Category: Software

Searching for a Ghost in the Machine

I’ve been low key looking for a new gig recently to compliment the Global Jukebox, either another consulting project or a something steady that would let me work from home. Luckily (if you can call it that) the software industry these days has shifted largely to remote work and it seems the trend to a large extent won’t be reversing. On the downside, many startups have miserable attitude towards their employees that begins with the hiring process. They say the only want the best of the best, and then start pushing you around like you have nothing better to than stick around and take it. Some want you to take a coding test before you ever talk to a human. One place recently asked me to submit a video, like an audition tape, in lieu of an interview. You must be kidding me. One place a few months ago asked me to take a one-hour coding quiz that turned out to be three hours. I ignore all these places cuz my time is valuable. If they’re like that when they’re recruiting they’re probably not very good to work for.

So it was refreshing today when I had a second interview (the deep tech one) at a place that actually cared about my experience, my approach to problem solving, how I work in teams and all that, rather than treat me like I must be some kind of liar trying to bluff my way into a their precious organization.

There was the usual coding quiz, where you have to write a working program on the spot. I must say I usually dread these. They tend to focus on low-level stuff you may not have used in a long time and you can just google if you need to in real life, and often as not they throw in arbitrary gotchas or they’re hung up on syntax or some library or something. In short, not modeling a real code situation and not testing high-level ability.

As luck would have it, the quiz was something I implemented just a few days ago in the course of work on the Jukebox. Basically it was to take a list of strings that might contain duplicated and return a list with no dupes. I did this to provide autocomplete prompts in our search component. When I was writing it I thought to myself, gee this is just the kind of thing they like to ask on coding quizzes. Maybe I should google it to see if my solution is optimal. I did and it was. So when the quiz came today I just flew right through, literally just writing out some code that was already in my head.

Sea of Tranquility

We’re now into week seven. Not too much going on. Or should I say everything that’s happening is happening slowly. Spring has been pretty cold and rainy so far. I mowed the lawn last week for the first time.

I’ve finished the style redesign on the Global Jukebox, and now I’m doing data work, updating the model for the cultures tree, and adding in 700 pop songs. We should be going live before too long.

In music land, I’ve been working my way thru Patterns for Jazz on the sax, I’m up to pattern 78 now, getting into flat thirds and fifths. I’ve also been working thru the Real Book, sight-reading every head and running down the changes, doing a few every day. If there’s a song that’s interesting I’ll take a few days and study it and try and memorize it. So far all the Charlie Parker songs have been interesting in that way. Right now I’m up to Blues for Alice, and the next few songs after that are Bluesette, Boplicty and Bright Size Life, so that’s a fun place to hang out for a while.

I ordered the Charlie Parker Omnibook in Bb. I studied the thru whole book back in high school, but in Eb on alto. I always thought playing Bird songs on tenor was kinda weird, cuz they don’t lay on the horn as well. They tend to wrap around the octave in funny ways and are often either too high or too low, since Bird made use of the full range of the horn. And his tunes are hard enough to begin with. But now I’m thinking it’s worth it to try and get some of his riffs in my bag.

On piano I’m also working my way thru the Real Book, but at a much slower pace, picking and choosing songs to work up as solo piano pieces. Mainly ballads, with alot of emphasis on voicings. I’ve finally gotten pretty good at Body and Soul, and I’ve been playing ‘Round Midnight for ages. Next tune I’m gonna woodshed is either My Romance by Rogers and Hart, or Naima by John Coltrane, or maybe both.

It also occurs to me I know literally hundreds and hundreds of rock and pop songs on piano and voice, and there’s many more I kinda know, but I rarely play more than a handful of them. So I’ve started putting together a notebook of all the charts so I can rotate them in and out of my practice and keep them fresh.

In the recording realm, I’ve finished my sax and synthesizer parts on The Story Lies and Who Speaks on Your Behalf (actually only WSoYB had synths), so now we’re up to the vocals, and then it’s just the mixdown. At the start of the year I was hoping these songs would be done by end of June. Together they’re about 10 minutes, which would put me on track for 20 minutes of produced music for the year. Now it’s looking like they’ll be done in early May, and with luck it’ll be more like 30 minutes of music this year. Woo-hoo!

