Alex "Gus" Gustafson

  • The Best Thing About Javascript

    The best thing about JavaScript is its implementation of functions. It got almost everything right. But, as you should expect with JavaScript, it didn’t get everything right. – Douglas Crockford

    from Javascript: The Good Parts

    —

  • Chili at Great Flood Brewing Company

    Great Flood Brewing Company hosts quarterly events for members of its Flood Liars Club. Amber and I are inaugural members: we attended the High Water Series tasting early in the year, but we didn’t make it out to the bottle share this summer. We definitely wanted to attend the Chili Cook Off this week and Ber even entered her chili into the competition. She didn’t win the free renewal of her membership (the prize for top chili) but we renewed anyway because we love everyone at Great Flood. 🙂

    The winner also brought a bag of Fritos to go along with their chili. The rest of the entries relied on the oyster crackers Great Flood supplied. Amber and I considered bringing a box of Ritz crackers, and maybe that would’ve put us over the top or at least in the honorable mentions. Who knows?

    I hope they do a chili cookoff again next year as an event, it was a lot of fun.

    —

  • Baby Talk

    This is the most prepared I’ll feel for the next twenty-five years. Because right now I’m an expert on everything pregnancy, infancy, and child rearing.  Unfortunately I’m all too aware that I’m currently on “Mount Stupid.” Once this baby comes into the world I’ll be totally knocked down by everything there is I don’t know.

    Amber and I went to a maternity class this weekend at the hospital where we’ll be delivering. It was a good firehose of information and we left more confident than when we came. But the main gist of it ended up being “keep your common sense and we’ll give you more instructions as you need them.”

    Knowing where to park was nice info.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a go-bag to pack.

     

    —

  • A Really Good Time

    I told Ber that she should read a particular blog post I just finished. She responded with a groan.

    “You don’t have to do it right now, just sometime,” I clarified.

    She replied:

    “Good, because right now I’m having a really good time looking at food.”

    —

  • Caturday

    20151024_082306

    —

  • Pumpkin Iron

    20151023_174750
    Russian Twists with a Pumpkin

    Thanks to Ber for the photo.

    —

  • The Stonecutter Samurai

    I was fortunate enough playtest and to be Dungeon Master for a group playing “The Stonecutter Samurai.” Payton did a great job writing the story and it was exciting to play. I recommend you check it out for your gaming group!

    Payton Swick's avatarPayton.Codes

    Once a year Automattic gathers all its employees together for a week of projects, learning, and adventure at an event called the Grand Meetup. This year I wrote a D&D adventure to share with my friends and co-workers, most of whom had never played a tabletop RPG before. It’s now been run seven times (four by me) for a total of 26 players (two even played the game twice!).

    Here’s the teaser text:

    In the country of O’Taki, there exists a feudal hierarchy of Dwarf lords in the style of old Japan.

    As the Emperor’s Prime Minister Okanama ages, a rivalry has arisen over who will take his place. Several factions vie for control. The leader of the most influential faction, the retired General Buren Tomogawa (also known as the Stonecutter Samurai), has fought to keep power away from his strongest rival, Yomo Ishin, a powerful noble whose detractors claim deals…

    View original post 62 more words

    —

  • Malcolm in the Middle

    Pretty awesome little web game.

    Malcolm In The Middle Official Licensed Computer Simulator

    malcolm-in-the-middle-simulator.gif
    Yes / No. Maybe. I don’t know. Can you repeat the question?

    (h/t They Might Be Giants on Facebook)

    —

  • Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock

    My team lead, Simon, and I have a one-on-one chat every week. It’s typically casual in tone but big picture in topic. At some point in an August chat, we hit the topic of managing people. Recently this book has been read by several Automatticians and Simon is one of them. He recommended I read it too after we typed at each other a bit.

    2015-10-21 11.00.30
    Work Rules on Kindle eBook with avid reader cat, Bagheera

    The most interesting thing about this book is how much it reminded me of Automattic. We focus a lot on employee freedom and that’s a major tenet presented. Bock mentions a conversation with another company’s HR lead and how they were interested in trying things like a room with lava lamps and beanbag chairs, but not giving the employees more freedom, responsibility, or transparency. Good ideas pretty much stop with that roadblock of less employee freedom.

