This section lists all blog posts, regardless of topic.
Struggles reconciling the disparity between rich and poor, and how we should liveOctober 17, 2012
The last couple of years have been an interesting journey. To a fault, I have been pondering money issues. Where this started, I think, was the realization of how financially blessed Meredith and I are. We have both been successful in our careers, and with that has come good salaries. Since I grew up in a family where one parent worked outside of the home, and I always felt like we were very well off, I at some point started to question whether Meredith and I really needed all that we were being given.
Something that has exacerbated this questioning is that in the last year, my app development hobby exploded, and at one point I was making twice as much money on app sales as I was at my day job. Around the time this happened, I felt like God was clearly telling me that this app money was our "cup overflowing", and that we should use that money beyond ourselves. It has been a very joyful process for both Meredith and I.
More recently, I read the book
Radical: Taking Your Faith Back From The American Dream by David Platt. I would highly recommend this book to my Christian friends and family. The chapter that really hit home for me was chapter 6. If I can paraphrase, there are many thousands of children that die each day due to starvation or preventable diseases. Many of us are vaguely aware of that, but file it away in the back of our minds. Meanwhile, we consume ourselves with our desire for more physical stuff, prettier stuff, or experiences. Jesus tells us pretty plainly in the New Testament to do otherwise, but we fall victim to interpreting many of the difficult teachings of Jesus through a materialistic North American context. Our culture is far more powerful than we give it credit. David Platt argues that our blindness to this issue is analogous to the blindness that people had to slavery. It's very frightening to realize that such good, God-loving people honestly believed that slavery was good. Is it perhaps similarly frightening that many North American Christians are blind to the control that their culture has over their lifestyle and how they interpret the teachings of Jesus?
Having read this, I feel very convicted that I am far more materialistic than God desires us to be. And secondly, I feel like David Platt's writing has been successful in dislodging my mental defense mechanism which allows me to ignore the critically poor in the world. Part of this is that I'm a parent now, and the thought of watching one's child, Eli or Hazel, die to starvation or a preventable disease, is something that I can empathize with far more than I could before having kids. The way we perceive harm to our children is profoundly powerful. When one can empathize with other parents in third world countries, it is like receiving a large electric jolt. No longer is it a vague abstract concept for me. It is real people, just like me, living a nightmare.
This may sound extreme, but I have cried very heavy and burdened tears at least twice in the last week.
One of the core questions I am struggling with is how much money it takes to save a life. Two billion people in the world live on $2 a day. So the $5000 that we can easily spend on a two week vacation is an incredible sum of money in comparison.
If there are thousands of children each day on the tipping point between life and death, how is it possible that it is God's will for me to use that money for my own pleasure instead of helping my brothers and sisters?Being hit with that question has been tough. It really shakes one's whole world view of money, and how we should live. And it seems kind of silly, because it's not like I've been completely oblivious to this topic my whole life.
I'm thirsty to talk with others, both people who have likewise been convicted by these questions, and those that think such extreme thoughts are misguided and unhealthy. Obviously there must be a balance somewhere, but most suggestions of balance I have heard so far don't seem to answer the $5000 question I pose above.
If you have any thoughts or comments, let me know:
mailto:daniel.bigham@gmail.comWhat a dayOctober 16, 2012
I'm currently in Champaign Illinois for my yearly trip to the headquarters of Wolfram Research. Today at 2:30 as I was typing away on my laptop, I started to feel a pain in my chest -- the bottom three inches or so of my sternum. It was mild pain, but one's mind always wonders whether one should be concerned about such things. I told my manager so that if I went into any distress, someone would know what I was feeling, but continued to work. After 20 minutes or so, it started to get worse, and I felt the urge to lay down, so I packed up my things and headed back to my hotel room to get some rest.
I feel asleep and woke up a couple of hours later with significantly more pain, and I could feel my heard beating. I took my pulse and it was 110 bpm, which isn't at all normal for waking up from a nap. I started doing some Google searches and was going to phone telehealth but I was overcome with the sense that being alone in a hotel room with significant chest pain and an elevated heart rate wasn't very smart. I went to put my shoes on, and as I sat up I felt even worse, so I didn't even bother putting my socks on.
