyze all day, but you must analyze and research some. If you don’t understand what you’re doing, then you only know enough to be dangerous and we come back to point #3. Or you risk going in half-baked and everything gets fucked worse than before.

But you also cannot sit there and just analyze it to death. Sometimes you just have to dive in. But then it goes back to #2. Commit often. Heck, make a branch, maybe a branch of that branch, whatever you have to do. Sometimes getting in there and poking at it is the only way.

There’s a balance to be had, and ultimately you just have to find it. Never lose sight of the fact you have to ship, because you need to make money, because you need to get paid and pay bills and such. So if nothing else, let that be a motivator to keep going, just don’t rush it.

5. You don’t invest in your tools or development process.

This is a pretty good one.

I’ll just add that scripting has been one of the things that has helped me. Eventually I’ll recognize a task that I perform often (enough) and takes (enough) time. I’ll also see the task is one that tends to be the same thing over and over, or maybe almost the same with just some small variation of input. That sounds like a perfect candidate for automation! So maybe it takes me a day or two to come up with a script or other mechanism to automate it. Fine. But now it’s a simple execution of the script and viola, the thing is done. Or the thing can churn in the background without my tending to it, and I can go tend to other things. In the end, I get more done in less time.

How does the saying go? “Efficiency is intelligent laziness.”

6. You’re too embarrassed to ask for help.

Don’t be. You don’t know it all.

On the same token, don’t be an asshole when someone comes to you for help. If someone comes to you for help, they are in need and believed you to be the best person to aid them. Help them, and don’t be a dick about it. And yes, that includes things like LMGTFY, or just saying “RTFM” or “did you use the search feature” or other shit like that. There are ways to help people become more self-sufficient, but being condescending isn’t one of them.

7. You don’t know how to make it easy for other programmers to work with your code.

Your code will outlive you. As well, once you have written code, it will have to be maintained… often by you, and chances are 6 months from now you won’t remember what the hell you were thinking when you wrote it.

Write clear code, clean code. Yes sometimes architectures have to be obtuse or complex. So document them. Explain them to others. Be sure to share the knowledge.

8. You don’t know how to read someone else’s code (or don’t want to.)

This goes back to #7, that you should make it easier for people to read your code. In fact, it goes back to #2, because you should be pushing your code to others and soliciting their feedback. Code review is good.

Granted, we shouldn’t get hung up on coding styles and coding standards, because someone’s will always be different from yours. So you need to learn how to read their “dialect” and forge ahead.

9. You can’t code from the end-user’s point of view (you think too small.)

This this this, so very much THIS.

We must always remember who we are coding this for. When I write a script (#5), I’m usually writing it for myself so if it’s quick and dirty, that’s fine. So long as I can make it go that’s all that matters. If it fails along the way, that’s OK because I can fix it. But if I was to make that same “automated task solution” work for someone else, I’d probably have to make it cleaner, clearer, I might have to put a GUI on it, make it more robust in the face of failure, etc..  It’s the same basic solution, but because of the audience the specifics and the end product are different.

We do not reside in an ivory tower. We must realize that we are generally not the audience and our take on things isn’t often the way it should be done. It was one then when I worked for Metrowerks, being a developer writing tools for developers, so often we could use our assumptions and biases and turn out the right features and approaches. But when I wrote Spring Cleaning and was writing an app to make life easier for non-tech-savvy people, that affected everything and directed how even things as simple as error messages must be written.

But also, don’t let this get you arrogant. I often hear that the customer doesn’t know what they want and so we must give it to them. Actually, customers often do understand what they want, but they have a hard time articulating what they want and may not know how to articulate it. But often they will know it when they see it. Thus it becomes OUR job not as a programmer but as a designer, as an architect, to learn how to draw this out of the end user. To step back, to see the larger trends, the directions, and the problems faced by our end users and then see how we can solve them to give them a solution that not only gives them what they want but in a way that’s better than they expected.

This isn’t easy, and it’s nothing a novice can do. But it’s a position for the novice to strive for.

