Forem: Nadia Odunayo

What I read in 2019

Nadia Odunayo — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 17:15:53 +0000

In 2017, I had set myself the challenge of reading 25 books.

I reached that goal with two days to spare.

For 2018, I wanted to push myself a bit more. 30 books.

Once again, I made it just in time.

In 2019, I was scared when I publicly announced that I wanted to read 35 books in the year.

And yet, somehow, I managed to read 57 books. Yes, 57.

I’m shocked too.

But, in some ways it makes a lot of sense since in 2019 I founded The StoryGraph — a new website for readers —and got immersed into the books community on Instagram.

I thought I’d have less time to read, but instead it became even more important for me to make reading a priority.

So, what were my highlights this year?

Fiction

Assassin’s Apprentice, by Robin Hobb

My number one fiction read of the year goes to this story about a prince’s illegitimate child who is adopted into the royal household and trained to be a court assassin.

The plot and the writing were amazing. The book was slow, but I was captivated. The world and the characters that Hobb creates were so rich and detailed, yet the reading of the book flowed so well.

I laughed, felt tense, was angered, frustrated, and sad from chapter to chapter.

I’m so excited that there are fifteen more books in this universe. I want to read them all in 2020 but also fear the day when I have no more new adventures in this world to read about.

Saga, Vol. 1, by Brian K. Vaughan (Writer) and Fiona Staples (Artist)

Yes, plot twist — my second favourite fiction read of the year takes the form of a graphic novel!

The first volume of this epic series introduces us to Alana and Marko, two soldiers from opposing sides of a galactic war, who fall in love and run away together. It’s not long before there are a bunch of different parties racing to track them down.

I don’t usually read graphic novels but I’d been hearing great things about this one from friends over the years. And they were all true!

I loved the unique cast of characters, the worlds created, and the artwork.

I raced through it in an afternoon.

Non-Fiction

Becoming, by Michelle Obama

I don’t know if I would have read this one already if it hadn’t been given to me as a gift for Christmas in 2018.

I knew people had been raving about this one, but I was blown away by what a magical reading experience this was.

I related to so many things that Michelle spoke about and that touched and inspired me.

I’m also a sucker for behind-the-scenes details at places like the White House, and I love Barack, so reading about their love story was wonderful too.

Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker

I think this is a book everyone should read.

Yes, it’s slow and dense at times, but overall very readable. I spent the book in a state of fear mixed with fascination.

Walker touches on how our sleep has developed, different stages of sleep, the affects of caffeine and alcohol, sleep across a human’s lifetime, sleep’s link to Alzheimer, cancer, and other diseases, and a lot more.

I’ve been made aware that the book likely contains factual inaccuracies or overblown claims but I’m not yet convinced that Walker’s book will cause overall harm.

I think that the more people that read this book, the more of us that will try and eek out an extra 30–60 minutes in bed, leading to happier and healthier people that are a lot more productive and pleasant to be around.

Here are the other 53 books I read this year, grouped by similar ratings:

5 stars — amazing, brilliant, all-time fave

99 Bottles of OOP, Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen — this will only be interesting to you if happen to be a Ruby software developer. If you are: read this book! If not, there’s plenty of excellent recommendations below.

4.5 stars — little niggles prevented it from being a 5-star read

Beartown, Fredrik Backman — beautiful, dark, and deep.

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi — incredible scope for such a slim novel.

Confessions, Kanae Minato—disturbing and twisted.

‘Salem’s Lot, Stephen King—I started reading Stephen King’s work chronologically this year!

The Shining, Stephen King

Shoe Dog, Phil Knight

A Ladder to the Sky, John Boyne—compulsive reading!

Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi—such good fun. Looking forward to the sequel.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee—I started rereading books this year and began by revisiting old faves from my high school days.

The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro—Finally read some Ishiguro. I was surprised by how much this moved me and made me laugh.

The Everything Store, Brad Stone—Yo, Amazon is scary.

4.25 stars

Carrie, Stephen King

The Crucible, Arthur Miller— a play!

The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood—reread this in preparation for The Testaments and wasn’t blown away as much as I thought I’d be.

4 stars — really enjoyed it

Tokyo Ueno Station, Yu Miri

The Travelling Cat Chronicles, Hiro Arikawa

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, J.K. Rowling

The Flatshare, Beth O’Leary—I dipped into Contemporary Romance for the first time and loved it. Will be trying out some more this year.

Saga, Vol 2, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Perfume, Patrick Süskind

One of Us Is Lying, Karen M. Mcmanus

Normal People, Sally Rooney

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh—surprised by how much I loved this one given the subject matter

My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite

Daisy Jones and the Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid—the format ended up really working for me and I got sucked in. I can’t believe the band isn’t real!

Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

Before The Coffee Gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Secrets of Sand Hill Road:Venture Capital and How to Get It, Scott Kupor

Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston

3.75 stars

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Taylor Jenkins Reid

The Hero of Ages, Brandon Sanderson

Queenie, Candice Carty-Williams—I grew to really enjoy this but it took me a while to get into it.

Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata

Commonwealth, Ann Patchett

Catch-22, Joseph Heller—a reread. I struggled with this a lot more than I thought I would. But there’s a lot of genius humour in it.

3.5 stars

This is Marketing, Seth Godin

The Unhoneymooners, Christina Lauren

Sex Criminals, Vol. 1: One Weird Trick, Chip Zdarsky and Matt Fraction—another graphic novel!

Never Mind, Edward St. Aubyn

Bad News, Edward St. Aubyn

3 stars — a good, solid read, but not a fave/won’t be rushing to recommend it

The Wych Elm, Tana French

The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu—so gutted I didn’t love this. I’ve heard so many good things. I might try again some time.

One True Loves, Taylor Jenkins Reid

Maybe In Another Life, Taylor Jenkins Reid

Exit Strategy, Martha Wells

Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, Ryan Holiday

When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi

The Lessons of History, Will Durant and Ariel Durant—too dense for me!

The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know, Mike Shatazkin and Robert Paris Riger

2.75

Rage, by Stephen King

Not rated

How to Vegan Keto, by Tay Sweat — don’t ask. Well, you can if you want. I’m always experimenting with how I eat!

Which of these have you read? What did you think? Have you picked up any new recommendations that you’re excited to try this year? Let me know!

Also, I hesitated over whether I should do this…but I’m doing it.

2020: 60 books.

Eek!

What I read in 2018

Nadia Odunayo — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 21:38:05 +0000

Last year, I set myself the challenge of reading 30 books in 2018.

On December 27th, I succeeded!

This year featured many ‘pretty good’ reads, but I was disappointed, particularly on the fiction side of things, not to have more to rave about. Having said that, there’s plenty of good stuff in here and who knows? Your next favourite read might be waiting for you below.

Here are my highlights:

Fiction

The Alienist, by Caleb Carr

This was the only fiction book of the year that got a 5 star Goodreads rating from me. It was a captivating thriller about the introduction of psychology as a tool to help solve criminal cases.

Set in 1896, we follow newspaper reporter, John Schuyler Moore, as he works with his friend and psychologist, Dr. Laszlo Kreisler, to catch a serial killer loose in New York. However, the pair don’t go about this conventionally. They focus on building up a psychological profile of the murderer, hoping it will help them to figure out where they will strike next.

I felt like I was there, living through America’s Gilded Age, chilled to the bone, but unable to stop turning the pages. I love that there was a lot of historical detail that didn’t slow down the story. This is definitely one for murder mystery fans, and will leave you reflecting on the age-old question of: nature versus nurture?

Lethal White, by Robert Galbraith

This is the fourth book in Robert Galbraith’s (aka J. K. Rowling) Cormoran Strike series — and it was a fantastic instalment.

The story, set in London in 2012, follows detective Strike, and his partner, Robin Ellacott, as they try and figure out what is going on after a distressed, mentally ill, young man comes into their office imploring them to investigate a crime he believed he witnessed as a child.

How awkward of me to include a book in the middle of a series in my highlights, right? Well, this book was so enjoyable that I encourage you to go and read The Cuckoo’s Calling (the first book in the series, which is also great), get through The Silkworm (wasn’t a big fan, didn’t like any of the characters) and Career of Evil(much better, but a rather messy plot), and then you can get the most out of the Lethal White reading experience.

In The First Circle, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I decided to pick this book up after the host of the EconTalk podcast, Russ Roberts, enthusiastically recommended it on his show and said he’d do a couple of special ‘book club’ episodes about it.

There was one other thing that intrigued me — the book was over 700 pages, spanned just 3 days, and yet, apparently, wasn’t slow-paced at all. Oh, really?

Turns out Russ was right! I was blown away by how fast-paced the book seemed, given its depth. The character work was incredible and I learnt so much about the Soviet regime in the 1940s.

This book is not your light bedtime reading though, that’s for sure. I did get a little lost in some of the back and forth dialogue and philosophical debates. Also, keeping track of the characters, especially during the first half of the book, was difficult. I read the book with a pencil in tow (opted not to read it on my Kindle after Russ recommended against it), annotating the ‘Cast of Characters’ list with page numbers of first appearances and defining plot points to help jog my memory of who was who.

Overall, this book was fascinating, moving, and, at times, very funny. If you’re interested in this part of history and getting real insight into what life in a special Soviet Russian prison was like, both for those inside and their relations outside, then this is an essential read. Solzhenitsyn based the story and characters on his real life experiences, making the detail, dialogue, and character development incredibly rich.

If you do pick up this book, make sure you are indeed reading “In the First Circle” and not “The First Circle”. The latter was published with nine chapters removed and different plot points and characters so as to get past Soviet Russia censorship in the 1960s. The version that I read was how Solzhenitsyn intended for the story to be.

