Alasdair North

The fear of falling behind

Alasdair North — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 22:08:00 +0000

Every so often I get gripped by this anxiety that I'm not achieving enough, that I'm not moving fast enough or making the best of the skills and position I've got. Sometimes it's just crippling to see everything that other people are making and comparing it to the vacuum of my output.

There's just so much happening in software these days. A whole world of people releasing awesome products, building cool frameworks and just getting stuff done.

Thanks to sites like Hacker News we're exposed to it all constantly. You could spend every hour of every day comparing yourself to the success of others and seeing how much you fall short.

Yes, on a good day it's inspiring and shows you what's possible, but for every day like that there's another where I just want to crawl into a hole and not show anything to anyone.

It's a bullshit game that my mind plays with me; I know that ultimately, but the feeling is hard to shake. Yes, it's the fact that we only see other people's stuff when it's finished and ready and at its best - that combined with my sleep deprived brain from a 10 month old child who thinks 5am is time to start the day. I get that, but still my mind screws me over.

And I've achieved plenty. At Endis, Fluent, Runway and now viaLibri there's a trail of successes behind me (my fair share of failures, missed deadlines and over-engineered solutions too of course). Really I've got nothing to be ashamed of. I'm pretty good at what I do. I get that, but still my mind screws me over.

Maybe it's because I'm a generalist and don't have anything I can point to and say "I know more about that than anyone else". Maybe it's because I just don't have as much time as I used to to play around with side projects and just have fun. Maybe it's because I'm in a field where everything's changing so fast and literally nobody is able to keep up. Maybe I've been working on my own too much and miss people reassuring me. But probably I'd feel the same if all that were different. Probably it's just part of who I am.

I remember someone telling me years ago that Mother Teresa felt guilty all the time because she felt she wasn't doing enough for the sick. If that was true for her then really what chance do the rest of us have?

I don't know what the answer is. But this post has been brewing inside me for months and hopefully just getting it out there is part of the solution.

see comments…

Daily digest email RSS reader

Alasdair North — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 09:44:00 +0000

Update: I've built this as a webapp and it's currently in beta testing. You can sign up at http://www.mailfeed.io. It's free!

Several times over the last few years I’ve tried to build an RSS reader into my daily habits. I’ve wondered if it can do a better job than Twitter of helping me follow the writing of people I like and admire. My Twitter feed is at the point where it’s easy to miss articles that people post - especially if they’re not confident enough to repost them several times.

For some reason I’ve never built that habit though. Maybe it’s because I was missing out on BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits rules (I’m following it this week and it’s proving effective). Maybe it’s because most RSS readers are designed to make you feel guilty about the amount you haven’t read - with big bold ever increasing numbers pushed in your face all the time.

I realised something at the weekend though. I do have a pretty effective way of getting articles into my life already: email digests. I’m currently signed up to:

Hacker News Digest (monthly)
Product Hunt (daily)
Growth Hackers (weekly)
Quora (daily) - might unsubscribe from this because it’s a time vortex sucking in precious minutes
Graphic Designers Stack Exchange (weekly)
WordPress Stack Exchange (weekly)
Bootstrappers (every so often)
Government Digital Service agile delivery community on Linkydink (daily)

Wow! I’m pretty proactive about unsubscribing from things, so it’s obvious that this is a delivery method that works for me. I like the way it forces its way into my routine, but that it’s quick to dismiss and archive the email. Any articles I miss are gone, they don’t stick around to make me feel guilty. Maybe I should use this method for following the posts of people I care about too, not just whatever filters to the top of the communities mentioned above.

I’d like an RSS reader based around a daily digest of the new posts people have posted. Every morning it would send me one email containing a list of all the posts that had been published the previous day. I could use some sort of digest email from an existing service, but I think a service based around the email could do much better:

I want links to the articles as they were posted, not shown within some reader that messes up formatting, code samples, etc.
I want the system to detect which sites I always read and put them at the top of the list.
I want sites that I never read to be deprioritised, perhaps going dormant after a few months so they’re not included in the email.
I really don’t want there to be anything in the system that aims to make me feel guilty for not reading things.

I haven’t found anything like this so I think I’m going to build my own little system - starting off with a command line script and working up to a subscription web service. Is that something you’d be interested in helping me beta test? If so please leave a comment below.

see comments…

The most fun I've had making software

Alasdair North — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 09:57:00 +0000

Back in 2011 Ryan North (no relation) the writer of the excellent Dinosaur Comics webcomic, tweeted about a new site he’d found: Listening Room. The idea behind it was that someone starts a room and people could join them and listen to music together. Everyone uploads MP3s and then you would listen to the same music simultaneously while chatting to each other.

http://listeningroom.fettig.net/room/qwantz is a DJ room where we are all uploading tunes and listening to the freshest of beats
— Low-Res Bojo North (@ryanqnorth) January 11, 2011

It was a simple concept, and I know Ryan didn’t expect the listening party to last more than an hour or two. It was still going months later. The room he created was called qwantz after the domain name on which Dinosaur Comics is hosted. Those of us who’d joined the room kept coming back and we kept the music playing constantly for days and days. While the site gave us all random names we all started using our Twitter handles instead and we started getting to know each other, sharing jokes, tracks we enjoyed, and chatting about our lives. It was a spontaneous community that formed around music.

Part of the fun of it was that the Listening Room site, built by Abe Fettig, was a prototype that was being improved all the time. New features and tweaks were added constantly, but we also added our own community features. For example, every Wednesday we’d have Hump Day Jams, a day when every track uploaded had to fit in with one of three themes that the community had voted on. Categories could be incredibly random like “80’s action movie theme tunes” and, of course, the whole day when most tracks are uploaded were Sleng Teng Riddim - essentially lots of different people singing over the same demo from a Casio keyboard.

Aside from the community events we also started writing Greasemonkey-style scripts that enhanced the functionality of the website, things like adding links that searched for track details on Last.fm, a volume control, and displaying the length of all the tracks in the queue.

Eventually I brought the scripts together into a Chrome extension, then over time started adding more features like logging all the tracks played so you could browse charts and scrobbling to Last.fm. By the time I got round to blogging about it there were already more than 50 people using it, and at its height it was used by about 500 people - virtually everyone on the beta version of Listening Room. Those numbers are a fraction of the user counts of other pieces of software I’ve worked on - but even with this low number of users this was one of the most satisfying projects that I’ve ever worked on.

