a glob of nerdishness

My name is Nathan and I have ADD.

I know it’s vogue to glorify our overloaded lives and our craving for instant happiness with a generic “Whee, I’m so ADD!” It’s a fair enough analogy, but that’s not what I mean. There’s also a tendency to romanticize the effects of real ADHD. My disorder has its moments, but contributed greatly to my depression through college and my frustration at work since:

• ADHD is killing precious time because what I need to be doing is boring.
• ADHD is wasting extra time because what I am doing is too exciting to just finish.
• ADHD is rambling on and on instead of listening to others.
• ADHD is buying into lust for possessions that shouldn’t own me.
• ADHD is brainstorming a thousand ideas when I should be sleeping.
• ADHD is chasing an emotional high with no regard to its consequences.
• ADHD is staying consumed by unfinished projects while my family yearns for my missing attention.

ADHD is trying to overcome all that, while being undermined by all that, while the past grows ever larger and the future arrives ever faster. After trying “on my own” for way too long, I read Reaching for a New Potential. It’s a well-written book about adult ADHD, and convinced me of its thesis: “It is the combination of treating the disability specifically and strengthening the non-disabled parts generally that helps us succeed.”

By “treating the disability specifically”, the author means: medication. As a kid, I took ritalin every school day. I was still hyper, but could channel my creativity and close my mouth often enough to make most teachers proud. After 8th grade I stopped taking the pills; my high school provided enough challenge, emotion and structure to compensate. I began to look at medication as something like cheating. You know, the New Yorker published this article about how stimulants are being exploited as study drugs, neuroenhancers used to get ahead in the rat race.

The fact is, ritalin and a few of the other medication options are stimulants. They can be used like caffeine, they can be abused like cocaine. But decades of proper prescription have shown that ritalin can provide an additional, special effect against ADHD. I’ve come to accept that — along with needing glasses to see clearly, and lactase supplements to digest dairy products — I need pills to respond properly to extrinsic motivation.

And if a meandering fifteen page exposé of “study drugs” implies that pills make my accomplishments phony? Well, Easter weekend tells just how God swallowed up all my broken failures and phony triumphs and gave the final success to Jesus. If taking Ritalin is a constant reminder to claim his accomplishments and not my own, so be it.

I’ve been thinking about the last two years’ investment on a number of levels. Regarding the platform I chose, I’ve been struggling to find the right words for several months. I came across them today, at the end of a dead-on post by Alex Payne:

Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own.

I’m most energetic while inventing a self-contained tool to improve some aspect of life. Writing native software for OS X was a dream come true. I hope the Mac’s open platform has many good years left, but it’s time I learn to enjoy building native software for Chrome OS as well.

It’s been a busy week!

The biggest event was announcing the departure of my friend and Calf Trail co-founder Hjon from the company. It’s been in the works for a while, but this week we officially transferred the iPhone half of our work over to Hjon’s new LLC: Pseudorandom Software. (If you use FogBugz, be sure to check out his great Inbugz app. Despite keeping busy with other jobs, he’s got some useful new features in the works.)

The other big announcement was Sesamouse, a free utility to send real gestures and touches from the Magic Mouse. Translation into dev-speak: Sesamouse gives legitimate applications access to the Magic Mouse’s otherwise-crippled multitouch hardware features. It contains the private/undocumented API gunk within its own process, interpreting gestures and sending the system its results. Applications that use the publicly supported NSEvent and NSTouch APIs then work with the Magic Mouse automatically. Accomplishing this involved many hours staring at hex dumps and learning to read assembly, with a helpful boost of UTSL. Quite a fun challenge!

In the midst of all this, I also made some great strides on another iPhoto-related app this week. It currently lacks the finishing touches, but my wife and I already have fun testing it. Plans call for a beta release next week.

I’m hoping to give Calf Trail’s lineup of Mac products a big boost during the early part of this year. That way, even if sales don’t pick up, I’ll have some good stuff sitting out there while I’m busy finding paid work. I’ve been thinking a lot about the last two years’ investments…but that’s a topic for another post.

It’s a gracious privilege to be reminded of the coming of our Savior one week before a new year begins. I needed a silent, holy night to shed a little light into my valley between decades.

Despite all that’s on my mind, I’m not ready to write. Even — no, especially — about past and future technological investment. I remain incredibly fortunate in many many ways, but there’s this malaise. Frustrated undertones host subtle lies. So in lieu of 2009 in review or resolutions for 2010, here’s a message from the sponsor here at a glob of nerdishness. DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL.

Not code monkey nor offshore,
I build software: Hear me roar!
Servers, browsers, small chips and multicore —
Cocoa's great but I shun The App Store.

My rates are low, I'll tell you why:
I live and learn and time sneaks by.
Give me freedom to explore;
you'll find that I deliver more.

I cannot work the nine to five
'cause I've got other things to keep alive.
But if by email the tasks arrive
I could help your project thrive.

It’s cheesy because it’s true. Contact support@calftrail.com if you’re in need of some custom programming work and think I might be good fit. *cue outro jingle*

Call this the second of a two part series. The first looked at the past, and now you get a glimpse of THE FUTURE!

Tobias Vander Wilt will be one month old this weekend, and d.v. will grow up faster than we can imagine.