10. You aren’t able to judge the business value of any programming task.

I will never forget Doug D.. Doug was a manager I had early on in my career. I was this idealistic programmer that enjoyed my ivory tower. I wanted to write perfect code, and do great things as a programmer.  Doug helped me realize that while that’s all good, there’s business to think about. It’s simple. Money has to be made. There has to be money to pay my salary, to keep the lights on, to pay my salary, to put Mountain Dew in the fridge, to pay my salary, to keep the business floating so we can keep our ivory tower alive and going to even bother with any of this code. If there’s no money, none of this stuff matters and our ivory tower of ideal programming goes away. So you have to look at the business side of things. You have to keep perspective. And sometimes yes, you have to not do something, you have to leave some task, adjust priorities, or even sometimes take a hack approach instead of a clean architecture. There’s just realities of business. Many times it may lead to ugly things that are more painful to recover from down the road, but that’s life… at least you stuck around long enough to have that longer road instead of having to pull up stakes miles and years back to find a new home.

Nothing will be perfect. We have to find balance and constantly juggle priorities.

Just don’t forget to grow and have fun along the way. 🙂

Commitments and Priorities

/ hsoi

I saw the above image posted to the DangerouslyHardcore Facebook page. In case the image goes away it says:

Commitment means staying loyal to what you said you were going to do long after the mood you said it in has left you.

Very true.

I’ve had a bunch of things rolling in my head for a while, and seeing the above image/text along with something that happened in Wife’s life a few days ago… it changed my priorities regarding my commitments.

I had committed to being more involved in shooting competitions, like IDPA. That’s going down the priority ladder.

I had committed to working on a new iPhone app. This commitment was made some time ago, work started, but has been treading water for too many months. This is going up the priority ladder.

I only have so much time and energy. The app went down the ladder because after staring at the computer all day and busting my ass all week for the day job, I just didn’t have the desire to look at the computer any more. I was (am) drained. Other things went up the priority ladder because they were not-computer things. They gave me something else to do, something else to occupy my mind and energy. Plus they were things that needed attention.

Well… the lack of app commitment also strikes a little closer because this particular app project is very personal. It’s something I’m doing with Wife, and it means a lot to her. That I haven’t been able to give it the attention it’s due is not right, and I feel horrible. It’d be one thing to not honor the commitment to myself, or to anyone else. But to not honor this commitment to my wife? That’s not right, and that hurts me deeply. It wasn’t not honored out of malice or anything bad, just exhaustion. I need to do something about it.

And in some regard, the mood for the app has left me. It’s mostly because I’ve been away, had too many false restarts, and it’s just hard to get motivated yet yet yet again. But I know once I truly get back into it, I’ll roll along alright. I need to rediscover my commitment, and see it through.

So, since much of my “free time” is on the weekends, that means I need to spend it working on this app.

That means shooting matches is out, for now. I don’t expect the app will take me all year to do, so I reckon later this year I should be able to make it out to matches. As well, so long as I keep dry firing at home and regularly shooting, like when I go out to KRT to teach, that’s alright. I mean, if I can run through a few magazines, run a few drills, assess state of things, then go home and dry fire to bring up the skill, then go back and shoot to measure progress, really, that’s OK. That will hold me for now. That I’m just shooting live at least once a month is well, about what shooting competition would be. Granted, there isn’t any of the pressure or environment, but this is the trade-off for now while I live up to my more important commitment. I just have to keep up with dry fire and ensuring I put at least a mag or two through the gun (for myself, with purpose) when I go out to teach.

I’m not abandoning my commitment to shooting competition, just changing course a bit. I have to, because Wife is more important. 🙂  And hopefully it brings other commitments back, like more regular dry fire and practice.

I can only look at this as a good thing, as long as I remain committed. 🙂

WordPress fail

/ hsoi

I downloaded the WordPress iOS app update.

Installed. Oh hey, this “Notifications” thing is new. Let’s go see.

Crash.

*sigh*

Relaunch the app.

Oh cool. They have some mechanism that autodetects the crash and looks like it can send the crash report…. oh the app just crashed again.

HA!

And now it’s caught in an endless crash loop. Launch app, crash detector comes up for a couple seconds, then the app crashes. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Just awesome. 🙂

 

Smart guns? Dumb idea.