The Listening Room website shut down at the end of 2011 and the Qwantz Listens community went their separate ways, but many of us still follow each other on Twitter and interact from time to time. We all have happy memories of that time and the spontaneous community that sprang up overnight and then grew and evolved.

With a reunion planned for next week I’ve been remembering the experience of creating the Chrome Extension and trying to think through what made working on it so enjoyable. After all, if I can work out the magic formula then I can bring that to what we’re doing at Runway.

The key thing was building a piece of software that was widely used and appreciated by people in a community that I was part of. Every time that I released some update or another I got an instant hit of gratitude and I knew people were excited about it and spread word of it without any prompting from me. The encouragement and satisfaction that came from that can’t be underestimated. It meant that even after a long day of coding at work I was still excited about going home and working on the Chrome extension for a couple of hours. I looked forward to giving my time away for free.

Looking back I’m sure some of that came from the contrast it had with my day job, where I had very little customer contact, being sheltered from the noise of that interaction in order to enhance my productivity. Perhaps the isolation works for some people - I think it had a negative effect on my motivation in the long term.

Another contrast was in the release cycles. In my day job at the time we’d get a release out once a month if we were lucky. For the Chrome extension I was deploying updates at least twice a week, getting new features and fixes out there into peoples hands. The feeling of momentum and progress was great - small and nimble changes with a quick feedback loop.

Overall though it was the fact that it felt like the extension belonged to the community rather than me. Everyone suggested new features and improvements. Rather than it being me on my own it was a cooperation between everyone. It fitted in with the other community stuff like Hump Day Jams and contributed to building the community and making it a better and more enjoyable place for everyone. That’s probably the hardest thing to replicate, but it’s definitely what made it fun - doing it for something bigger than myself.

What about you? What piece of software has been the most fun to build? Why? Was it the team? Was it the audience? The process?

see comments…

Dear recruiters, here's how to tempt me

Alasdair North — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 08:27:00 +0100

LinkedIn brings a flood of recruiters’ messages to my inbox, only some of them have a chance.

Less Arseholes Please

Alasdair North — Sun, 08 Sep 2013 21:02:00 +0100

A little rant about grammar pedantry.

Digital Sizzle 9 Art Hack

Alasdair North — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 10:02:00 +0100

This post originally appeared on the Fluent website.

The idea was simple: stick a bunch of software developers, artists and musicians in a five-star hotel for a weekend, provide plenty of food and drink, and see what they build.

The event was the 3 Beard's second Digital Sizzle Art Hack event – a hackathon with a difference. The challenge was straightforward: "take any data and turn it into something creative". We had 48 hours to form teams, sketch out a creative vision, and actually build something. If at all possible, we also had to fit eating and sleeping into that tight timescale (although some people didn't bother with the sleeping part).

At times it felt like working in the laboratory of some mad scientist. We ended up with a quilt containing encrypted data, a real-time visualisation of someone's brainwaves, a model city flooded by hand gesture controlled pumps and so much more. The sheer breadth of what people created was staggering.

And all of this took place in the incredibly swanky South Place Hotel. It was possibly the nicest surroundings I'll ever work in.

The project I worked on was called Mashifesto. We were inspired by the thought: what would all our tweets look like to digital archaeologists in a thousand years? Will they recognise all the jokes, sarcasm and triviality, or will they misinterpret everything as factual and serious statements? The resulting idea was to take portions of tweets and recontextualise them as a manifesto.

We built a website to do this. All you have to do is mention @mashifesto in a tweet. It will then process your Twitter history and create a mashifesto for you. One of the benefits of having creatives on our team, is that the mashifestos look pretty good too. Apparently they're inspired by Russian Constructivism and Italian Futurism.

We were pretty pleased with the result. The judges seemed impressed too, because they awarded us 3rd prize. We were flattered to have won against such strong competition.

If you'd like to see all the different projects in person, they'll be exhibited at the South Place Hotel from 16th-18th August. Some of the work will then be shown at the Barbican for the following two weeks.

Photo used with kind permission by Paul Clarke Photography.

see comments…

Tech Advice Drop Ins

Alasdair North — Sun, 30 Jun 2013 15:45:00 +0100

A while ago I posted about wanting to run Good for Nothing style events in Cambridge, connecting skilled people with charities and social enterprises. Well, on Monday we had our first event. We had about 25 people come along, with lots of interesting ideas about how tablets and smartphones can help the elderly and those with learning disabilities. We don't yet know what will come next, but you can sign up to our mailing list if you want to be kept up to date.

One of the things that surprised me is that we had a real mix of people there. There were a few software developers, and some other people with an interest in technology. But we also had a lot of people who were involved in caring for the disabled, or who had more of a general interest in charity work. I think the mix worked well and having some different perspectives around helped with the discussions have a bit more depth.

Those that didn't have much technical knowledge seemed to get a lot out of talking to the techies that were there. A typical piece of feedback was "I didn't know all this sort of stuff was out there". It looks like discoverability is still a massive problem.

I was talking to a friend about this on Friday night. She's a primary teacher and her school's just had a grant to buy a set of iPads and Samsung tablets. Most of the curriculum is taught in an integrated way, with subjects all working together around a central topic. However, IT is still separated and taught on its own. They've been playing with Scratch on netbooks already, but would like ways to incorporate technology into other lessons as well. She said it wasn't just that they didn't know what solutions were out there, but that they didn't even know what questions to ask.

Those of us with technical expertise often underestimate how much we actually know and how much confidence we have. If you've been reading tech news websites for years and experimenting with random code, hardware or ideas then you're a massive step up from an average member of the public. We aren't just experts in our own field, but in the online world in general. We've spent hundreds of hours training ourselves to rapidly find and assimilate information.

I think there's a need for an event that puts some of that knowledge to good use. Perhaps some sort of drop in session for technology advice. We could get together a group of techies in a Cambridge coffee shop for a couple of hours; then people with problems could pop in and ask for advice. It wouldn't be about tech support, but idea support. The focus would be on finding new ways to help people, rather than figuring out why their laptop won't turn on.

Of course we won't know the answer to every question someone has, but we will probably have a better idea of where to start looking. Maybe we'd whip out a laptop or tablet and start researching it with them there and then.

As well as being useful for those dropping in for advice I think it would be pretty enjoyable for those giving it. We'd meet new people, and investigate new and interesting problems. We might even come across a great idea for a new app or website.