It’s my hope that, whatever his occupation, he’ll have the freedom to wholeheartedly serve our creator, discovering — and sharing — innovative responses to what is broken in this world. And it’s my hope that even if doing so goes against powerful interests, he’ll still do right.

It’s been a little over a year since Calf Trail Software, LLC was formed, and a nearly a year and a half since I started working at it full time. I must have learned a lot in those months, even though it always seems I’ve barely scratched the surface of writing software and running a small business.

Mercatalog was my first project, and its biggest lesson was the cost of too much research. I spent a year working out solutions to dozens of problems, in the scope of just one release. Before I had barely begun to succeed, the application became largely unneeded.

From that experience, and from that code, another app was born. Geotagalog is already the easiest tracklog-based geotagging utility on the market, and will only get better through its next major version. Watching Geotagalog gradually gain fans has been teaching us patience and persistence.

…”us” being me and Calf Trail co-founder Jon Hjelle. (And my wife Hannah, who has been helping us with our artwork, and learning patience while we try to make something resembling a living off of this calling!) While I’ve been focusing on the desktop apps and the website, Hjon has been busy developing Resistulator, Cheap GPS and Inbugz, as well as keeping our store and servers running.

It’s been a good year in many ways, though we have yet to even recoup all of our initial expenses. We’ve learned enough to make some good products available, but are still learning how to let people know about them. Besides continuing to grow as programmers and marketers, it’s quite likely we will also offer our iPhone and Mac programming skills as contractors in the coming year.

So there’s a lot of excitement in just my job these days, but that’s not all. I hope to share details regarding another source of excitement and responsibility here soon!

I tend to let perfectionism get in the way of progress in my software development. This can happen on many levels:

• coding *too* carefully, not leaving any time to write tests or leave good notes
• delaying new code to overdo structure, even though refactoring is always inevitable (and usually fun!)
• overplanning an architecture, in ignorance of all the problems it will *actually* have to solve
• constantly trying to re-”decide” if a product is worthwhile, instead of seeing what users think
• worrying about mastery in a given domain, before even setting foot in it

This isn’t to say that I don’t try to do my best at all levels. It’s to say that time spent practicing — time spent making mistakes and learning from them — is rarely time wasted. Sometimes I catch myself spending as much time trying to make the best decision as it would take to actually try one good option or another. Other times I don’t catch myself!

Is perfect the enemy of better? Grace is someone willing to pay for my mistakes themselves. I see many of my weaknesses as a programmer and designer, I know there are more I don’t see, and I’m not proud of any of them. My pride ends up working against itself, though. There is just enough grace in the world for me to waste time not making mistakes when I should be making things better.

The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting colder; 2008 is almost over. The work at Calf Trail is progressing well, but there’s still a lot we’d like to get done before calling it a year. We’ve released two and a half alpha versions of Mercatalog, our Mac geotagging application, and are trying to get to beta as soon as possible. Letting other people finally try Mercatalog has been a great experience, though quite humbling. I feel like I’ve learned so much this year, and hope to eventually find time past this 100th post here to share more thoughts and more code!

Corporations don’t value my warm fuzzy feelings. Computers go bonkers. Code is hard to write well. Cars keep breaking down; colonies of mold keep forming on things once clean; creepy crawly critters keep coming through the walls; cats keep turning kibble into feral kittens; crooks keep on, who knows when they’ll be back.

Complicated issues don’t have concrete answers, or even easy questions. I keep letting myself settle into the sidelines — the world doesn’t spin the way I think it should, so I stand with my arms folded making cynical, sarcastic and even snide commentary on just how screwed up the entire shebang is.

I’ve been fighting fire with spoonfuls of rancid bacon grease.

Even in my best moods, I still believe that human pride trumps human progress, that people who set out to change the world end up content to just control it instead, that human history teaches history teaches humans little. So if success is simply continuing forward, why bother succeeding? Because failure is unpleasant? Because real men ship? Because my addled programmer brain has no other mode but to find the underlying patterns, implement the missing features, fix the major bugs, of THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE?

I’m not pressing on because I think I can fix the problem, clean up the mess, and squelch the fire. I’m pressing on because, yeah there are messes and I keep making more, yet the world is in good hands. I’ve been blessed despite my brokenness, and from what I’ve been given I hope to give a bit of cool water. And specifically, today’s next step: maybe some of that could affix a mess of pictures to something that resembles a map; I can’t fire myself just yet.

I flew to rural Northwest Illinois last week, to visit my childhood house and stomping grounds for perhaps the last time. My parents, who had settled there for two decades, are moving several states westward to a house in the city. Pulling up those kind of stakes is an opportunity to realize just how much junk can accumulate without careful curation.

Nerdishness, it turns out, is genetic. The pack rat tendency may be a learned behaviour, but the hereditary effect is the same. Combine the two and the offspring will look something like this:

The decades of collecting and the two days of extraction and disposal were a team effort between my dad and me. I’m sure there were some gems in all that junk, but that will be for the salvage yard to figure out. This necessary catharsis might not have cured either of us of our collecting habits, but it was a healthy step in the right direction. The whole week, Dad kept singing a chorus about the freedom we find from the Things We Leave Behind; I felt like I was Mourning the Death of a Dream instead. Dad’s choice of Michael Card song was more appropriate, but the components and computers we did keep still carry kernels of nerdish dreams.