(Want to enhance your reading experience of this book? First listen to Kevin McKenna, a Russian Literature professor, and Russ Roberts discuss Solzhnitzyn and the Soviet Union, then read the book, before listening to the same two men discuss the characters, plot, and themes of the book.)

Non-fiction

Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou

This was the juiciest read of 2018 for me. I couldn’t put this book down. If this were fiction, I’d have been disappointed in the novel, saying that the plot was far-fetched and the characters were not believable.

Turns out everything that happened in this book was true.

Bad Blood is the behind-the-scenes story of the rapid rise and shocking fall of Theranos, a multibillion-dollar blood testing startup. I remember seeing the founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, on the cover of magazines and thinking: wow, she’s amazing. Can I be like her? Turns out I definitely definitely do not want to be anything like her. Her whole company was built on huge lies, fear, and intimidation.

For all you (strange) people out there who don’t like fiction but love a good story, this is definitely one for you! It’s also a great read for people who love all things to do with tech, startups, or Silicon Valley culture.

To Pixar and Beyond, by Lawrence Levy

This book was a joy to read. A beautiful and inspiring story about how the author worked with Steve Jobs to turn Pixar, a struggling company, into the successful creative giant that we all know today.

What I love is that there were so many practical business lessons, particularly around strategy, partnerships, and leading teams, and Levy did a wonderful job of giving a step-by-step account of what he did while still delivering a compelling narrative.

Here are the rest of the books I read this year, in rough order of enjoyment/recommendation:

Fiction

The Final Empire (Mistborn Book 1), Brandon Sanderson I’ve always wanted to read Sanderson so I’m glad I finally got around to it. The first book was great fun, the second good, though a bit tedious, and I’m looking forward to finishing the trilogy early this year.
The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels Book 2), Elena Ferrante For me, way more engrossing than the first in the series. Looking forward to book 3!
My Name Is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout
Anything Is Possible, Elizabeth Strout
Winter, Ali Smith
Daytripper, Fábio Moon A beautiful, moving graphic novel following the protagonist in different important periods of his life, with each chapter ending with his death.
The Well of Ascension (Mistborn Book 2), Brandon Sanderson
Sourdough, Robin Sloan
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco I’m so gutted I didn’t love this book. I’ve heard so many amazing things about it and I was so excited to finally sit down with it. A part of me suspects I just wasn’t in the right headspace for it. Or maybe Umberto Eco is not for me?
Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries Book 3), Martha Wells A fun, sci-fi, short series told from the point of view of a robot trained to kill, who hacks its own system and regains control of itself. I’m enjoying the books more and more as I work my way through the series.
Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries Book 2), Martha Wells
All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries Book 1), Martha Wells
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
Milk and Honey, Rupi Kaur
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

Non-fiction

The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero This book was laugh-out-loud funny for me at times. For maximum reading pleasure, I recommend reading about and then watching arguably the worst film of all time ‘The Room’ beforehand.
The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis A moving and informative story about the friendship of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and their work on rationality and decision making.
Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis An account of the crazy life inside Solomon Brothers and the rise of the mortgage bond market in the 1980s.
Deep Work , Cal Newport
Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice, Anthony W. Ulwick If you do any form of product development or management, then this is an useful theory to be aware of and to consider implementing.
The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking
Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Traction, Gabriel Weinberg
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Andy Hunt
UX Design for Growth, Molly Norris Walker

So there we have it!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? Have I inspired you to pick up something new this year? Any questions about books I didn’t say much about? Drop me a message on Twitter.

Oh, and we’re upping the ante again in 2019: 35 books.

Let’s go!

The Day That Git Saved My Life

Nadia Odunayo — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 09:26:39 +0000

Okay, so it didn’t save my life. But it saved me hours of time and prevented me from experiencing incredible amounts of frustration.

I had been working on a big, new feature, a tricky problem. After a few hours of solidly working away, I was done. I ran git status and sat back and looked proudly at the list of red that detailed the ten or so files that I had either modified or created.

I meticulously reviewed and added all of my changes. Then I committed my changes with a simple, descriptive message. I was ready to git push:

And then I realised I’d made a mistake. I was working on master.

You see, I hadn’t been working on one of my own codebases. I had been working on something for a friend and I wanted them to review all of the changes before I made them part of the official website. I decided that I should instead commit all of my work onto a branch and open a pull request.

Now, the safest thing to do — and believe me, I had this idea, so it’s beyond me why I decided not to do it — would have been to cherry pick the commit onto a new branch and then reset master to its origin. However, for some strange reason, I backed my Git prowess and decided to, from memory, do something different in order to revert the codebase to its pre-commit stage.

Let’s relive the disaster together

Here is a re-enactment. We’ll pick up from the moment I realised I’d made a mistake:

The commit at the top is the one I needed to move.

The first thing I did was type in git reset — soft HEAD^ so that the last commit would disappear but I’d still have all of my work staged. git status revealed this:

And git log showed me this:

Great! I had my work, but the “New, big feature…” commit was gone from master.