Would you be interested in coming along to an "idea support" drop in session? Have you got a problem you need solving, or could you help other people with theirs? Let me know in the comments below.

see comments…

Charting My Weight

Alasdair North — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:01:00 +0100

A constantly updating graph of my weight. The result of playing around with Google Docs' API and D3.js.

see it in action…

Good Food ProPoints

Alasdair North — Wed, 15 May 2013 08:27:00 +0100

My weight is always something that I've been a bit self conscious about. It's not that I'm particularly fat, but for the last few years I have had a bit of a belly. And, at my height, it's not difficult to stray into the "obese" BMI range.

In an effort to try and lose a bit of weight I've signed with WeightWatchers. So far the system seems to be working well for me and I've lost half a stone.

At the heart of the WeightWatchers system is keeping track of what you eat. Every food has a points value (ProPoints) assigned to it. This is a single number that's calculated from the fat, protein, carbohydrate and fibre content of the food. The idea is to limit how many ProPoints you eat each day, and so limit the calories you take in. It's not necessarily about eating less, but about giving you an easy way of comparing alternatives when you're making a food choice.

A lot of the food we cook is from recipes on the Good Food website. As the website lists nutritional values alongside each recipe it's easy to calculate the ProPoints value for a portion.

As a programmer it seemed like a waste of my time to copy the numbers from the Good Food website and paste them into the WeightWatchers calculator. I found a user script that would calculate the ProPoints values for recipes and display them on the page. However, Google have made it difficult to install user scripts in Chrome these days and I wanted something that would work without too much hassle. I took that code as my inspiration and created a Chrome extension that would do the job.

The extension takes the nutritional values given on the Good Food website and uses them to calculate the number of ProPoints in a portion. It'll show this number on the recipe page, and also on pages showing search results.

If you're following WeightWatchers then I'd recommend installing it. It's really helped us find tasty meals that don't cost too many ProPoints, and that's made following WeightWatchers much easier.

Helping those who do good do more

Alasdair North — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 23:27:00 +0000

My work is also my hobby. Some days I come home after a day of programming and all I want to do is get in front of a computer again. I'll disappear for hours working on random projects just for the sake of coding some more. It's not that I'm not fulfilled by my job, or not challenged enough by it. In fact I think it's the opposite, I enjoy the challenge and I want more of it.

The end result of this has been dozens of half finished projects. Those that make it online are the lucky (and rare) ones, most never see the light of day. I used to have a Trello board that tracked the status of my hobby projects. I gave up when the list of "dormant" projects got to twice the size of the "released" list.

Why don't they ever get finished? Because that wasn't why they were started in the first place.

The aim was never to finish and release them. They were started because I wanted to play with some new piece of technology, or new method of programming. If a project is started because it's fun and interesting then there's no motivation to finish it once the fun and interesting bit is done.

This isn't necessarily a problem. If your spare time isn't for doing fun and interesting things then what is it for? On top of that I learn a lot from these projects. This feeds directly into my work and makes me a better programmer. For example, one dead hobby project a few months back was an experiment with Knockout. As a result Knockout's played a central (and very successful) part in some of Fluent's work recently.

There are downsides though. I've deleted the Trello board, but the sheer amount of abandoned code in my Github, Bitbucket and Dropbox accounts does get me down. It's hard not to see them as failed projects.

Even the work that does get released never finds much of an audience. I think the key reason for this is that it isn't solving a problem. When the main point of a project is to be interesting to write, what's the motivation for anyone to use it?

So all this effort goes in, and nothing useful comes out the other end. Yes, I will have learned something new, but I can also do that while building software that solves problems people actually have. At the moment I'm teaching myself Ruby on Rails by building sites for Cultivate London and a friend of mine. The work I'm doing is benefiting people, and I'm learning as well. It's the best of both worlds. There's no downside, as long as these projects don't have hard deadlines or get too stressful.

I think that's the sort of thing I'd like to focus on. Helping others while learning myself. I've come up with a simple test potential projects have to pass. They must have this aim:

"Helping those who do good do more"

If it doesn't live up to that then it doesn't happen.

This is partly inspired by the day a fortnight I give to charities. Two of the key problems for them are 1) reaching out to people and 2) making the best use of volunteers' time. These are both areas that software can help with. I want to be building those systems.

Of course there will still be abandoned projects. Sometimes you try an idea and it just doesn't work out. However, I'm hoping working on actual problems will mean that some useful things come out the other end.

If you've got an idea for some software that matches that aim then get in touch. I might be able to help you out with some time or advice.

Or do you want to help build something like that? Do let me know, it would be great to collaborate.

Cambridge Developer Bloggers

Alasdair North — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 12:24:00 +0000

The death of Google Reader has got me thinking about RSS again. I'd always meant to use Reader more, but never got round to it.

One of the ways I'd intended to use it was to keep up to date with what developers in Cambridge are up to. I'd like to know what's going on in the development community near me.

After failing to find any existing list I've created my own. So far I've trawled through the lists of @camgeeknight followers and CAMDUG members. I've found quite a few local developers with blogs, but I'm sure there must be more out there. Do get in touch on Twitter if you know I'm missing someone.

Not everyone blogs about software; there's a pretty wide range of topics covered here. There are posts about coding and reviews of programming books, but there's also cycling stats and tips to avoid sexually harassing someone.

So here's my list. There's also links to download the list as either an OPML file or a CSV file. OPML files can be imported into most RSS feed reader software.

Doing Good for Nothing in Cambridge

Alasdair North — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:24:00 +0000

For the last few years I've given up a day every fortnight to work for charity. Most of this time has gone to supporting Cambridge Youth for Christ in various ways. While I've been able to help them a lot in this time, I've always felt there was more I could be doing for Cambridge charities in general.

We've got a lot of talent in our city. From the world beating companies like Arm and Redgate right down to the quality small compaines like Fluent, there's plenty for us to be proud of. I think there's great potential to use some of what we've got to help out the local community.

At the end of January I went down to London for a weekend event organised by Good for Nothing. The idea was to bring together designers, thinkers, and techies in order to help out charities and social enterprises. Three organisations came with challenges for us; we split off into groups and worked on solving them. These challenges involved a range of skills, some people helped refine a funding pitch, some redesigned publicity material, and others started building a database system for tracking plants.

The weekend was great fun, and I met a lot of interesting people. It was also inspiring. Seeing everyone getting stuck in really made it clear to me what I'd like to do for charities in Cambridge. I want to put on a Good for Nothing event here. I want to bring together the skill & talent we have in this city and use it to help our community.

