Eric Holscher - Posted in 2012

2012 Year in Review

2012-12-31T08:06:17+00:00

Wow, what a year. 2012 was a great year in my book. I took 2012 off from a lot of the professional development activies that have taken up my adult life thus far, and really focused on personal development. I think I did a great job with that, and I have a pretty awesome list of things I accomplished this year. I think I also started to get the full enjoyment out of Oregon this year, in all its seasons.

Physical achievements

The biggest achievement of the year has to be the Petal Pedal I did in June. That’s a 100 mile bike ride through the Willamette Valley in Oregon. I trained for it through most of the spring with rides that started out around 20 miles and ended up in around 70-80 miles. Previously the longest bike ride I had done was probably around 10 miles. The official ride also had 5000 ft of eleveation gain, which added another element of difficultly. The ride was beautiful though, and went through a bunch of flower fields and Silver Falls State Park.

Earlier in 2012, I also started taking up skiing again. I went up to Ski Bowl for night skiing a bunch. I went ahead and bought a season pass for Ski Bowl for the 2013 season.

As summer came to Portland, I was outside pretty much all the time. It was a most excellent summer weather-wise and I took full advantage of it. I did a bunch of backpacking up on Mount Hood, with a number of weekend trips to various places including Carin Basin and Paradise Park. I also went car camping a bunch, including at Rock Creek in the Santiam State Forest, and Trillium Lake on Hood. I also stayed in a Yurt on the Oregon Coast for the first time at Cape Lookout.

The summer also included a couple fun road trips. I got down to see Crater Lake, the only national park in Oregon. We camped there for a night and drove around the rim. It is one of the most amazing places I have ever been. It’s a crystal clear blue lake, but it’s in the rim of an extinct volcanoe, at around 5000 ft elevation. It’s a really amazing geological place and highly recommended. After that, we drove up to Bend, and camped at Lava Lake, which is also a beautiful place. We saw tons of ground squirrels and other wildlife there. We also went through Bend and walked around, and checked out Smith Rock. The trip concluded with a sunset walk up to Mirror Lake on hood, and a race against the sun to get back to the car.

I made it back home for 2 of my good college friends getting married (to each other) in DC and visited family in Virginia. I got some surfing in down in Virginia Beach, which was great. It’s something I miss about Oregon, because the water is so cold here. Made it out to the Oregon Coast, but it’s mainly just good for looking instead of swimming in.

The summer also included some awesome hikes and other activities. I went out to Hood River a couple times, and actually Wind Surfed and Paddle Boarded for the first time. We also drove around the east side of Hood to the Fruit Loop and gorged on cherries and other delicious fruit. Speaking of fruit, I ate a ton of berries again this year, with Oregon having some of the finest summer farmers markets in all the land.

Hiking was a big draw this year. I went on a number of hikes including the PCT from Timberline Lodge all the way to Cairn Basin on a couple different days. Eagle Creek, Angel’s Rest, Dog Mountain, and a few more in the Columbia River Gorge. I hiked the Wildwood trail through Forest Park a number of times, however I didn’t thru-hike it’s 30 miles, will have to save that for next year.

As fall came around, things started to slow down. I still did a bunch of hiking through the fall, and riding my bike. I started rock climbing around this time to keep up the activity level, and have been progressing nicely at indoor climbing at the Portland Rock Gym. I can’t wait to test my skills outside, but I already noticed my balance and confidence improving on the hikes I did in the fall.

As winter came into view, I escaped down to the Turks & Caicos islands for Christmas. Where I did 7 dives, got my Advanced Open Water cert, and did a bunch more snorkeling. It was great hanging out with my family in the warmth, and spending time in the water. When I got back, I went on my first snowshoeing adventure ever on Hood. I really like snowshoeing, it’s basically just like hiking in the snow, just it takes a lot more work!

This year was also full of Ping Pong. We have a table at work, and it’s rekindled my love of the game. I played some when I was a kid, but we have gotten pretty good and serious at work, and it’s been a pleasure upping my skills again.

In list form

A list of firsts for the year:

Rock Climbing
Backpacking
Wind Surfing
Paddle Boarding
Snow Shoeing
Long Distance Biking

Things that I love that I did more of this year:

Ping Pong
Hiking
Camping
Skiing
Diving
Snorkeling
Biking

Things I love that I didn’t do so much of:

Surfing
Traveling
Soccer
Frisbee

New things I want to try next year:

Bike Camping
Longer backpacking trips
Climbing outside
Climbing Mount Hood and/or St Helens
Thru hiking Forest Park
White Water Rafting
Kayaking

Conclusion

I’m sure I missed some stuff, but it was a year full of firsts, and I think I have gotten the most out of Oregon that I could. I chose to focus on my personal life this year instead of my professional life, and I think it’s worked out for the best. I have had an amazing year full of excellent activies outdoors.

I also saw a bunch of music this year, and met a bunch of awesome new people, and did a bunch of great things professionally, but I think the points worth remembering will be the parts above.

As a wise man once said: Work to Live, Don’t Live to work.