Then, I checked out a new branch called new-big-feature and ran git status:

At this point, I thought to myself: “The new-big-feature branch is looking good. Before committing these changes, let me tidy up the master branch.”

(Why, Nadia, why?!)

So, I checked out the master branch again and ran git reset --hard origin/master.

git status showed me:

Back to the new-big-feature branch.

Now, I expected to see this when I ran git status:

Instead, I saw this:

What the fuck?!

No, this couldn’t be!

I started to shake. My heart was pounding. I didn’t have time to do all of this work again. How could I have been so careless?

I typed in git status a million more times, each time saying that this must all be some mistake, git status was only erroring and all of my work would be there and everything would be just fine.

After five or so minutes of frantically typing on my keyboard and freaking out, I stopped and put my head in my hands, wondering what to do, and starting to psyche myself up for starting the work all over again.

Git is so powerful, most people only skim the surface

Suddenly, I remembered somebody saying that to me. I also had a vague recollection of someone saying:

“It keeps a log of every single Git command that you type in and you can check out to different stages of your local repository.”

“Well, Git,” I thought to myself, “let’s see just how powerful you are.”

I went to Google and typed in: “recover unpushed lost commit” and that’s when I found out about the wonderful git reflog:

Reference logs, or “reflogs”, record when the tips of branches and other references were updated in the local repository. Reflogs are useful in various Git commands, to specify the old value of a reference. For example, HEAD@{2} means “where HEAD used to be two moves ago”, master@{one.week.ago}means “where master used to point to one week ago in this local repository”, and so on.

Hopeful, I went back to my terminal, and typed in git reflog:

The last line looked interesting. It appeared to reflect the point in my local repository after I’d made the commit and before I did the deadly reset.

I took a big, deep breath, crossed my fingers, and then typed in git reset --hard HEAD@{6}.

Hallelujah!

git status revealed this:

And git log gave me this:

The commit had reappeared. My work was restored. I was back in business.

I switched back to my new-big-feature branch, cherry-picked the 2d6e22b commit, and then reset master.

Phew.

Git has your back

I hope you’re never in that situation — accidentally losing commits and panicking about hours of lost work. Committing little and often and pushing regularly will save you from scenarios like the one described above. However, I hope that my tale has given you confidence to press forward and try out things that you’re not sure will work, like complicated rebases and merges, when you’re deep in the weeds of Git and unsure how to get yourself out. After all, you now know it’s nigh on impossible for you to lose any work that’s been committed, even if it has never been pushed.

I also hope that this tale has made you curious to discover more of Git’s surface area. This experience, combined with my discovery of the --intent-to-addoption the other week, has made my keen to find out just what else Git can do for me.

Here’s something I’ve already learnt — with Git, you can even recover work that you have never committed!

But that’s a blog post for another time.

So you want to speak at tech conferences but you have nothing to talk about…

Nadia Odunayo — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 07:53:47 +0000

I bet that’s not true.

I used to think that, especially during my first year of being a software developer. I wanted to speak at tech conferences. I’d done presentations and debating at school and university, so I thought I’d be good at it. But what did I, a junior developer, have to say about tech that was interesting?

So, I stuck to running the weekly Lunch & Learn events at Pivotal, where I then worked.

One day, a colleague was organising a talks night at the monthly London Cloud Foundry (Pivotal’s Platform-as-a-Service) user group. The talks would be 10 minutes long. He said to me, “You’re always organising events here, but never speaking at them. Speak at this one.” I panicked. I couldn’t think of a decent enough reason for saying ‘no’. Besides, a 10 minute talk wasn’t that long. It would be an accessible length to ease myself into the world of speaking at tech conferences! And before I knew it, I found myself saying ‘yes’.

Turns out that it doesn’t matter what the length of the talk is. If you don’t have an idea that you’re confident in, filling even 2 minutes can be a serious endeavour. As soon as I agreed to take part, I started thinking about what I was going to speak about. I spent weeks mulling over this, but I could only think of two things: 1) my experiences as a junior developer, and 2) the pain of slow feedback cycles — at the time, the test suite on my team lasted for over an hour.

I wasn’t excited by either of these options. For the first option, I’d seen a lot of talks by junior developers about what it was like being new in the industry and I didn’t want to choose what seemed, to me, to be the easy, obvious option. I wanted to demonstrate to an audience of more senior developers that they could learn something new from those coming into the industry, beyond just a better understanding of what our experience and perspective was like.

For the second option, I didn’t think I had anything new or insightful to say about why slow feedback cycles were painful. One of my worst fears when giving a talk is for the audience to sit there and think: Duh — this is obvious. Why have you wasted my time?

At this point, not being able to move beyond these two ideas by myself, I almost pulled out.

But then I realised I had all of these smart people around me at Pivotal, so I figured one of them would give me my grand idea. I started to ask my colleagues for ideas and got two general responses:

“Talk about the fact that you’re junior and what it’s like.”