I'm not on my own in this. I met Helen Morris down in London, and we've now got together with Lou Shackleton and Mel Findlater of the You Can Hub. It's early days yet, but the current plan is to put something on in September. We'd love to do it as part of Good for Nothing, as long as they'll have us.

Does this idea inspire you too? We're on the lookout for a couple more co-organisers, particularly people with graphic design or marketing and communications experience. Get in touch with me on Twitter if you'd like to join us. If you haven't got the time for that then we'll also need a venue and sponsorship. It's a great opportunity to get your name in front of a cross section of talent, as well as doing something good for Cambridge. And, of course, you can support us by coming along in September!

If you want to be kept up to date with our plans as they develop then sign up to our mailing list.

Sizzle6

Alasdair North — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 01:55:00 +0100

Two weeks ago I spent a weekend down in London at an event called Digital Sizzle 6. The idea was simple: take 50 technically minded people and 50 artistically minded people, bring them together to collaborate for 48 hours and see what comes out of it. The result was a lot of fun, not much sleep, and some fascinating projects.

Our brief was to create art out of data, a simply stated goal which gave rise to a lot of creativity. By the end of the weekend we had a dress made of Instagram photos, a machine to recreate the weather of faraway cities, a website that made “music” from the movement of fish and lots more.

Our project - Gaia

I went down on the Friday night without any real ideas of what to do, expecting to find somebody there to work with. This was a deliberate move to force me out of my comfort zone and get me collaborating. At the previous two hackathons I’ve been to I ended up working mostly on my own and I wanted to avoid that this time.

In the end I joined up with a team of people who wanted to make something out of London transport data. There were eight of us with a lot of different ideas floating around and we came up with two related pieces.

The first piece was a merging of painting and digital video. Mo worked through the night on Saturday to paint pictures of two tube stations. The mood of the paintings was inspired by sentiment analysis of tweets mentioning those particular tube stations and lines (as you’d expect, the sentiment was mostly negative).

Over the top of these we projected video footage that had been taken from the same viewpoint as the paintings. The effect was pretty awesome, but you really have to see it moving to appreciate it properly.

To add a touch of physical engagement Sam hooked up a couple of sliders so that people viewing the videos could slow down or speed up the videos.

Our second piece ended up as a pair of visualisations of London bus data. We took coordinates and timing information from TfL’s data feeds, cleaned it up, squished it all together and created some pretty videos.

We decided to use the Processing language for creating the visualisations. It’s a programming language designed for creating images and animations so it seemed like the right way to go. Having never done anything with it before I buried myself in a book for a few hours and got to grips with the basics.

While I was playing around trying to make 3D lines and animations the other techies on the team were attempting to get some data together. Here’s where we came unstuck a little. The information we’d started with wasn’t in the format we needed and was going to need some work to get it there. We tried hard, but we still hadn’t got the data in a form we wanted by the end of the weekend. Looking back I don’t know whether it was just the odd format of the data, or whether lack of sleep and mounting frustration combined to stop us thinking straight. The sheer amount of data didn’t help either, one of the data sets we’ve ended up playing with had over 120,000,000 data points just for a single 24 hour period.

As a result of our problems the visualisation we had by the end of the weekend wasn’t too impressive. However, we’ve carried on working on them since then and they’re starting to look pretty good.

Here’s my visualisation. It’s a full day of bus data - downloaded every minute from the TfL website, fed into MongoDB’s MapReduce and rendered as a video using a Processing script. Each white dot moving around is an individual bus doing its rounds, around 121,000 trips in total over 24 hours. It’s best viewed full screen in glorious HD.

What came next

One of the aspects of Sizzle 6 that, for me, has marked it out from other hack events is what’s happened afterwards.

Presenting our projects at the end of the weekend was only the beginning. As well as running an impeccably organised hackathon, the 3 Beards had also organised an private exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery with several hundred guests. This was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed hanging around our exhibit and chatting to people who looked interested. Sometimes I’d just step back and eavesdrop on people admiring what we’d done.

Over the course of the night there was a text message vote for people’s favourite project. Somehow we managed to win this, beating even the very excellent Real Weather project into second place.

Many of the projects and collaborations will carry on into the future. Stef Lewandowski spent Sizzle 6 creating necklaces from Twitter data, including his wife’s stream of tweets. Since the weekend the Data Necklace project already has a Kickstarter-style website allowing you to order necklaces. It’s also been getting some press attention from the Wall Street Journal as well as some love from Bill Thompson, a technology writer for the BBC.

Project Gaia won’t stop here either. We’re meeting up soon to talk through what the next step is. The plan at the moment is to build up enough different pieces that we can put on our own exhibition in a few months time. I’m really excited to see where this might go, and where it might take us.

Update: Since I wrote this stories about Sizzle 6 have appeared in The Observer and on the BBC website.

Ubuntu Errors

Alasdair North — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 19:02:00 +0100

Ubuntu just crashed on me. After it recovered I had the option of filing an error report, I then had this box pop up. It’s the type of user interface decision that will mean Linux is always a niche product.

Even as a technical user it took me a while to remember that “precise” is the codename of the Ubuntu release I have installed. If the OS had been installed by a helpful friend or relative I wouldn’t have a clue. Everywhere else in the UI I can see it’s referred to as “Ubuntu 12.04”, then out of nowhere this “precise” word pops up. What is that? Is it the name of the program that crashed? Is it the name of subsystem that’s malfunctioned? We’re given next to no context.

Of course the guy that wrote this dialog box knows what “precise” is, because he’s deeply involved in the Ubuntu development process. This word means something to him, but it means almost nothing to the end user. The developer hasn’t tried to think like an end user, and nobody at any point in the development process has done that either. The result is that the user is left confused. And this is at a point when a system error has already left them feeling vulnerable. Their confidence as a user is kicked while it’s already down.

Demons

Alasdair North — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 18:34:00 +0100

A couple of months ago I was given a passage about a demon possessed man to preach on. Having no idea what I believed about demons I was a little daunted by this.

My instinct is to put them in a box with vampires, werewolves, goblins and ghosts. It’s a box marked “great topics for horror films, but not stuff we need to worry about in real life”.

I spent a weekend reading everything I could find about demons in Christianity - from thoroughly researched theology textbooks to random crap on the internet. I even read a bit of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to see if it might add some light relief (it didn’t).