In origami land, I’ve been continuing to work on my book. I settled on eight or maybe nine models, somewhere between 50 and 60 pages. I have six of the models done with new diagrams and layouts complete. The others are mostly done: the diagrams are finished and I have a draft of the layouts. That is, except for one model. The Martian appeared my previous kit book, and although it’s a great idea I was never really satisfied with the final design. So now I’m redoing that model without the constraint of having to keep it to an intermediate level with a low step count. Changing the body proportions, adding more detail to the head, everything. It’ll be substantially a new model in the end.

Don’t Get Around Much Anymore

Sometimes work can be fun. I recently completed an assignment for The Global Jukebox to put together a list of the greatest jazz singers of all time, along with representative songs to showcase their greatness. It’s been very enjoyable listening and curating the list, and I learned alot along the way. For example, Nina Simone used to live in my neighborhood.

Originally I had wanted to do the top ten or maybe twenty artists, but it was hard to stop. I extended it out to thirty, albeit with fewer songs as you get on down the line. The list features both old and newer singers, spanning the entire history of jazz. Some central to the genre, others maybe coming in from neighboring forms such as blues or pop, but nevertheless great contributors to the legacy of jazz as an art form, and particularly to the vocals. It also really gets across the variety oh jazz styles out there and how it’s evolved over time.

Even though list is definitive because I say it is, naturally that’s absurd. It’s necessarily pretty subjective. Of course Ella, Satchmo and Lady Day are 1-2-3. After that you can debate the relative ranking of the performers or maybe point out someone that I neglected to include. That’d be a fun debate. Regardless, all the performers and songs listed here are pretty great.

Here’s a link to the playlist on Spotify. Enjoy!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VZSjgb7157yUQ9KmrSvvd?si=S0mnQa89RGK3_Og5q0KVRg

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Greatest Jazz Singers of All Time for The Global Jukebox

1. Ella Fitzgerald – How High the Moon, I’m Beginning to See the Light (w/ Duke Ellington), My Romance, I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm, The Lady is a Tramp

2. Louis Armstrong – Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Jeepers Creepers, Cuban Pete, Hello Dolly, What Wonderful World

Bonus: Ella & Loius – Cheek to Cheek, Dream a Little Dream

3. Billie Holiday – Gimme a Pig Foot and a Bottle of Beer, Strange Fruit, Lover Man, Stars Fell on Alabama, God Bless the Child

4. Tony Bennett – (I Left My Heart) In San Francisco, Anything Goes (w/ Lady Gaga), There Will Never Be Another You (w/ DaBrubeck)

5. Sarah Vaughn – Black Coffee, Lullaby of Birdland, Body and Soul

6. Johnny Hartman – Lush Life (w/ John Coltrane), My One and Only Love (w/ John Coltrane), Our Love is Here to Stay

7. Frank Sinatra – Fly Me to the Moon (w/ Count Basie Orchestra), Summer Wind, Luck Be a Lady

8. Dee Dee Bridgewater – Afro Blue, St. James Infirmary (w/ New Orleans Jazz Orchestra), Love from the Sun (w/ Theo Croker)

9. Kurt Elling – Nature Boy, Matte Kudasai, Steppin’ Out

10. Esperanza Spalding – I Know You Know, Cuerpo Y Alma, Funk the Fear

11. Gregory Porter – Liquid Spirit, Holding On

12. Chet Baker – Do It the Hard Way, Everything Happens to Me

13. Nat King Cole – Unforgettable, Smile

14. Shirley Horn – A Foggy Day, Makin’ Whoopee

15. Mel Tormé – They Can’t Take That Away from Me, The Christmas Song

16. Etta Jones – Bye Bye Blackbird, Etta’s Blues

17. Joe Williams – Five O’Clock in the Morning, Don’t Get Around Much Anymore

18. Nina Simone – I Put a Spell on You, Mississippi Goddam

19. Bessie Smith – Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out, Devil’s Gonna Git You

20. Ray Charles – Mess Around, America the Beautiful

21. Joni Mitchell – Goodbye Porkpie Hat

22. Billy Eckstine – Oo Bop Sh’bam

23. Dinah Washington – Destination Moon

24. Jazzmeia Horn – Out the Window

25. Patti Cathcart – I’ve Got Just About Everything (w/ Tuck Andress)

26. Dianna Krall – Peel Me a Grape

27. Bobby McFerrin – Thinkin’ About Your Body

28. Norah Jones – Don’t Know Why

29. Harry Connick Jr. – It Had to Be You

30. Etta James – At Last

Global Jukebox in the Classroom

Just before my trip we completed a a major round of work on The Global Jukebox. We’re adding an education portal; we now have a working prototype. You can see it at:

http://dev.theglobaljukebox.org

Just scroll down to the bottom of the landing page to find the entry point.