    Another great discussion in the book is around the topic of managers. It’s a commonly bemoaned thing in tech that managers just get in the way of engineers, but this book showed the steps that Google took to show that while bad managers do indeed just that, good managers are invaluable and make their teams better. One of the big decisions that kept Google managers good at their role was distancing them from acts of compensation and promotion.

    At Automattic we have a similar philosophy: we don’t have managers, but we do have team leads. Simon is my lead, but is not my boss. Team leads are charged with making sure the team does the very best work we can do, but they can’t decide on their team members compensation unilaterally. Our HR team does compensation reviews rather thoroughly, and the team lead’s opinion is only a part of that. As was recently put at the grand meetup, Happiness Engineers like myself bring happiness to customers. Team leads bring happiness to Happiness Engineers. Same job, different purpose.

    You might also enjoy this book for a more thorough view of why Google has the ‘fun’ perks it does like the free food and napping pods. There has been tons of media coverage over those little things in past years. But instead I hope you’ll read this book and help your business shape the way it sees its people. For now, I see it as a pat on the back that Automattic really is doing things at the top tier of HR and strive to make myself an employee deserving of such a great team.

    Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will ransform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

    Amazon ; Goodreads ; Wikipedia

    WorkRules.net

    —

  • Grand Meetup Magic: The Gathering Deck Recap

    Playing Magic: The Gathering over the course of the Grand Meetup was a lot of fun. While I had a losing record (5-8,) I was second in number-of-games-played, which was my true objective. We had 31 players with a round robin setup: everyone was to try and play everyone else once, but we all knew we wouldn’t get all the games in. Each match was ‘best of two out of three games.’ We were playing sealed decks with booster packs from Magic Origins, Dragons  of Tarkir, Khans of Tarkir, and Fate Reforged.

    I did some research on how to build a deck in a tournament like this, and I ended up only adjusting my initial build once, to add one counter spell which I never got a chance to cast. Apparently in most tournaments you have to mantain the same build for all matches, but we allowed players to change decks completely between matches since it spanned the course of a week and was only for fun anyway.

    My best cards were a pair of dragons that both required blue and black mana. I also felt okay on my blue/black cards to provide a solid opening, but I worried about how well they’d hold up in the middle. Since no other color seemed to scream a plan at me I decided to go forward with blue/black and find ways to win late with my dragons and a couple other big creatures.

    2015-10-20 12.12.45
    These bad boys were the pillars for the rest of my deck.

    You can skip to the deck list by clicking this link.

    Having low-cost, deathtouch creatures helped my early drops, but I relied heavily on creature removal to make it through the middle game. When I was lucky enough to get the Blood Chinned Rager along with multiple other warrior creatures (i.e., Unyielding Krumar, Hand of Silumgar, Alesha’s Vanguard) the requirement of two creatures to block made for a strong attack that almost always secured a win later on. But in sealed deck, one really shouldn’t rely on combos. So I added that splash of white to bring back some life. I considered removing the War Behomoth because I almost always used the 2/2 token (without morphing) as a blocker instead of using it for the big creature it can be. The Skaab Goliath and my two dragons were way better at that.

    The Necromaster Dragon ended up being my best win condition. Creating 2/2 tokens turn after turn adds salt to the wound of a tough flyer and it was usually enough to turn an equal position into a winning position. Problems with this plan were against opponents playing with aggressive speed. If I was already being attacked by five or six creatures, one 4/4 flyer isn’t enough to turn the game around to my favor. But if I could steadily build as I liked, this creature became the cornerstone of my turn. Silumgar, the Drifting Death can fill the same role because he’s so tough to kill, but I just didn’t draw him as often.

    If I wanted to use this deck as the basis of construction play, I wouldn’t need to adjust it much. I’d just add land appropriate to a 60-card deck and beef up the amount of black 3-drop and 4-drop creatures. The result would still be a deck that either annoys for several turns and wins late, or loses quickly due to slower draw against aggro.

    Deck List with Links

    —