In doing all that I learned a lot, most of which ended up in the sermon. Hopefully it wasn’t too dry, but once you start talking about a topic like that you have to cover all your bases. If you don’t it’s quite easy for someone to go home with the wrong end of the stick.

For me, the most important thing that came out of my research is that I’m now convinced God believes in demons. For the God of the Bible demons are a fact of life. They show up too often in too many places to be dismissed easily, so frequently that I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re mentioned more than Jesus’ relationship to God. If you’re going to cut demons out of the Bible then it raises serious questions about how you treat the rest of it.

The result of all this is a direct conflict between my worldviews. The Christian in me says I should be agreeing with God, while the scientist in me says that I shouldn’t believe in supernatural forces like demons without proof.

As a Christian it’s a big thing when your opinion about something is different from God’s. It usually (or perhaps always) means that you’re wrong. If you’re speaking purely theologically then God can see everything, God has perfect judgement, and God knows better than you.

Life would be so much easier if my faith were that strong, that unquestioning, that blind. But it isn’t, I live in a world of nuances and of doubt. A world where, for so many questions, blind faith is a get out clause and not an answer. It’s a world where Robin Ince shouts almost as loud as God.

It is blind faith that I protest against – if you hold your position solely because your ancient book can be interpreted to tell you so, or your purple bishop has declared it true and you haven’t stopped to use your own reason to think it through – then your opinion is worth little.

What should I do when the Bible doesn’t quite match up with what I believe? I don’t know. I wish I did. What I do know is that question is probably the defining question of my faith at the moment.

Last.fm Loved Lister

Alasdair North — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 22:43:00 +0100

For the last few years I've been using Last.fm to discover new music. Whenever I find a track that I like I'll mark it as "loved". Every so often I go through my list of loved tracks and buy an album or two.

I used to have a python script that would list loved tracks along with links to search eBay for CDs. I've now rewritten this as a small web app.

Give it your Last.fm username and it'll list your loved tracks along with links to buy them on Amazon etc. Once you've bought an album by them, or have decided that you don't want to, you can hide the artist so they get removed from the list. It uses Quolace to save the list of hidden artists and make sure it's the same on all computers that you use.

Stackdoc

Alasdair North — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 18:59:00 +0100

About a month ago Jeff Atwood tweeted a link to an interesting post about crowd sourced documentation. I really liked the idea of generating documentation from data available on Stack Overflow, and of augmenting existing documentation with this information.

With this in mind I started writing a Chrome extension to insert lists of Stack Overflow questions into existing documentation. Now StackDoc is at a point where I’m ready to release it into the world.

It’s quite simple and limited at the moment, but the plan is to expand its features over time and in response to people’s feedback. Right now it’ll only add information to Microsoft’s .NET documentation on MSDN.

I’ve kept it quite subtle and unobtrusive for now, but still instantly visible when you open the page. Clicking on it expands the full list of questions.

The crawler that gathers the data is also quite simplistic at the moment. It only looks for links to MSDN, rather than using any of the more sophisticated techniques discussed in the blog post.

I’d like to expand it so that it can add lists to other types of documentation, perhaps Mozilla’s JavaScript docs, node.js and many more. The main problem is gathering the underlying data of which questions might be relevant to a particular bit of documentation. In order to get useful links for some languages it may be necessary to crowd source this process as well.

That’s a discussion for the future perhaps. For now give the extension a go and let me know what you think.

MSDN IDs

Alasdair North — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 21:00:00 +0100

I’m currently working on a Chrome extension that inserts lists of relevant Stack Overflow questions into MSDN documentation. As part of this I needed a way of converting the IDs used for MSDN pages into the canonical names of classes and functions. For example, “zba0x2tx” maps to “system.console.writeline”. This can be done quite easily by loading the relevant MSDN page and extracting the information from the HTML.

I could have written a function to do it as part of the Chrome extension’s server-side code. However, I thought there was a (very small) chance that someone else might find such a thing useful, so I’ve released it as a separate web service.

Dissent

Alasdair North — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 07:39:00 +0100

(I typed this on my phone while bored on a train, so apologies for the lack of links and formatting)

A while back, when the church was in the middle of one of its many recent controversies, Ben Goldacre tweeted that the church needed a sensible and sane spokesperson to speak against the tide of crazy stuff we’re seen to believe and do.

At the time I couldn’t help but agree. I find it incredibly frustrating being associated with a group of people that molests children, helps spread AIDS, oppresses minorities, kills Norwegian students, invades countries and suppresses scientific enquiry. Obviously not all Christians do these things, just like not all British people are members of the BNP, but enough do to ruin a lot of people’s perception of us.

Of course, most of these things aren’t part of Christianity, they’re the actions of a minority of crazy people who’d be dangerous whether they followed Jesus or not. I’m sure most people can see that, but they also see that the rest of the church isn’t particularly quick or keen to distance itself from these loons.

Is Goldacre right? Does the church need to be better at condemning this type of behaviour?

Maybe, but perhaps it’s also a little bit more complicated than that.

When Goldacre was tweeting his frustration and suggestions I gave some thought to the idea of starting blogging about these sorts of issues. Not with the pretention of being a spokesperson for the church, but with the aim of adding a small dissenting voice against the crazies. I considered the idea for a few days and decided against it. Here’s a few reasons why.

— The real problem isn’t the views of minority crazies, it’s the views of majority crazies —

Those outside of the church don’t think we’re all Anders Behring Breivik, but they may well believe we all have badly thought through ideas on evolution, that we think women can’t lead, or that we equate homosexuality with bestiality. And for a vocal majority of the church they may well be right.

Many people’s idea of Christianity depends on how we tackle these issues, but their opinion won’t be swayed by one blogger when the most powerful nation in the world is in the grip of a mad Christian majority.

— I’m not going to make a difference —

I may have a bit of an inferiority complex here, but it’s a fact that only a handful of people read what I write here. If no one’s reading it it’s never going to change anyone’s mind. I could rant all I want on here, but it would have to be purely for my own satisfaction.

— Devoting all your time to negativity is no way to lead your life —

In order to produce well researched post on here regularly I’d probably end up spending a few hours a week on it. I have no doubt that I’d enjoy it. Demolishing people with an eloquent and comprehensive put down is always satisfying. However, I don’t want my life’s work to be finding fault with people, it doesn’t feel like a healthy thing to focus on.