Interesting projects on Read the Docs: Teaching

2012-12-01T18:27:15+00:00

As the maintainer of Read the Docs, I spend a lot of time looking through random projects, and getting inspired. People have been doing lots of interesting things with the project, and I’d like to highlight some of them.

This edition is focused on teaching. All of these projects are trying to teach something, and doing it in different ways. Some are community contributed guides that have many authors, where some are a single person trying to distill their experience into something valuable for others.

The projects mentioned here will be featured on the homepage of Read the Docs until I do another posting, where those new projects will take their place.

Little books of R

The Little Books of R were some of the first books that I was aware of on Read the Docs. They are great little manuals on things that you can do with the R programming language, often used for modeling and graphics.

There are a few different books, including how to use R with:

These books are perfect examples of what publishing online provides. Short and sweet, to a specific niche, and easily available.

Ops School

Ops School is an attempt at providing a cirriculum for someone interested in learning Systems Administration. It’s answering the question of “What do I need to know to get a junior sysadmin job” that many people have before starting into a career.

It takes a lot of knowledge that takes years to gather from experience and attempts to distill it down into a form that is easily referencable. As this project matures, it will provide a valuable resource for a lot of information around the running of systems.

The project is still in development, and is actively seeking contributors.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python

The Hitchhiker’s Guide is a great project from the Python community. It’s goal is to provide knowledge on best practices on the daily usage of the Python language. It is trying to answer the question “What do I need to know that I don’t know I need to know.” Known more colloquially as unknown unknown’s, this knowledge is the hardest to gain. Having a guide from the community about the things that you should probably know about is invaluable as a new, or even experienced member of that community.

This project is also in active development.

Thoughts on RESTful API Design

These thoughts are a great collection of experience from someone who has built production REST APIs. If you are tasked with creating an API for a web site, it’s a great read. It provides a good framework for understanding how the API fits in with the rest of the application, as well as what makes a good API.

Conclusion

I love the idea of Read the Docs as a medium of teaching, as well as just documenting software projects. Please let me know of other interesting projects that you’ve found, and I can include them. Raising awareness of these great resources is valuable, and hopefully it will reach more people who can learn from them.

Help fund Read the Docs

2012-09-20T12:04:59+00:00

Currently Read the Docs is funded mainly through Corporate sponsorship. The Django and Python Software Foundations (non-profits), Mozilla, Lab305, Revsys, and others have helped keep the site running. However, this requires finding sponsors to help donate to the site every 6 months or so to keep things running.

I want to try out a new idea that is effectively a subscription to the website. When people pay for something, they expect certain things. A promise of support, uptime, and other work are basically being transfered in the mind of the person providing payment. I know some places try to explicitly denounce this transaction, but it is still there.

This is where Gittip comes in. It has the idea of funding a person to do work through anonymous donations. The thinking behind this is that the person recieving the money now has no sense of obligation to the person giving money. This allows them to take the money and continue to work on Open Source without feeling pressured to work on the things a specific person giving them money cares about.

I think this same idea can apply to software projects. Read the Docs doesn’t cost a huge amount of money to run every month - it costs a lot less than keeping a person alive and happy. So, I think that the first success story for Gittip funding something could easily be a project instead of a person. This funding model would then allow Read the Docs to support itself over time - without having to try and get support and investment again.

Read the Docs currently costs about $300/mo to run. This includes 6 servers (2 web, LB, Build, Database, Util/Monitoring), over 350GB of data transfered, over 100GB of repositories, and it serves over 3 million page views every month. We expect these costs to slowly rise as we get more and more traffic, but that is the goal we are currently aiming to hit. Head to the Read the Docs gittip page if you want to help out.

This is the beauty of Gittip - when 75 different people are giving you $4 a month ($1 a week), one can stop giving and it doesn’t totally destroy the funding. It allows other people to pick up the slack, and to sustain a dependable revenue stream for the project.

This is an experiment that I am going to try running to see if we can get individual sponsorship for the project, instead of depending on corporate sponsors for the sole source of support. Once this is achieved, we will look at other ways to spend the sponsorship we get from corporations, perhaps in more traditional efforts to advance the code base.

If this sounds interesting to you, head over to the Read the Docs gittip page, and start donating to the project.

Update: Wow! We reached the goal of $75 in around 14 hours. Thanks everyone who has donated to help keep the site running! It looks like we might reach above our weekly goal. For now, that money will just be left in an account to help pay for future growth of the site. If we end up making way more than we need, we’ll find something awesome to do with it (CDN?!).

The festival that felt like a hug

2012-09-18T13:29:38+00:00

A story about XOXO Festival in 3 acts. I will start first with something that set the tone, then talk about the importance to me, and then what I hope comes from it in the future.

Act 1: Interjecting awesome

One moment stood out to me in the swirl of ideas and amazing that was XOXO. It was at the beginning of the conference, when the organizers were on stage. They were talking about how they wanted the conference to be experienced. The sentence that I think changed the entire conference experience for me (paraphrased):

This should be a conference where you can go up to a group of people you don’t know, and they will include you in their conversation.