We’ve been partnering with a group called City Lore to create this section for use as a classroom tool in the New York City Public Schools. We created an experience where students can search for the musical roots by listening to the music of different cultures, then create and share a playlist of songs from cultures associated with people in their family tree. We demoed it the other day with City Lore for a group of teachers doing a day of professional development. It went quite well; they were keenly interest in the app and the Jukebox as a whole, and afterwards was an interesting and productive discussion. This was the culmination of a long period of planning and work, and it’s good that it paid off. must say also that it’s been a long while since I gave a demo and it’d lots of fun.

As part of the project we’ve added a visual designer to the team to skin the portal and reskin the site. Her name is Alona and she’s doing great work and I finally got to meet here F2F at the demo. The next phase of the project for me will be integrating her comps into the actual software, while Martin will be focused on backend integration. Hopefully we’ll be pretty much there in the next few weeks, to give us some time for testing and tweaks before the start of the school year.

New Home Page

Hey everybody, go on over and check out the new home page to my website:
http://zingman.com

It’s now split into two main entry points, one for music and one for origami, with the rest of the stuff below. The current features are the Haven Street album for music, and the Origami Air and Space book for origami. This way I can update the features for the two front page elements independently. While I was at it I updated my origami publications page with the new book and some improved layout.

There are some updates in the offing. I figure I’ll want to finesse the styles on the home page. And I realized I never made a page on my site for G-Force. I also want to add some more media to the Haven Street page. And it’s getting time to put up some new photo galleries.

Wind ‘Em Up

Well we’re winding things up for the year. The last few weeks have just flown by. The Xmas tree and decorations are all up and the shopping is mostly done. Lizzy is home for winter break, Michelle is done with school and Jeannie and I are off work until the New Year. All the deadlines were slain and we ended it up with a nice holiday party for my work, at a cool event space near our Manhattan office. Work has been going pretty well recently. We’ve hired a couple new guys into our team and feels like everyone is working together effectively and even having some fun.

You’ll be happy to know our chimney and furnace have been fixed, I got a new car key from the hardware store at a quarter the price the dealer wanted, and we even got a new deadbolt installed on our front door. I got new the tires on my car and the oil changed too, but since then the engine has been a bit, um, funny. More on that in a future post.

Things have been progressing with the Global Jukebox as well. I have been working with Martin on a suite of features to let users and build and share journey-style content, and a tool for building a musical/cultural family tree. Last week had a meeting last week to check in with Ray, our design consultant, in which Anna & co. ratified the wireframes and direction for a new landing page and multiple, configurable entry points into different areas of the app with an optional interstitial page to provide contextual content. The following day we had a meeting with an organization called City Lore, whose goals align with ours and are looking to provide the project with some funding. Happy news.

It’s nice to have a few days of time off to look forward to. Of course our time immediately fills in with things we haven’t gotten around to in a while. Yesterday was Jeannie’s family’s big Xmas party. Denis and Sarah came into town. I played Super Smash Bros. with Michelle and her cousins.

Been working on music. In our rock band we decided to learn twelve new songs over the break and be prepared to get them together as a group in the new year. Alot of 80’s stuff plus some other thins. I’m singing lead on five of them. So today I found copies of the lyrics and chords as well as audio recordings, and started practicing them on piano.

I learned Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on the piano, which is alot of fun even if the sheet music is not totally correct to the record. I’ve even been playing a handful of Christmas Carols including Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas (which as it turns out was kept from being number 1 on the charts back in the day by Bohemian Rhapsody), Steely Dan’s Charlie Freak (not often thought of a Christmas song despite the hipster Dickensian twist on the story of the Gift of the Magi in the lyric and the sleigh bells in the arrangement), plus a couple of numbers by Vince Guaraldi.

In jazz world we’re preparing for our gigs in the new year too, so I’ve been woodshedding a good handful of standards on the sax, as well as our originals. I’m going to make some demos of a couple of my new compositions and arrangements soon, hopefully over the break.

One last piece of news. The remix of my 2010 Buzzy Tonic record Face the Heat is done. I’ve been listening back and making finer and finer tweaks until it’s become as good as I can make it. So now all that’s left is getting the CDs made and setting up the online distribution. So more on that soon.