Well, I’d already decided I didn’t want to do that. The fact that it was a very popular suggestion confirmed my belief that it was the easy and obvious choice for me.

“What’s something that’s currently frustrating you at work? Talk about that.”

So I was back with the slow feedback cycles. And I’d already decided I didn’t want to talk about that either.

It was at this point, two weeks away from the talks night, that a cold panic set in.

It was true. I had nothing to talk about.

Have you heard the story about the two university students…

…and their final Chemistry exam?

They had received A’s all term. But on the night before the final exam, they went partying in another town and didn’t get back to school until the exam was over. They had to think of a legitimate excuse. They thought about what to say before finally going to their professor and saying: “we’re really sorry, we went to visit some friends the evening before and would have made it back in time, except for the fact that we had a flat tyre. Can we please sit a make-up test?”

To their surprise, the professor agreed. She wrote out another test for them to take the following day and, when the time came for them to sit it, she sent them to separate rooms.

They each sat down and turned the page to the first question. It was worth 5% and very easy. They answered it quickly and turned the page to the second question:

Which tyre was it? (95%)

Stories like that got me into Game Theory.

I studied Economics at university. Game Theory stood out because you could take entertaining stories from everyday life and attach a model of strategic interaction to them. These models could provide an explanation for why things happened as they did, help you to think about likely outcomes based on the behaviour of others, or guide you in deciding which actions you should take.

Take the students in the story above. They now find themselves in what’s called a coordination game — one where the players do best when they choose the same strategy. If they land on the same tyre, the professor will give them the benefit of the doubt that they were telling the truth and they’ll pass their end-of-year Chemistry exam with flying colours. However, if they put down different answers then the professor will know they were lying — and so they’ll fail the exam.

The students are in separate rooms at this point. There is no way they can communicate. They have to think — what is the other person likely to put and why? Maybe one of the students, student A, knows which tyre is more statistically likely to go flat in their country — but that answer is no good if they don’t have confidence that student B also knows that information and knows that student A knows it too.

Coordination is just one flavour of game. One type that I found particularly interesting were bargaining games. In its simplest form, a bargaining game looks at how two people will share an amount of something, usually money.

Why did I like bargaining games so much? A lot of our day-to-day interactions revolve around a negotiation of some form, whether you’re trying to get a raise at work or go to your favourite restaurant when deciding where to eat with a group of friends. I liked that Bargaining Theory explored how the stuff in question should be shared, based on the specific criteria that you want to optimise for, as well as how the stuff will end up being shared, based on the current circumstances of the game and the information held by the people involved.

So back to how I had nothing to talk about.

There was one thing I did know — I wanted my talk to be engaging. That’s what I wanted to optimise for. I thought the best way to do that would be to talk about something that most people in the room wouldn’t know a lot about.

I also didn’t have much time left at this point. I’d spent weeks stressing about how I didn’t have anything to talk about so in order to put something together pronto, I needed something that I knew a lot about.

That’s when it hit me.

Something the audience doesn’t know a lot about +

Something I know a lot about =

Game Theory.

I was making an assumption about what the audience would know, but I figured that it was unlikely that the majority of people in the audience would have an Economics degree and so would have been unlikely to have studied Game Theory to the depth that I had.

So, I settled on Game Theory. Then I thought: Game Theory is so broad — is there any way I can link it to Cloud Foundry and PaaS? — which is what I was working on at the time. So I searched for game theory and cloud computing and stumbled across some academic papers. Turns out a few Economists had been looking at the most efficient way to allocate resources in distributed systems, i.e. systems where many computers have to work together to do some work.

The papers were dense. I realised that I could take my learnings of Bargaining Theory and construct a fun story of computers as game players, characters, who had to work together to complete tasks efficiently for the users of the cloud platform.

And thus my “Playing Games In the Cloud” talk was born.

The 10 minute lighting talk was enjoyed by everyone (I think) and caught the attention of some people who pushed me into developing it into a longer 30 minute talk. I eventually first gave this at RailsConf in 2015.

I went from thinking I didn’t have anything to talk about to getting accepted to speak at the biggest Rails conference — on a topic that had nothing to do with Rails, mind — within a matter of months.

So back to how you have nothing to talk about.

I bet you do.

Sometimes people tell you: think about something at work that’s frustrating you.

For my first talk, that didn’t work for me. I couldn’t find anything inspiring or exciting enough that I wanted to work at — remember, crafting an excellent conference talk takes a lot of time.

And so, if finding a pain point isn’t working for you, try this:

What’s something that you know a lot about that a room full of developers in your field will likely not know about?

It can be anything. Trust me.

Even after writing the Game Theory talk, I spent a lot of time telling myself: but nobody cares. Why do you think anyone will care? Half the room will probably leave when they realise this has nothing to do with Rails.