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

So, Jeremy Shane thinks the solution to the problem is to “make guns smart”: (h/t Shawn)

While the debate rages on, it’s worth thinking out of the box for a moment. What if we could design guns to be smarter and safer — with hardware and software? The right technology could neutralize the killing capability of an assault weapon, even in a madman’s hands.

After reading Mr. Shane’s article, I’m not sure how much he knows about guns or software, but it comes off like he doesn’t know much. I’m a firearms instructor and have been a software developer for over 20 years, so I know a few things about both realms. Given that, while I applaud Mr. Shane’s imagination, I can say his ideas are best left to the imagination, as realization of them will not lead to the end goals he desires.

The root of the problem is that guns are “dumb.” Pull the trigger and they discharge bullets mindlessly, regardless of who is doing the aiming or where they are aimed. Guns should “know” not to fire in schools, churches, hospitals or malls. They should sense when they are being aimed at a child, or at a person when no other guns are nearby.

Most useful tools are dumb. We don’t have “smart” hammers, smart screwdrivers, smart knives, smart binoculars, smart blenders, smart cars… well, granted some things are starting to try to move that way, but most things understand that those “smart” devices can really only operate in dumb environments. No computer can process information as fast and as well as the human brain, can make the “instant” decisions that sometimes are necessary. The “touchier” the environment, the more humans are still needed. Even with all the safety technology being brought into cars, we still haven’t eliminated the driver because there are just some things the car cannot do and only a human can.

Should guns “know” not to fire into schools or churches or hospitals or malls? I don’t know… what if there’s an active shooter in a school or church or mall (since that’s where most such events have happened)? Wouldn’t you want the good guys to have guns that can work in those environments?

They should sense being aimed at a child. How would that work? Define “child”, as some sort of optical device would perceive them? I mean, I know some young teenagers that are larger than adults, some adults that cast child-like silhouettes. Mr. Shane also says “Sensory data can be used by built-in software to disable firing if the gun is pointed at a child or someone holding a child.”. Or someone holding a child… So a gun shouldn’t be functional if pointed at the person kidnapping your child?

You see, these are subjective decisions. How exactly can software make the sort of decision necessary? And even if it can, it takes time, time that may not be present as a horrible event is unfolding.

If you wish to have software attempt to make these subjective decisions, we have to remember that software is imperfect. It’s written by humans — who are imperfect — and software has bugs. It may not be robust enough. It may not be sound enough. It may hold bias of the programmer. I mean, for all my care and concern at writing bug-free code in my decades of programming, it’s impossible to write bug-free code. Do you want YOUR bug to be responsible for someone’s death? That it might not fire when you need it to fire, or that it fires when you don’t want it to fire? And then, who bears the responsibility for such a mistake?

Couldn’t gun software be hacked? Perhaps, but the risk can be reduced by open-sourcing code, requiring software patch downloads, and notifying gun makers or law enforcement if software is disabled. Open-sourcing code is not foolproof, but it will build a community of lawful gun owners and code writers who value safety and Second Amendment rights. Enabling two-way communication between guns and their original makers will help guns to be tracked beyond the initial sale, putting greater long-term responsibility on gun makers.

Nice thought, but open source code is still not bug-free and still can have horrible things happen. And there’s nothing here to address “software hacks”, but boy… what about viruses? what about social engineering? hardware hacks (I mean, why not just disassemble the gun and disable or replace the mechanism)? It’s not like DRM has really stopped piracy. It’s not like iPhone’s don’t keep getting jailbroken. There’s so many other things that can happen and be made to go wrong, to bypass, or to even force malfunctions. Wouldn’t it just be dandy if some virus was let loose that caused all these guns to rapidly empty their magazines at some coordinated time of day… all around the world… *shudder*.