As I walked down the hall, I felt more ill, and I could feel my heart pounding faster and faster. I didn't feel overcome with panic, so my racing heart was really concerning me. I got to the front desk and wanted to first tell them my symptoms, and second figure out a way for me to get to the hospital to get checked out. My pain was evident in my voice, and when they heard "chest pain" they didn't seem at all interested in me going by taxi. The lady at the front desk later explained that she has had several family members in their 30s and 40s die from cardiac arrest, so she wasn't going to mess around. I felt badly about calling an ambulance and wanted to avoid that, but they wouldn't have any of it. My grandma Bigham died of a heart attack because she didn't want to raise a fuss with her symptoms, so I suppose we should learn our lesson. I got them to phone Meredith and let her know my symptoms.
I was really feeling overcome by my pain and racing heart, which was now > 130 bpm, so I lay down and elevated my feet. (is that what you're supposed to do?) The ambulance arrived after about 5 minutes and I stood up and got on the stretcher. They loaded me into the ambulance and measured my heart rate and blood pressure, which I think were 130 bpm and 160/100. They started monitoring my heart, and there were no signs of trouble. He explained that, while the details are complex, they are trained to quite easily pick out the signs of heart trouble, and they weren't seeing anything of serious concern.
I got to the hospital and they did an ECG. Everything looked ok. The last major thing they wanted to rule out was a blood clot. Because I have had surgery recently and spent 6 days in bed, the risk of that was a bit higher. So they took some blood. It ended up being an hour or so before I had the chance to call Meredith and let her know that there were no signs of trouble. I lay there feeling very badly that all this time she must have been frantic not knowing what was going on. As I was requesting that they bring a phone for me to talk to her, she actually phoned the hospital. I was able to let her know that everything looked fine, so I could finally relax knowing that she wasn't in the dark.
After two hours of waiting, the doctor was able to present the results of the test, which showed no markers of blood clot. I was A-OK. They did a quick ultrasound to make sure there were no visible signs of distress in my heart or lungs, and that looked great. And finally, they gave me a numbing agent to drink to see if that had any affect on my GI tract. By the time they gave me the numbing drink, the pain was reduced by 70%, and the drink perhaps helped a bit more, but didn't make it go away.
So here I am back at the hotel room and I've chatted with Meredith and Hannah and my Dad. What a day. I feel somewhat badly that an ambulance ended up being called, but as I said about learning from my grandmother's experience, it's better to fare on the side of caution.
So what is causing the pain? It could be stomach, or it could be musculo-skeletal. Ulcer? Acid reflux? I've had heart burn at least a dozen times in my life and the pain I felt today didn't feel similar at all to heart burn, so it's a bit of a mystery. My guess is stomach. Maybe an ulcer? I've had an emotional week pondering difficult questions of injustice in the world, so maybe that is part of the story.
But glad that everything seems to be ok.
BB10: It's Gotta Be FunOctober 4, 2012
One of my reflections this week is that a key thing that BB10 development must succeed at, in order to be successful with devs like me, is that it needs to be fun. It needs to be a positive experience that brings joy and keeps you coming back.
I'm a developer that works full time, and so every now and again, when I find an hour or two for some recreational coding, I want to do something that I am passionate about. Something that is entertaining, fun, positive. The PlayBook delivered on that, big time. Adobe AIR is a very mature platform, with a rich class library. You can do a lot with a little bit of code. And the PlayBook didn't add much complexity on top of that. Because ActionScript had been around for so long, you could Google just about any problem or question you had, and find decent answers. It doesn't get much better than having an app idea, sitting down for 4 hours, and at the end of it having a shiny new app that was both fun to create and rewarding to share with others. Bam! That'll keep you coming back time and time again.
BB10 via Cascades/QML isn't there yet. By my best estimations, it's almost there, and I just need to hang on a little bit longer, but the unfortunate reality is that as of October 2012, my BB10 development experiences haven't been fun. They've been frustrating, and slow. And it's tantalizing, because what RIM is building looks so, so good. I love just about everything about the platform, the design, the devices, etc.
