Justin Peck
Justin Peck has been writing code since he unboxed his Timex Sinclair ZX81 in 1983. He has been writing applications for the web since 1997. In addition to slinging code, he is a Development Manager, an opinionated agilista, a filmmaker, a writer, and a technology entrepreneur. When he's not behind a computer, behind the camera, spending time with his family, or playing the ukulele, you'll find Justin at the movies, probably watching something with subtitles and subtext. He prefers pie to cake.
Profile
Experience
- Sept 2010 - PresentCo-Founder / QonqrI am one of the founding partners of QONQR, the geosocial game of world domination. We are an indie game shop, so I fill many roles. I do Product Management, Development, Game Design, PR, Marketing, and everything in between. QONQR consumes every spare minute of my life, and I absolutely love it.
- Feb 2006 - PresentDevelopment Manager and Commercial Credit Technology Lead / Ally Financial
- Apr 2009 - PresentCo-Leader / Twin Cities .NET User Group
- Jul 2004 - PresentSoftware Consultant / Peck Tech, Inc.
- Feb 2000 - PresentSoftware Engineer / Best Buy
- 1997 - PresentSenior Software Analyst / Minnesota Life
Education
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1992 - 1995University of WisconsinB.S. in Communication Arts (Radio/TV/Film)
Additional Information
Updates
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@michaelheald - No worries!
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@jbellus - Absolutely! I'd love to chat sometime!
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Wow! "Because We May." http://t.co/WXfzLl98 (via @APickett)43 hours ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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"Why The End Of Film Is Awesome (Except When It Isn't)" http://t.co/iPWU14PB43 hours ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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@MNHeadhunter - I'm at the airport and they're issuing "weather warnings" and saying airlines should activate their emergency procedures.
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@michaelheald Congratulations! (Does that mean you might have some availability soon?) ;-)
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@edanidzerda @wickywik "Good learnings" indeed! :)
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@wickywik - Crashplan is an offsite backup (limited by my ISP's upload speeds). I have Time Machine configured to only backup by request.
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@edanidzerda - It still had not caught up synching a recent batch of huge files. :/
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@edanidzerda - Most docs live in Google Docs or Dropbox, most code was committed, so the impact of 10 days was (thankfully) pretty small.3 days ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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@wickywik - Time machine back up from a week and a half ago. My always on Crashplan backups haven't caught up to current state yet. :(3 days ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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Secondary crisis (insufficient space for restore) averted. System back up with just ten days' work lost. *phew*
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@APickett - I have way more trouble with this than it seems I should. Luckily I think I'll only lose a week's work. #SavedByTheBackup
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FFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU http://t.co/odkIzz2W
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@ojstewart - Yep. :)
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@ojstewart - The awesome thing is, that feeling never goes away and only other parents truly understand.4 days ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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@Solome33 - Congratulations!7 days ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
Posts
A lesson I have learned the hard way is that we aren’t smart enough. Even the most brilliant programmers routinely make stupid mistakes. Not just typos, but basic design errors that back the code into a corner, and in retrospect should have been obvious. The human mind can not grasp the complexity of a moderately sized program, much less the monster systems we build today. This is a bitter pill to swallow, because programming attracts and rewards the intelligent, and its culture encourages intellectual arrogance. I find it immensely helpful to work on the assumption that I am too stupid to get things right. This leads me to conservatively use what has already been shown to work, to cautiously test out new ideas before committing to them, and above all to prize simplicity.
In his memoirs, computing pioneer Maurice Wilkes wrote of the moment in 1949 when, hauling punch cards up the stairs to a primitive computer called EDSAC in Cambridge, England, he saw the future: "The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs." From Wilkes's epiphany to the present, despite a host of innovations, programmers have been stuck with the hard slog of debugging. Their work is one percent inspiration, the rest sweat-drenched work; their products are never finished or perfect, just varying degrees of "less broken."
Scott Rosenberg, Dreaming in Code
Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.
David McCullough
That's me at my second computer: a Tandy 1000 SX. Note the *two* double-density 5.25" floppy drives. This picture has to be about 1986, which would make me roughly 13 years old. At this point in my life, I was splitting my time at the keyboard fairly evenly between coding BASIC and playing Infocom games. That ratio shifted a little more to the gaming side the following year with the release of Vohaul's Revenge.
I always find it somewhat ironic when I hear people complain about programming abstractions not being good. Especially when these complaints are published via blogs – whose content is displayed using HTML, is styled with CSS, made interactive with JavaScript, transported over the wire using HTTP, and implemented on the server with apps written in higher-level languages, using object oriented garbage collected frameworks, running on top of either interpreted or JIT-compiled byte code runtimes, and which ultimately store the blog content and comments in relational databases ultimately accessed via SQL query strings. All of this running within a VM on a hosted server – with the OS within the VM partitioning memory across kernel and user mode process boundaries, scheduling work using threads, raising device events using signals, and using an abstract storage API fo disk persistence. It is worth keeping all of that in mind the next time you are reading a “ORM vs Stored Procedures” or “server controls – good/bad?” post. The more interesting debates are about what the best abstractions are for a particular problem.
I look at creative projects like they were Sudoku puzzles — you can stare at them as long as you like but you won’t suddenly see all the numbers. You have to start. You have to find one box to fill in, and from that — another one reveals itself. You might not be able to solve all of them, but as long as you know it’s possible, you’ll keep trying. And no matter how many you solve, each new one begins with a bunch of empty spaces
Yes, there are areas of suboptimality all around. But on the macro scale, Unix and Windows and Java are just minor reverberating harmonics of an explosion that started happening when the first transistor clicked from one pole to the other. Progress is being distributed unevenly, even lumpily, but the net direction is overwhelmingly Forward.
That was one of the real problems of the dot com crash -- the punk rock look-I-can-do-magic theology of the early Internet, driven by the empowered introvert Textite cadre that kindall describes so well, was briefly eclipsed by financial tricks and marketing broadsheets.
But then people came to confuse the fact that we can do fucking magic now with the shifty dissembling of the dot com flippers.
When those guys' rhetoric died under the weight of unreal financial tricks, everyone thought that the entire stack from top to bottom was a sham and turned away in disgust. Even, I would say, a majority of the Textites -- naturally given to a certain kind of insular pessimism.
But you know what? We can still do fucking magic now.
The issue is not Vista vs. Mac vs. Ipod vs. Zune vs. blah whatever. Let the swoopy cube desktops and gaily colored soapbars of plastic fall where they may. The issue is, shall we now together proceed to create a universe of unbelievable facility and magnitude from the universe skeleton that lies before us, with the universe wrenches and universe screwdrivers that fall so easily into our hands?
For a couple years, I’ve saved this snippet of a MetaTalk discussion because I find it so inspiring. Let’s put the contents of our Universe Toolboxes to good use, shall we?