There have been groups that have attempted such “smart guns”, and all have failed. Not only because the system itself doesn’t really work out, but because no one is willing to buy said “smart” systems. There’s no police nor military group that would want to buy such a thing, because they operate in environments where you may need to shoot multiple rounds in a school at a person holding a child. They understand these “smart” systems are anything but, and are too risky and prone to failure, and not worth risking their lives over. So you may say, only sell “dumb guns” to police and military. Realize then that still means such guns would be in circulation, and thus bad people will still get a hold of them. Of course, if you know anything about weapons fashioned and found in prisons, bad people will get weapons without your “smart restrictions” if they really want them. Even if somehow that’s all there is, there are going to be other “dumb” ways to cause mass destruction; look at Timothy McVeigh. So all these “smart” weapons would do is abridge and hamper law-abiding good citizens. Why do you want to do that?

You see, a well-made gun is actually a very simple mechanical system; it’s a simple machine. Once you start to add all of these things on it, start trying to add GPS, sensory data, target discernment, you start making for a massively complex system. And with any complex system, it starts to become… well… complex. Difficult. And prone to mistakes.

If truly you value life, should it be held to a system that can be massively complex and prone to mistakes? For all your attribution to car technology, Mr. Shane, consider how many recalls happen every year. A car is a massively complex system, and while it may work most of the time, you know all too well that cars break down and fail us. Thankfully most of the time car breakdowns don’t have life hanging in the balance. But when good guys need their guns, for certain lives are hanging in the balance — do we really want the risk of breakdown when preserving life is most critical?

It’s a nice thought, but technology cannot save us. Fixing our cultural and social norms and behaviors is at the root of solving this problem.

kwikkEmail 1.0.2 is now available

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

kwikkEmail 1.0.2 is now available in the App Store.

It’s a simple update, bringing iOS 6 and iPhone 5 compatibility.

Click/tap here to download it.

 

PracticeDeck 1.1.1 is now available

/ hsoi

The DR Performance PracticeDeck for iOS 1.1.1 (or PracticeDeck for short) is now live in the App Store.

It’s a simple update, bringing iOS 6 and iPhone 5 compatibility. It also raises the minimum OS version to iOS 5.

Click/tap here to download it.

A year since we’ve said goodbye

/ hsoi

A friend pointed me to the Apple website, because 1 year ago today, Steve Jobs passed away. Apple changed their home page today to post a video (linked here, but no idea how long this link will remain, or if it’ll move to a more permanent home eventually), a tribute and remembrance of Steve Jobs.

Yeah… it choked me up a bit.

I didn’t know Steve at all, but my first computer was an Apple //e, and the day I saw a Mac… it changed my life. I’ve spent over 20 years writing Mac and now iOS software professionally, so yeah… Apple has a place in my life.

At the end of the video you hear Steve say:

It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.

That’s what people tend to not get.

Sure, iPhone is behind Android in a lot of respects. In fact, in many respects Mac has been behind the PC/Windows. But in many other respects, Apple has completely lead the way in both the desktop Mac and mobile iPhone world (and let’s not forget the music iPod world either). And the biggest leader is Apple make products people want to have, that people yearn to have. Who lines up for the midnight release of any product? What other customers find opening the box to be a religious experience? that a product, a service, a brand creates such intense devotion… to plastic and silicon?

There’s an aesthetic.

I see Android devices all day at my day job, and I just can’t like them. Same with Windows vs. Mac. Oh sure, I can totally appreciate the technology going into them, both the hardware and the OS. I think there’s actually a lot of cool stuff about Android as an OS. But it just doesn’t sing to me. It doesn’t move me. I don’t look at it as a joy that I like to look at for hours every day, which is what I have to do. If I have to stare at something for a long time, I like it to be pleasing to the eyes (like my wife), and somehow stir my soul (like my wife).

To some people, they don’t care. These things don’t matter to them. And that’s OK. To some it’s pure utilitarian, or they don’t know any different or don’t care. And that’s fine. That’s them.

Me?