Some of the best talks I’ve seen over the years have nothing to do with day-to-day software at all. They don’t even tie back to computers or tech the way that I did in my Game Theory talk. These sorts of talks can often be gifts to us, as they force us to think about things and draw parallels in ways we wouldn’t have done in our tech bubbles. Our career is in problem solving — the best problem solvers have an arsenal of symbols and metaphors at their fingertips ready to help them analyse that tricky problem from a different perspective.

Give conference-goers something completely novel to add to their toolkit.

—

If you want to throw ideas around, tweet me @nodunayo. Also, if you’ve never written a conference proposal before, check out speakerline.io for examples of ones that have been accepted or rejected at various conferences.

If you’re interested in watching “Playing Games In The Clouds”, check out the 20 minute version I gave at Brighton Ruby.

Podcasting for Newbies for £20 a Month Or Less

Nadia Odunayo — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 06:56:40 +0000

I used to host and produce the Ruby Book Club podcast with Saron Yitbarek. Each week, we read one hour of a Ruby book and discussed what we had learnt.

Since starting the show I have had similar questions from a lot of people:

I have a great idea for a show. What do I need to buy? What software do I need? Is it all very expensive?

Well, it can be expensive. But it doesn’t have to be.

I want to share the details around the equipment and software that I used (Saron had different, more expensive tools in some cases, but then again, podcasting is her business) in a bid to show you one way to produce a decent-sounding show that won’t break the bank.

Microphone — £128

The first step to increasing the quality of your audio is to get a microphone. This will likely be the biggest capital investment as you start your new podcasting project. Getting one is essential.

Why can’t you just speak into your laptop’s built-in mic or into the ones that come with your headphones? They’re not optimised for best capturing your voice and digitising it for media where audio quality is the main focus. They’re there for basic communication, so any recording of your voice will be of low quality and will come accompanied with a lot of surrounding noise. Dedicated microphones are there to focus on getting your voice to sound as clear and rich as possible via a recording. Remember — it doesn’t matter how amazing your content is: if the quality of your audio isn’t good enough, people will not stick around.

Starting out, you probably want a microphone that’s ‘plug-and-play’, i.e. there isn’t much of a learning curve getting started using the thing. For this, I would recommend USB microphones that you can plug directly into your computer. These mics are relatively inexpensive, yet still provide a huge upgrade to computer or headphone built-in mics. There’s a wide range of them available on Amazon.

Over the years, I’d heard great things about the Audio-Technica brand — mainly that the reliability and quality you get is amazing in relation to the price point. Because of this, I eventually decided to purchase the Audio-Technica AT2020USB PLUS USB Microphone.

I’ve been using it for over three years now and have only had one issue with it — I dismantled and screwed together my mic and its stand pretty regularly since I carried it between an office and my home. It wasn’t long before the grooves at the bottom of the mic wore off. I had to buy insulation tape to securely fit the mic into the stand again. Beyond that, audio quality on the mic has always given me what I needed.

Recording software — Free

Once you’ve got your microphone, you’ll need a way to record your content and conduct the actual interview.

For recording, Saron and I used Quicktime, which came pre-installed on our Mac computers. It’s also available via free download. That way, we could each record our own streams of audio separately and locally, giving us a high quality recording.

To have the conversation featured in each episode, we used a tool called Mumble. It’s open source software, primarily aimed at gamers, that enables two people to speak via one server. It has pretty granular audio controls which can come in handy to get the best sound quality based on your internet speed and quality. However, it does require a decent bit of setup, so it may not be the best thing if you’re just starting out and don’t have somebody around who knows what they’re doing and which settings would be ideal.

Something you’ll want to think about is backups in case your primary recording source fails in any way. It can be something as simple as one person forgetting to hit the button to start recording! Since Mumble also lets you record each stream of audio separately, it worked very well for backup recordings.

For an alternative to something like Mumble, I’m seeing Zencastr grow in popularity. Their sell is that you can easily get high quality audio since the app records each person locally using an extremely reliable connection that doesn’t rely on the users’ Internet. In that way, it does the job of the local Quicktime recordings, but you can also hear one another through the website. This means you can host the interview or conversation there as well. Guests can easily jump into a recording via a link they’re sent via an email, and the host receives a track for each guest once the recording session is over. I’ve used Zencastr as a guest and found the process straightforward. I recommend evaluating it alongside your recording options when getting started — the people who I know who use it generally only have very good things to say. The only downside is that because it’s relatively new on the market, there have been cases when it has lost an audio file or didn’t save the whole interview. However, it’s getting better and more reliable over time.

Editing software — Free

Even with a good quality mic, you’ll still want to clean up your audio, especially if you’ve got at least two people on the recording.

For the Ruby Book Club, each week we’d have two separate audio files. At the most basic level of editing, the tasks that need to happen are as follows:

Reduce background noise from each track
Sync up the audio files so people are speaking in time with one another
Silence the track of the person not talking at any time
Level the volume across all of the tracks
Cut out any mistakes or do-overs made by guests.