Most recently, this week, after so many exciting things coming out of BB Jam Americas, I was excited to spend an hour or two and try out the new SDK. I loaded the new SDK, fired it up, and fixed some of the compile time errors that were a result of API changes. One of the API changes gave me a hard time, because the instructions on RIM's page for how to incorporate it didn't mention anything about their modified code snippet requiring new include statements, and the compile errors that resulted were, in typical C++ style, not especially helpful. But once I got over those hurdles, the app compiled. With nervous anticipation, I clicked the "Debug" button.
And that's where things ground to a half. The console contained all sorts of errors in red about corrupt shared libraries. Off to the support forums I went, but didn't find any existing posts. As per usual, Garett from developer relations at RIM came to the rescue and with the tip of uninstalling 10.0.9, forcefully deleting the API, and then re-installing, I was up and running.
Sort of. Now when I ran my app, I couldn't load any secondary screens. Great. I eventually determined that some of my QML files had errors in them, but inexplicably those files don't show up in Eclipse with red error icons. Rather, you have to manually open each one and look for red squiggly lines. Face palm. Not was I was expecting as a developer using state of the art dev tools in 2012. At the very least, the thing shouldn't compile and deploy to the device if files have errors in them.
So, I solved those issues, again due to changes in the API, took a deep breath, and tried again. Still no ability to load secondary screens. When using the app, nothing would happen when I'd touch an action bar item. Nothing in the console, nothing on the screen... just, nothing.
Later this week, when I had another hour of energy for BB10, I tried again. I spent half an hour trying every possible thing I could think of to narrow down the problem and isolate what was going on. But nothing I tried really helped solve the issue or narrow it down. In the end, I couldn't even get console.log statements in the QML to work.
We're all human. We all have finite patience, and this is where mine ran out. I felt angry. I felt like slamming something, turning off the dev tools and shouting an expletive. And those things aren't typically part of my personality. I was really, really disappointed. Yes, I was obviously making a programming error, so my fault, but the point is that the tools weren't doing their job to help me as a programmer find my mistake. And without that, programming goes from being "fun" to "get me the heck out of here" very fast.
This time I didn't even bother to post to the forums, I sent Garett an email directly explaining my emotions and disappointment. This guy is amazing. As per usual, he promptly returned my email the next day with helpful explanations of exactly what was going on, and how to get past my issue. Brilliant.
But I need to pause here. As much as I love and am blown away by RIM's developer relations, they shouldn't and can't be a substitute for properly working tools. It's just not a sustainable model. In the end, and I really wished by now, RIM needs really great dev tools that allow BB10 development to be straightforward.
What came to light in Garett's response was shocking: RIM has released 10.0.9 knowing that due to some related changes by Qt folks, logging is now broken. What this means is that if something goes boom in some QML you're running on device, you're not going to hear about it. Rather, it will silently fail.
So here I was wasting my life debugging a programming problem, and because of a major bug/issue with the tools, the error messages weren't even making it back to the IDE to be shown to me. No wonder I couldn't make anything work.
What I simply cannot fathom is that RIM would release 10.0.9 knowing that this problem exists. Surely there must have been heated internal discussions about this with people saying "we can't release it like this", while other people countered "I know, it sucks, but we have to".
Whatever the story, this falls out of the realm of reasonability for me. It seems almost double faced to on one hand pamper devs with wonderful support from dev relations, produce great conferences and Jam sessions, and then after all of that, release an SDK update that breaks one of the most fundamental aspects of your code/run/debug cycle. What?!
I will circle around to how I started this blog post: BB10 development needs to be fun. It needs to be a positive, energizing experience. And until it gets there, devs like me will have nightmare experiences like I had last night, and it will take energy to cajole ones self to continually "try again, maybe it will be better this week". If RIM could only figure out how to turn that around, they would be so much more successful with BB10 now and in the coming years. I think they will ultimately succeed in getting BB10 development wrinkles ironed out. They are incredibly determined to do just that. But I'm sad to be sitting here in October 2012 still honestly saying that we're not there yet.
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