Well, speaking of Steve… if you consider his background with typography and how that influenced the development of Mac. Just the other day I read about a new programmer’s font, the article mentioned a few, I downloaded and tried them out, and settled on Source Code Pro. It’s a beautiful font. It’s a lot nicer on the eyes, and when you’re staring at code all day long well… the shape and placement and count of pixels really starts to matter. And you probably don’t realize it, until you start to care and do something about it… like change it. But there’s the joy of Apple. They spend so much time fussing and caring about every little pixel, every little detail. The intent? To just work. In some respects, it should be remarkable; “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But really in most respects it should be unremarkable. It should just work, it should not get in our way, it should not impede the flow of our work, it should enable and empower us… and we don’t really notice nor understand why. And even something as simple as a font can do this. Does that matter? Yes it does. And Steve knew that. Many people don’t know, don’t care, or aren’t aware… and that’s fine for them.

Not me.

Think different.

Happy Programmer’s Day

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

Happy Programmer’s Day to my fellow programmers!

Oh wait… you mean it was yesterday? Ah that’s right… leap year. So that means this is an “off-by-one” error. How appropriate. 🙂

More things I’ve learned about Jenkins

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

At the day job, I’m still working with Jenkins and our build system. I’ve written about some things I learned at the onset, and now I’d like to add some things I’ve learned since then.

Plugins

Be mindful of them. There’s a great many out there that can help you solve things, but they seem to also bring much risk. For example, Jenkins was going belly-up at least a couple of times a day. I’d look in the system console and see some plugin that I wasn’t even using (just had installed) was somehow causing memory failures, throwing an exception, and Jenkins went stupid and had to be restarted. Once you figure out what plugins you need, uninstall every other plugin. Keep your system as minimal and tight as possible to avoid introducing risk or uncertainty.

Backups

I had to write a lot of custom scripts (some bash, a lot of ruby). These files I can keep in our version control system. But Jenkins files themselves are harder to do. Make sure you have a backup strategy. Make sure you run it often while you work. Working on a Mac and using Time Machine is useful… make a change, screw up, easy to revert.

Updates

Don’t apply an update unless the changelog shows it directly affects you. For example, the git plugin was just updated to fix a regression that prevented using env parameters in the branch name — I need that, so I upgraded that plugin. This goes back to the plugin issues I mentioned above… and if you screw up, it goes back to my backup issue I mention above. 🙂

Planning

Do your best to plan your jobs and pipeline. Figure out the abstract ideal that you want. Then figure what Jenkins can offer to get you there. You might find plugins, but you might also have to write your own scripts and other management.

Then, don’t be afraid to revise and revise again, even starting over if you have to.

DIY

I wanted to use a lot of plugins, because they’re supposed to make it easy, right? Well, it depends. The Xcode plugin is supposed to make it easier to do xcodebuild-based, builds. And in theory it does, but our needs are different and so I just have to get dirty with our own scripts.

The email-ext plugin is really cool, but I couldn’t get it to understand and bring in a bunch of env vars and do other bits of logic processing that we needed. So again, scripting to the rescue. Net::SMTP to the rescue.

CodeSign problems

I noticed from time to time that I’d start a build and eventually xcodebuild or ‘xcrun PackageApplication’ would fail:

“There are no valid public/private key pairs in the default keychain”

It seems this would happen after rebooting the machine (and Jenkins started up via the launchd stuff). I could manually use launchctl to unload then (re)load and things might be back to normal, but that’s annoying.

I found this post at stackoverflow.com, and adding the “SessionCreate = true” key/value to the launchd plist seems to do the trick.

But then further down things failed out. Despite the codesign command line tool being granted special Keychain access, it still hated life:

<path to build output app>: User interaction is not allowed.

Uh…

So I found this and added a:

security unlock-keychain -p "" login.keychain

in the custom ruby script before invoking xcodebuild and PackageApplication.

BTW, I don’t have the passwords encoded into the script. Remember the use of the .netrc file? Use that.

Speaking of .netrc… it seems curl doesn’t like a .netrc where newlines separate entries… it wants everything on one line.

Passing Data to Downstream Jobs

Using Jenkins’ parameterized build mechanism, I was able to pass parameters around. I’d have the main build job, which would then use the promoted builds plugin to allow me to move the build through a pipeline, like to promote to QA, then promote to the App Store, or whatever. But there’s a lot of information from the main build job that I want the downstream jobs to have so the jobs can be properly named, emails can be properly formatted, version control tags set up, whatever. I found the easist way to do this was at the end of the main build job to use a little ruby scripting, create a Hash with all the things I cared to preserve, use YAML to preserve it to file, make sure the build job archived and fingerprinted that .yml file, and moved that “config.yml” file along with the rest of my archives and promotions. Then it’s simple enough to load and look up key/values out of the config.yml file in the later job scripts.