This seems like something very simple, but it set an important social contract. Normally my introverted self will balk at the idea of joining a group of unknown people. Especially at a conference with so many people who I look up to and admire. However, this idea, set forth by the organizers, dispelled this apprehension, and instead I viewed it as my responsibility to interject.

This was a fundamental change in how I experienced the conference. I spend most of my time at conferences talking to people I’ve known for years, rarely breaking into new groups. At XOXO, though, since I knew only a few people beforehand and felt compelled to meet new folks, I spent the entire conference striking up conversations with complete strangers. This was a profoundly different and amazing experience.

Act 2: Bring out your trolls

Consuming the world through twitter is not a way to be inspired. Getting together in a room and seeing people who have changed their world, and the world for others, is an amazing experience. It allows you to perceive and appreciate people’s aspirations.

I started XOXO in a funk that can only be explained as cynical. I had heard of Kickstarter and the ilk, but never really invested or taken the time to fully let the idea wash over me. As the talks started, and I heard Kickstarter over and over, it at first felt like a promotion and a buzz word. However, through the genuine excitement and joy of bringing something new into the world, my skepticism turned into inspiration.

Greed being destructive was a theme behind the conference, and I think this is the primary thing that won me over. People were creating things because they wanted them to exist in the world, and they had to do it. It wasn’t about making money, or getting famous, but because they had a drive to change a part of life. This drove the jealousy and skepticism from my heart, and started the search for the thing in life that I was meant to change.

Act 3: Radiating change

I think that this conference was an amazing view into a world that could exist. At a high level it was a distancing from the classical tech world that is so focused on money. A place where we can be open, share our ideas, successes, and failures. Somewhere that people can actually introduce something into the world and have support for it.

During the talk on Kickstarter, Yancey mentioned that Portland has been the most successful city on Kickstarter. Something like $7.5M has been given to creators in the rose city. On the technical side, we have a burgeoning, but not well formed start up community. This means that we can form this community into something that is different than has existed in other places.

As Paul Graham once said, each city sends you a message. I think that this conference was in some ways a call to action, that a place like XOXO needs to exist in a more permanent manner. I think that Portland has a chance of doing this going forward. I can’t, and won’t, try to spell out how this could be done. I will say that I can’t imagine another city that is better poised to do it.

I want Portland to be the place where you come, and think you can change the world.

Why Read the Docs matters

2012-01-22T14:08:01+00:00

Documenting projects is hard, hosting them shouldn’t be. Read the Docs was created to make hosting documentation simple. I think that we have solved this problem well, but now we need to start thinking about the larger picture.

Along with hosting, Read the Docs was created with 2 other main goals. One was to encourage people to write documentation, by removing the barrier of entry of hosting. The other was to create a central platform for people to find documentation. Having a shared platform for all documentation allows for innovation at the platform level, allowing work to be done once and benefit everyone. Having run the site for over a year now, I think there is a third thing that we should be striving for. That is to make the quality of documentation better.

I think that we can help a documentation culture flourish within the open source world. Django is a shining example of what a project with great documentation can do, and it has a community that values docs more than the norm. I think we can help spread this culture throughout the Python world, and beyond. This has already started, and I want to think about how something like RTD can help.

What we can do to help

I think that having a guide for writing useful documentation would be a great step towards helping people along the path of documentation enlightenment. Jacob Kaplan-Moss has started down this road with his blog series and Pycon 2011 talk on this subject. I think that we could start by collecting these into a section of the site.

We could build on top of that great start with simple guides for how to get started with Sphinx, best practices for documentation, and providing a general place to learn more about how to write good documentation. Since we host a lot of documentation, we could point to live examples of techniques, and provide helpers for people to enable the techniques.

I have started a reStructedText Philosophy document that is meant to help people understand the ideas behind how reST works, so that it isn’t as mystifying. This reST cheatsteet also appears to have similar goals. These are a very basic start, and I think some more along these lines would really help a lot of people get over the barrier to starting and continuing to write good documentation.

I think that we could also help create contributors to projects, if we could find an easy way to provide patches to documentation. If you could go to the project documentation, and fix small typos, or help add a paragraph in the tutorial, it would lower the bar to helping.

However, it isn’t a wiki. These changes would be represented to the project author as pull requests in their VCS, and they would still be responsible for tending the garden. This gets rid of the “Just Edit The Wiki” solution of documentation, and also helps new contributors get started in an easier fashion.

The Plone community has built a proof of concept, linking to Github’s edit pages for the current document. I think we can integrate this at the platform level, and make it available to everyone.

Want to help?

Read the Docs is open source. You can help by writing docs for the site, writing code for the site, or just writing documentation in general. People can also help just by using the site, and reporting bugs. Telling us how to make the site better helps everyone in the long run. Come join us on Freenode in the #readthedocs channel as well.

Another area that we’re hurting is in the design front. We have been adding features over time, and the design of the site is getting a bit strained. Having someone with a good sense of design help re-think and re-architect some of the features and ideas that we’ve been working on I think would help a lot.

A lot of the RTD contributors will be at Pycon 2012, where we will be having a sprint on the site. If you want to get started contributing, that is a great place to come and get started.