I’d much rather spend my time helping local charities and making nice websites. I find being creative so much more satisfying than tearing things down. I believe that’s something I’ve got from my maker.

— The church is divided enough already —

It’s not just hating gays that we’re famous for, we’re also well known for hating each other. In my student days I saw the pain this caused first hand as splits appeared in the Christian Union. It was nasty, confusing and it hurt. I do not want to encourage anything like that.

Of course, there’s also a tension here. My faith is not the same as Anders Behring Breivik’s, and I have no problem with saying that publicly. Is my faith the same as Michele Bachmann’s or Lord Carey’s? Would I be happy to worship with them? I think I might be, but there’s a line somewhere and I’m not sure where to draw it, or whether it’s even a good idea to draw it.

Quolace

Alasdair North — Sun, 13 May 2012 16:39:00 +0100

A few months ago I built a really simple web app to add tasks in bulk to Remember The Milk. It was straightforward to make and pretty easy to use, but there was one little niggle with it.

I’d decided to use HTML5 local storage to save the lists of tasks as key/value pairs. This was great as it allowed me to avoid building a server-side system to store this data. However, it also meant that the lists were only available on the device they were originally entered on. This was a pain, as what I really wanted was to be able to compile the lists on a computer, but then to be able to use them on my phone.

What I needed was a way to synchronise the data between all my different devices, but without having to run a server-side system just for this very simple app. The right solution may well have been out there, but I couldn’t find it, so I decided to build my own.

And that’s what Quolace is, it’s a key/value store for simple, single-page, web apps. You simply add the JavaScript library to your page, hook up all the get and set commands, and your users will be able to use their data and settings on whatever computer they want.

I’ll probably be using it from now on for all the little things I throw together in an afternoon, and I’d love other people to make use of it too. If you’d like to give it a go then there’s documentation and a demo app available to help you get your head round it. Do let me know if you find any problems, it’s all still quite new so there might be a bug or two lurking in there.

Questioning Faith

Alasdair North — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:45:00 +0000

Last Easter I helped out with the youth work at a church conference. Part of the programme was “the question box”.

This was exactly what it sounds like. The teenagers would write questions about some part of Christianity and put them in a box. We’d then do our best to answer them.

I hope that my answers helped the young people explore their fledging faith. I certainly found the whole process great for making me think about all sorts of nooks and crannies in my knowledge and opinions of God. Being put on the spot like that forces you to articulate what you really think and feel.

I kept all the question cards that the teenagers wrote and now I’ve made a website with some of them on. The idea is simple: run through a few questions and see if you can put your own answer into words. Try speaking it out loud if you find that helpful.

If there are any questions you think should be there then you can suggest them in the comments section below this post.

Sermon - Identity

Alasdair North — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Here’s another recording from the archives. This one’s from December 2008. It’s roughly based on John 1, but I really just use that as a springboard to talk about identity.

I think that’s the last of the sermon recordings for now. I do have a couple more MP3s sitting around, but they’re of talks that I’m not particularly happy with.

Malawi

Alasdair North — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:00:00 +0000

In 2002/2003 I had a gap year between school and university. I spent the year in Malawi teaching at a couple of schools as well as working with Children with Hope and Destiny (then Hope for a Hopeless Child).

When my parents came out to visit us in April they brought a video camera with them. We decided we’d record what a typical day was like for us. It’s many years ago now, but I’ve only just got round to editing the footage together!

Sermon - The Thirsty

Alasdair North — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:00:00 +0000

This is a talk I gave at St. Barnabas back in May. I’ve been meaning to get round to posting it for ages.

It’s on Isaiah 55 - An Invitation to the Thirsty. The passage was read out just before I started talking, but the reading is missed off this recording so you might want to give it a read before listening.

Bulk Adding of Tasks to Remember the Milk

Alasdair North — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:02:00 +0000

I’ve been using Remember the Milk for a few months now to keep track of all the things I need to do. It’s been great for getting my life in order and motivating me to get round to all the stuff I’ve been putting off for months.

One feature that’s missing though is the ability to add lists of tasks in one go. For example every few days I want to add this set of tasks:

“Washing - put on” for today
“Washing - hang up to dry” for today
“Washing - put away” for tomorrow

It doesn’t happen after a regular number days so I can’t use a repeating task, I just need a way of keeping a list of tasks somewhere that I can submit to Remember the Milk with one click.

Of course, the nice thing about being able to program is that when you have a problem like this you can write something to solve it. So I’ve written RTM bulk add, a little web page that hooks in with Remember the Milk’s API and can submit lists of tasks. You can also use RTM’s smart add syntax to set the due date, which list to put it in, etc.

For example the list above would look like this:

Simply press “Send to RTM” and the tasks will be added to the “Home” list.

The page is free for anyone to use. It stores all data in your browser and doesn’t send anything to my server, so you don’t need to worry about privacy.

Listening Room Charts Data Dump

Alasdair North — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 09:05:00 +0000

The Listening Room Chrome extension has been collecting chart data since the middle of May this year. This chart data has been available via a JSON API at http://lrdata.alnorth.com for all this time. However, there doesn’t seem much point in keeping the data site going now that Listening Room has shut down.

So that this data isn’t lost forever I’m taking one of the daily backups and making it downloadable by anyone who wants it. It’s a MySQL backup and should be quite easy to restore should anyone want to play with it.

Hopefully the data structure is self explanatory. One annoyance is that room names aren’t included, only room IDs. The room ID for qwantz was 4d6f04d78dc336ba42000005, but I don’t know any others. Hopefully you can figure it out by connecting users to track_plays to rooms.

Here’s the data.

Sermon - Lazarus

Alasdair North — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:20:00 +0000

This is my talk from last night at St. Barnabas. It’s based on John 11:1-44, which describes the death and resurrection of Lazarus. The passage was read out before the talk, but it’s missed off the recording. So if you’re going to listen to the talk you might want to read the passage through first.

Listening Room Chrome Extension

Alasdair North — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:20:00 +0100

Update: Listening Room closed down on the second day of December 2011. This Chrome extension no longer does anything.

A few weeks ago I spent a few evenings writing a Chrome extension to add a few features to Listening Room. The main features it adds is scrobbling to Last.fm, but there’s a few other GUI improvements too.

According to the Chrome Web Store it’s currently got 59 users which must be a fair percentage of the beta testers for Listening Room. It’s nice to know that it’s useful to people.