To do these basic tasks, I used Audacity. It’s free and open source. It doesn’t look like much, but it enables me to do the tasks listed above and there’s enough documentation around for when I came across new things that I needed to do; for example, fixing occurrences of clipping.

Website Domain registration — £12 (annual)

You might opt for a custom domain if you want your listeners to regularly check out a website attached to the podcast. You can use any registrar for this. I love DNSimple for its user-friendly, intuitive interface, especially when it comes to configuring DNS records.

£12 seems to be the average price for a ‘.com’ domain registration.

Squarespace — £108 (annual)

You’ll need a place to store your podcast episodes and Squarespace makes hosting a podcast easy. It provides a built-in RSS feed — the tool via which people can access your content via different platforms, including Apple Podcasts — and you can manage episodes and serve a public-facing website for your listeners all in one place.

The price you see above is the annual Personal plan with a 10% discount applied. I’m assuming you’ve got a promo code tucked away from one of the podcasts you listen to? If not, you can google around and find one easily.

There’s one main downside to Squarespace — you don’t have direct access to the RSS feed. If your podcast is just a fun side hobby, this probably isn’t important. However, if you think you might want to do something a bit more custom and have more control over how your RSS feed works and is structured, you’ll likely find Squarespace limiting.

Costs

Purchasing all of the above in one go will set you back £128 + £108 + 12 = £248.

If you run your podcast for a year, that equates to £248/12 = £20.67 a month.

Not bad.

Assumptions:

Ownership of a decent computer and headphones. Ideally, you want headphones optimised for accurate reproduction of recorded audio — not for listening to your favourite music tracks, where certain types of sounds are enhanced.You also want them to be comfortable, since you’ll be wearing them throughout the recording and editing process. Luckily for me, I already owned a pair of the wonderful Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO Studio Headphones. Again, though, if this podcast is a hobby, don’t worry about investing in new headphones if the ones you use day-to-day sound clear enough when you listen to music or are on the phone.
Annual payment for Squarespace. If you pay monthly, it’s a few pounds more each month.
Single host. Having a co-host helps financially. Apart from the mic, all of the above costs were split with Saron. Thinking of more hosts to save money? Keep in mind that there’s a tradeoff between a reduction in costs and the increase in complexity regarding organisation, logistics, and editing.

Other things to consider:

If you want to be fancy, go ahead and purchase some music for your opening and closing. This is an effective way to level up in the polished-ness of your show. We eventually got theme music from Premium Beat and it set us back £40 for a perpetual license.
Since things like the microphone and music are one-off capital investments — effective monthly running costs will decrease the longer you produce your show.
Want to take your audio quality to the next level? Check out this ingenious hack from my business partner, @saronyitbarek.

If you have any questions about what I’ve said here or alternatives you’re thinking of using, you can find me @nodunayo on Twitter.

Tell Git Your Intentions

Nadia Odunayo — Mon, 28 May 2018 19:49:12 +0000

What’s your Git workflow?

I’ll show you what mine was for almost 5 years, and then a few weeks ago, it all changed.

To keep things simple, let’s assume I’ve got some unstaged changes in my repo and all of the changes are good to go for my next commit. I always start with git add -p to review all changes one small chunk at a time:

Old Git workflow — new files made things ‘complicated’

Take a look at my flow when there’s just one new file involved. Did you notice how things get a lot more awkward? I also lose the benefits of partially adding changes with new files — I’m left with scanning over all of the changes after I’ve added them. The flowchart above assumes the happy path. Often, I’ll want to only commit some things and not others, so I have to go back and check out some of the added changes.

A few weeks ago, I was reviewing a cached diff after adding some new files, and I realised that I’d paginated through the changes without carefully reading them. I was disappointed in myself for letting the ball slip and frustrated with the workflow. This wasn’t the first time I’d caught myself doing that.

People often talk about how powerful Git is. Given that, this workflow seemed unnecessarily awkward. There must be a better way. So, after 5 years of using that same workflow, I decided to turn to Google to look for that better way. I typed in “partially adding new files git”, and that’s when I discovered my new best friend:

-N, — intent-to-add Record only the fact that the path will be added later. An entry for the path is placed in the index with no content. This is useful for, among other things, showing the unstaged content of such files with git diff and committing them with git commit -a.

This means that if I had a new file ready to be committed, I could type in git add -N and then do git add -p against that file.

So, here’s what my new Git workflow looks like:

A streamlined new Git workflow

Isn’t that much better?

With the --intent-to-add option, all of my files are now subject to VIP (that’s Very Important Partial add) treatment, meaning fewer errors and better crafted commits.

What do you think? Had you heard of the ‘intent-to-add’ option before?

If you’re looking at my workflow and thinking of a new way to step it up even more, then please get in touch with me. I’m @nodunayo on Twitter.