Here Comes Summer

Been busy as always. It seems that winter dragged on forever and spring came and went in the blink of an eye. Now we’re basically into summer, frequent rainy days notwithstanding. We’ve been having more and more beautiful warm sunny days. Last weekend we were upstate to pick Lizzy up from college, and for a quick visit with parents. Fun little road trip that seemed to give the summer and early kick-start. Realizing we ought to make some vacation plans.

Work has been busy. We had a big reorg of the whole software engineering department. I went from being in the Foundation team of the UX group to the UX team of the Foundation group. Our last major release seems to be a hit and has bought us some breathing room on the features race.

After all this time of building everything as fast as we can, we’re taking a step back and rearchitecting things to make them more performant, extensible, reusable, testable and all-around better. My first project is to create a component system for our UI elements. If feels like we just got going but we’re already transitioning from the figuring-out-what-we’re-doing phase to closing in on the first round of deliverables.

But the big news the Haven Street CDs are finally here!

Spring Loaded

Okay lots of topics today. First of the weather has finally gotten nice and spring is indeed here! Trees and flowers are starting to bud up and bloom, even a little sunshine. I spent a good part of the weekend outdoors, going for walks and working on the yard. I filled in some low spots in my yard and covered with grass seed. The last vestiges of stumpy are finally covered over. Next up, pulling out and re-laying some of the driveway stones where the tree used to be. Also both of our outdoor faucets are leaky, so I have to see if I can fix ‘em or else call a plumber.

I got the Mustang out on the highway too. It felt good. Last year at this time I was starting in on research to get it restored, but that fell by the wayside after I got sick/hurt. I guess it’s back in the realm of possibility again, but I have other projects I want to tackle this year, like getting some solar panels on my roof and expanding my patio. These also involve alot of upfront research. I’ll probably settle for getting an oil change on the Mustang for now.

At long last our bug fixing marathon at work has come to end, and I can let go of a huge amount of buggy code I’ve been holding in my head. At first it was a month, then six weeks, and kept getting extended and extended again. It’s pretty much all every engineer in the company has been doing for three months. By the end it seemed like every second bug was caused by some other bug fix. That’s a helluva way to run a company. I can understand that we have to deliver features to our customers, but we pay a very high price in code quality and technical debt rushing to do everything as fast as possible. We especially waste time doing things over rather than thinking it thru and getting it right the first time. It’s actually a known problem with our executives, and they keep saying they’ll address it next time around. Maybe this time they really mean it. We’re at the top end of a reorganization of the engineering department, moving to more flexible, cross-functional teams. Sounds good on paper but has a good chance of making things even more chaotic. We’ll see how it goes.

ZMP Origami Update

We we endured a pretty deep cold snap, with temps down close to zero every day for the last two weeks. Today it finally got up above twenty. Woo-hoo!

In other news I updated the origami page of my website:
zingman.com/origami

It’s been two years since the last major update. I have about a dozen new models, mainly airplanes, spaceships and flowerballs, and of course the flying fish. Alot of the work went into image editing, and while I was at it I updated some of the older models with new pics. Of course there’s always more to do. Next steps include support for multiple images for each model. I hope to get to that sometime this winter.

Enjoy!

GJB and TypeScript

We had a pretty major release of The Global Jukebox back in October. Since then we’ve been busy planning new features, and taking some time to up the architecture. One thing we did was to combine the different views and pages into a single-page application. The the two main views are the Map and Wheel. To switch between the two required a full page reload, but now it happens within the page so you can continue in your song, playlist or journey. Very nice.

The next thing is we converted the site to Typescript. We’ve been getting into Typescript in my day job. I must say it’s a big improvement over Javascript, and it feels like coming home to a real programming language. I’ve been getting into alot of functional programming in JS the last year two, and for the first time I really feel like Javascript is becoming a really cool language. I also made a whole new build and deploy pipeline in Node and Gulp. This has been on our todo list for a long time. It’s nice to be making everything more solid.

It’s funny, things have been following a similar trajectory with my day job. It was extremely chaotic in the time approaching our last major release at the end of the summer. Since then the focus has shifted towards getting things done in a more mature and organized way. We started migrating to Typescript in the fall, and we’ve finally moved to GIT as well, and the company is getting a bit more disciplined about sprint planning. This is all stuff I’ve been advocating for for a long time. So things are improving, although I’m still being told more often than I’d like that we don’t have the time to fix things properly. Ah well.