I start a lot of software projects in my spare time but it’s really rare that any of them get past the experimental stage and become something. In that sense this is a bit of a success for me, in that it’s actually being used by someone else.

I’m thinking I might move on to other things now but I’m sure there are still features to be added. To allow other people to spend time on it and improve it if they want to I’ve put the code up on GitHub. I’m happy to review pull requests and add them to the main extension if they’re good enough.

Wheels of Champions

Alasdair North — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 08:35:00 +0000

It’s been great catching up with Samuel and hearing about all that’s been going on at CHAD over the last few years.

One of the struggles has been that as the children get older the cost of their education goes up. Several of them are now studying at college, which involves registration fees and examination fees. When you’ve got to pay these for so many children it all adds up.

He’s been running a number of businesses to try and generate some money. The most successful seems to be Wheels of Champions car hire, which has also evolved into a car import and second hand dealership as well. So, if you’re ever in Malawi and need to hire a car, they’re the place to go!

Update: CHAD now have an excellent website with news about what they're up to. If you're interested in hiring a car then you can find contact details there.

Children with Hope and Destiny

Alasdair North — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 11:02:00 +0000

Between school and university I spent a year in Malawi. I went out with the excellent Project Trust who sent me out with a Dutch guy called Simon. For most of our time there we worked as a teachers in the morning and helped out at a place called Hope for a Hopeless Child (HHC) in the afternoon.

HHC was run by a guy called Samuel Kayuni, with his wife Hannah. Samuel had lived on the streets for some years as a child, and this experience gave him a real heart for all kids who find themselves in that situation. He started taking in orphans and children that were abandoned by their families and looking after them as if they were his own.

By the time we started working with them at the end of 2002 the Kayuni family had over 20 children, all of them taken in and cared for as if they were their biological children. Three more arrived in the 8 months that we were there.

HHC is still going strong under the new name of Children with Hope and Destiny (CHAD). So far it’s been largely supported by donations from America, but Samuel’s interested in building up some links with churches in the UK. With that aim he’s coming over to the UK for the next few weeks to meet a few people, speak at some events, and catch up with me and my family.

We’ll see how it goes, but it’s certainly going to be great to see Samuel again. I haven’t seen him since I left Malawi in August 2003.

Here’s a picture of the Kayuni family (complete with “uncles” and “aunts”) at Christmas in 2002.

Biblical Truth - Meaning from context

Alasdair North — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 19:16:00 +0000

When I was a bit younger (and single) I did a little investigation into where in The Bible it says sex before marriage is wrong. From what I remember it all came down to how you interpreted the Greek word porneia.

This word is mostly is translated as “fornication” or “sexual immorality”. But what does that actually mean when we read it in The Bible? After all, one man’s sexual immorality is another man’s Friday night. If you were trying to nail down it’s exact meaning then you might start by writing a list of things that it covers. But the activities and attitudes you would put on this list will depend on your personal preferences and on the views of the society you live in. Sex before marriage may well have been immoral in Israel in the time of Jesus, but it isn’t widely considered immoral in 21st century England.

Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 6:18 to “flee from sexual immorality”. But what does he actually mean? The way I see it there are three options here.

We should go with what he had in mind when he was writing. All that he would consider immoral should be avoided. First century Jewish attitudes of morality should always be considered to be the gold standard.
That Christians should avoid anything that would widely be perceived as immoral so that non-Christians wouldn’t have a bad word to say about them.
That we should look solely to God’s word when working out what’s immoral or not, rather than relying on cultural context.

When you take that verse out of context then all three points of view have their strengths. We need to look at the rest of the passage to get an idea of which way Paul would have us interpret this.

Here we see that Paul is talking about our standing with God. As God bought us at a high price we should conduct ourselves as he would wish. We are to flee from things that are against God’s desire for us, from what He would consider to be sexually immoral. For this passage, at least, cultural interpretation doesn’t come into it. We’re not being asked to conform to the culture of our time, or of two thousand years ago, but to obey the God that owns us.

This is the case for most of the passages that I looked at containing this word. They didn’t talk of judgement by the people of the day, but by God.

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that context is vitally important when interpreting The Bible. But it really is vitally important. We need to be aware of it constantly to avoid bringing our own bias to what we read. From the Corinthians passage the only thing we can tell for sure is that Paul wasn’t that keen on Christians having sex with prostitutes. If you want to read it in any other way then you’ll need some evidence.

Listening Room Hacks

Alasdair North — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 10:28:00 +0000

Update: Now Listening Room is in beta its structure has changed somewhat. These scripts will no longer work. The Listening Room Add-ons Chrome extension provides some of the features that these user scripts once did.

Me and a few other readers of Dinosaur Comics have been having an awesome listening party at http://listeningroom.fettig.net/room/qwantz/. It’s a pretty fantastic site where you can start a listening room and then everyone in the room can upload songs and then you all listen to them at the same time.

As there’s a high percentage of geeks in the room we’ve started customising our listening experience using user scripts. Rather than constantly sharing them in the chat I thought it’d be good to make a list somewhere. These can be used on Firefox if you install the Greasemonkey extension. For Chrome all you need to do is click on the link.

http://files.alnorth.com/last_listeningroom.user.js - This adds a button next to each record to search for the track on Last.fm. It also adds buttons linking to pages on the QwantzListens Data website for the track, artist and user.
http://files.alnorth.com/bg_listeningroom.user.js - This sets the background of all the records without cover art to the @QwantzListens avatar. It also uses the page background from qwantz.com.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/94690.user.js - Last.fm and Grooveshark search buttons, @QwantzListens avatars, twitter user name links and a more convenient “add song” button. By @nathanf77.
http://files.alnorth.com/queuelength_listeningroom.user.js - Displays the total length of all completely uploaded tracks.
http://files.alnorth.com/twitteravatars_listeningroom.user.js - If a user’s using their twitter user name then this adds their avatar next to each record they play. After a bit of a rewrite to use JSONP this now works in Chrome.
http://andymikula.net/listeningroom-cover.user.js - This sets the background of all the records without cover art to an awesomely retro picture of T-Rex. By @andymikula.
http://kempfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.info/donotfeedtheofficersofthelaw/cool-chat.user.js - Linkifies URLs in chat and converts *bold* and _italic_ text. By @takempf.
http://files.alnorth.com/volume_listeningroom.user.js - Adds a volume control. Unfortunately this is Chrome only.