What I read in 2017

Nadia Odunayo — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 14:53:47 +0000

In 2016, I read 13 books and was feeling pretty pleased with myself. But then a friend, Matt Clifford, published a blog post entitled ‘What I read in 2016’.

In the first paragraph he states that he read 47 books in the year. 47??!

This man runs an international startup accelerator, spends a vast amount of time staying on top of current affairs, and is married, among other things.

And here I am with my 13 books. I just sat there thinking: “oh, hell no!”.

So, for 2017 I raised the stakes.

25 books. Hey, it’s a start.

And on December 29th (cutting it close!) I reached my goal.

Here are my highlights of the year:

Fiction

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

This book was great fun. It’s 2044 and the world is stricken with social and economic problems due to a global energy crisis. People spend hours escaping in a virtual reality game.

The story starts with the death of the game’s founder who, in his will, leaves instructions to the world that kicks off a treasure hunt within the game. The winner of the hunt will inherit all of his fortune.

And so we follow the protagonist, Wade Watts, on his journey to be the first to solve the clues and claim the prize. The story is engaging and keeps up a good pace. Furthermore, the book is seeped in 1980’s pop culture references, so if that’s your thing then you’ll definitely geek out over this one.

The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch

This is the first book (of a proposed seven) in the ‘Gentleman Bastard Sequence’ fantasy series. However, this is far from your typical fantasy novel.

The story is about an inventive, enterprising band of thieves, focusing on their leader, Locke Lamora. We follow the stories of their training as they grow up, as well as their current day-to-day cons. However, things start to go wrong when a new, mysterious character threatens the normal order of things.

Again, this book is great fun. I remember laughing out loud in the airport during the opening chapter.

But maybe that’s just me being too keen.

Probably just me.

Still, the characters are excellent. You fall in love with them and Lynch has a real skill at writing dialogue. The conversations come alive and keep you engrossed. On top of that, the plot is well thought-out and the story never stalls.

If you do give this book a go and like what you read, then check out books two and three as well. They’re not as good, but they are enjoyable.

4 3 2 1, by Paul Auster

What an epic masterpiece this was. Okay, it did end up being too long, but what 900-page book isn’t going to end up being too long?

However, if you are looking for something to commit to or you want to escape from real life for a long while, then choose the four alternative lives of Archie Ferguson as your vehicle.

The book opens with the story of how Archie’s grandfather ended up in America and takes us right up to Archie’s birth. Then things get even more interesting: the book is split into segments and each segment is further divided into four parts. Each part tracks one of the four Archies. Each Archie is characterised by different circumstances in his upbringing. It’s fascinating tracking how this impacts Archie’s outlook on the world, how he approaches relationships with other people, and what he decides to do with his life.

Auster’s writing is accessible and engaging. He knows how to keep up the suspense and just when to give you a little teaser into the future. As an added bonus, given the story is set in the 50s and 60s, there’s a lot of great American social and political history packed in there too.

Non-fiction

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt

As soon as I finished this book, I wanted to put a copy in everyone’s hands. This was a fascinating look at the evolution of moral psychology, particularly relevant and interesting now given how baffled a lot of people were with the results of the UK EU referendum and US presidential elections in 2016.

Haidt proposes some novel, compelling theories and analogies, suggesting that our moral sensibilities are most likened to a tongue with taste buds and that we really don’t have much control at all when it comes to what we ‘choose’ to believe.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari

I was blown away by Sapiens. I don’t know how Harari managed to cover such a vast timeline and breadth of topics, and still make it all hang together.

Focusing on three main revolutions — Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific — he talks about how we’ve got to where we are today as a species and where we might end up — and it’s looking pretty dark from where he’s sitting.

If you read any non-fiction in 2018, please let it include these two.

Here are the other 20 books I read, in rough order of enjoyment/recommendation:

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — Agatha Christie (Love me my Agatha Christie.)
The Power — Naomi Alderman
Autumn — Ali Smith
The Vegetarian — Han Kang
A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire Book 5) — George R. R. Martin
The Republic of Thieves (Gentleman Bastard Sequence Book 3) — Scott Lynch
Red Seas Under Red Skies (Gentleman Bastard Sequence Book 2) — Scott Lynch
The Giver — Lois Lowry
Enduring Love — Ian McEwan
Turn The Ship Around! — L. David Marquet (Non-fiction)
The Complete Guide to Fasting — Jason Fung, Jimmy Moore (Non-fiction) (Yes, fasting. AMA.)
A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire Book 4) — George R. R. Martin
Warm Bodies — Isaac Marion
American Gods — Neil Gaiman
The Memory Artist — Katherine Brabon
The Sellout — Paul Beatty
Eats, Shoots & Leaves — Lynne Truss (Non-fiction)
The Phoenix Project — Gene Kim, Kevin Behr (Non-fiction)
The Checklist Manifesto — Atul Gawande (Non-fiction)
How To Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays — Umberto Eco (Non-fiction) (I’d say not to bother with this one.)

Upping the ante yet again for 2018. 30 books.