Tagging Git

One of the downstream jobs is a “deploy to the Apple app store” job. Certainly when we do that we want to tag our github-hosted repository with info about the build so we can know what was deployed. Trouble is, at that phase of the build pipeline we don’t have source code. So we can’t just “git tag” then “git push”. What to do? Use the github v3 API. In that config.yml file I was able to preserve the SHA hash of the code we used, so that’s all we need.

At first I thought to use the Tags API, but as I played with that it didn’t work. Even if I could create a tag, it wouldn’t show up in the Tags area of my git GUI app SourceTree. In fact, it started to give errors about refs. So I started to play with the References API and tried things like:

$ curl -XPOST --netrc https://api.github.com/repos/:user/:repos/git/refs \
-d '{"ref":"refs/tags/MyTestTag","sha":"be43262431c7a4b9db67a23d37f51e7901b9845c"}'

and lo… that seemed to work.

Is that enough? Is that correct? I don’t know. I’m not an expert on the low-level plumbing of git. I have contacted github support, but as of this writing have yet to hear back.

The Journey Continues

That’s all that I have for now.

It’s a lot of work to set up a build system, but it’s rather satisfying to do it. I still have a long ways to go. Right now we just have the basics for building and deploying to help our general workflow. It still needs lots of work for validations, testing, continuous integration, and other good stuff like that. One step at a time.

Let’s be consistent

/ hsoi

From Unc I read how a man was fired from his job for “liking” a Facebook post.

Daniel Ray Carter Jr. logged on to Facebook and did what millions do each day: He “liked” a page by clicking the site’s thumbs up icon. The problem was that the page was for a candidate who was challenging his boss, the sheriff of Hampton, Va.

That simple mouse click, Carter says, caused the sheriff to fire him from his job as a deputy and put him at the center of an emerging First Amendment debate over the ubiquitous digital seal of approval: Is liking something on Facebook protected free speech?

I think most people would agree that yes it is free speech, it should be protected. You are expressing your opinion. To “click Like” is merely a shortcut/shorthand for saying “I like this” or “I agree with this” or some other statement of agreement and affirmation. It’s just a more efficient (lazy?) way to do it. Are we saying that if someone typed a comment under the posting “I like this” that that wouldn’t be protected? or if I wrote it on a piece of paper, or spoke it aloud in a public venue for others to hear? So why wouldn’t clicking “like” be offered the same protection under 1A?

But apparently not:

The interest was sparked by a lower court’s ruling that “liking” a page does not warrant protection because it does not involve “actual statements.” If the ruling is upheld, the ACLU and others worry, a host of Web-based, mouse-click actions, such as re-tweeting (hitting a button to post someone else’s tweet on your Twitter account), won’t be protected as free speech.

Methinks someone in the lower court doesn’t quite understand technology advancements.

“We think it’s important as new technologies emerge . . . that the First Amendment is interpreted to protect those new ways of communicating,” said Rebecca K. Glenberg, legal director of the ACLU of Virginia. “Pressing a ‘like’ button is analogous to other forms of speech, such as putting a button on your shirt with a candidate’s name on it.”

So isn’t that interesting? Our Founding Fathers never could have imagined this thing called the Internet. They could never have imagined Facebook or Twitter or iPhone’s. They could never have imagined the act of pressing with your finger could act as a proxy for expressing your liking something. But just like they understood technology advancements like clay tablets, papyrus paper, quill pens, moveable type, printing presses, pony express, and so on… they probably understood that technology would continue to advance. I’m sure they wanted speech to be protected regardless of the technology used to convey it. Certainly that’s what it seems the WaPo, the ACLU, and others put forth. I know many people will be outraged if these advances in technology would not be upheld as protected under that 200-year old document written by men that (some day) had no clue.

So why isn’t this same standard held to the Second Amendment?