On top of these there’s also @AwesomeFunTunes that tweets all the songs that get played in the room. As it has to scrape them from the page it’s a little fragile at the moment. Hopefully it should get more reliable as @SleeperCo add more ways of getting data from the room.

You can also play with this data on the QwantzListens Data website and see what the most popular tracks are. This will only work with browsers that support the new HTML5 client-side SQL databases, like Chrome.

If you’ve got a user script you’d like to add to the list then tweet it at @AwesomeFunTunes or @alasdairnorth.

Biblical Truth - Translation

Alasdair North — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:13:00 +0000

Let’s assume for a minute that there was a single orginial manuscript of The Bible. Let’s also assume that it was literally God’s word and was true in every way, with every word precisely chosen. While this would be awesome in lots of ways, it would be useless to me. That’s because it would still be written in languages that I don’t understand.

The different sections of The Bible were written in Hebrew and Greek, with a smattering of Aramaic on the side. A handful of Christians do learn these languages, but the majority of Christians don’t, and requiring it as a condition of conversion would be setting the bar pretty high.

This leaves most Christians with translated copies of The Bible. This introduces a couple of issues.

Quite often a word in language A won’t have a direct equivalent in language B. When a translator runs up against a word like this they need to make a choice. They need to decide which word from B best represents what the author meant.
There are different ways of translating a section of text. For example, you could go word by word, or you could take the passage as a whole and try and present its meaning as understandably as possible.

Many different groups of translators have made these choices in different ways, giving us the massive number of English translations we have of The Bible.

Could all these translators have been inspired by the Holy Spirit? Yes, they could have been, but that doesn’t change the fact that they all came out with different results.

If we assume we started the process with the complete and infallible word of God. What we have now is dozens of slightly different renderings of it, none of which completely accurately represents what God said.

What does this mean for us in practice? The simple take home message is that we can’t point to the NIV and say it’s 100% literally true. Is this a massive problem? Probably not, but it’s something we all need to be aware of. We should always look a passage up in a few different translations before we even begin to think we know what its original meaning was.

Biblical Truth - Contradictions

Alasdair North — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:53:00 +0000

In my first year of university a friend challenged me on contradictions in the Bible. He thought there were some, I thought there weren’t. We looked at one of the many lists on the internet and checked a few out. The one that I remember centred on two different uses of the word ‘sword’ by Jesus.

“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” Matthew 26:52

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Matthew 10:34

On first glance it appears that there might be something contradictory here, but read the verses around them and it’s clear that there is no contradiction at all. The word sword is being used in two different ways in meanings that it is perfectly possible to reconcile.

Look down any of the lists you can find online and you’ll see a lot of entries like this. They will present two verses that contain the same word, but where the word is used in completely different contexts.

Another class of contradictions you’ll find on these lists is what you might call “theological differences”. Do we end up in heaven because God has chosen us or because we’ve chosen God? Why does God spend one millennium killing non-Jews and the next reaching out to them? Are God and Jesus the same being or separate beings?

Here we’re often asked to take completely opposite “truths” and believe both simultaneously. Many of these differences do cause me problems, and tackling them is going to be the main focus of this blog, but they don’t cause me to question the Bible. They’re questions that I’d like to tackle using the Bible, but I’d still take the Bible’s word on them. When we’re looking at God’s personality it’s pretty much the only source we’ve got.

The contradictions that do cause me to really think about how to treat the Bible are the straightforward factual discrepancies. You can probably find lists of these online somewhere but, for me, one is enough.

Where did Judas die and who bought the dramatically named Field of Blood? Matthew and Luke give completely different accounts. Does it really matter where Judas died? In the grand scheme of things it is rather irrelevant, except for what it tells us about the Bible. This contradiction is understandable if we’re looking at two different writers who wouldn’t have had the chief priests or Judas as a source. It really does cause problems though if you think they were both written by God, who would have known exactly what really happened.

Does this mean that we distrust everything in the Bible? No, I don’t think so. It does mean we have to think a bit more carefully about each passage we look at though. We need to think about who the author’s sources might have been and about how much we trust that each thing they say is actually correct.

Biblical Truth

Alasdair North — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 10:45:00 +0000

When I first came to University I started going to quite a conservative church. Even though I only went to this church for a year it influenced my opinion of the Bible quite a lot.

If you’d asked me back then I would have said that I thought the Bible was the literal word of God transcribed by human hands, and that everything in it was handed down from him. I would have said that it employed different literary techniques and approximations so that not every single word was literally true, but that every metaphor, poem or prophetic vision was placed in the writer’s mind by God.

Perhaps I would have had this opinion even without going to that particular church, it’s probably the default attitude of any Christian approaching the Bible. It’s not really the attitude I have now though, and over the next few posts I’m going to outline a few reasons why.

Doublethink

Alasdair North — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 18:53:00 +0000

In my day job I’m a computer programmer. I do it because I love it. This probably has a lot to do with the type of mind I have. Programmers are generally logical, scientific people who like to see the world in black and white. We like things to be clear and understandable, and when we don’t understand things we’re pretty good at breaking the problem down into smaller parts that we are able to understand. If we’re going to believe what someone’s telling us we’ll want them to give evidence or a logical argument for why it should be true.

Being a programmer is a large part of who I am, but it’s not all of it. I’m also a Christian.

A large part of being a Christian is believing in what we haven’t seen, and have little evidence for apart from our own experiences and the anecdotes of others. As I learn more about God through the Bible I see more and more areas of faith where we’re required to take two seemingly contradictory ideas and believe them both simultaneously. Even with this and all the personality traits I’ve listed above I am a Christian, and I know several other Christian programmers.

This raises the question of whether we leave all our logical thinking at the door of the church. In order for us to be Christians do we have to drop our logical thinking and desire for evidence?

I don’t think this is the case, I don’t think we do make a special exception for our faith. But perhaps more importantly I don’t want this to the case. I want a faith that stands up to scrutiny, I want a faith that I believe in with my whole heart and my whole mind. I’m going to try and get to it, and that’s partly what this blog is about.

It’s been done before by many people I’m sure. Much more intelligent and more learned people have written books and books on this topic. Something makes me think though that this is process I need to go through for myself, and that there’s great value in that.

Why do it in public in a blog? Because some of the things I’ll post about will be things that should be discussed and argued about. We get closer to the truth by being challenged and having others holding up a mirror to what we say.

There may be other things I post about, like software I’m working on, but the main focus of this blog will be in exploring my doubts, and I hope you’ll join me in that.