Listening for peace

In this TED Talk, the presenter tells us how important listening is. In our world we are not listening enough to our pairs. We are focused, concentrated, deconcetrated, multi-tasking all the time. But the consequence of that is misunderstanding, which can lead to violence and pain.
Recently I felt frustrated because I wanted to tell someone what I was thinking about something he did. My aim was to help him to improve but he was not really listening … even if he was saying « yes, yes, yes ». I felt bad afterwards and in the end I was almost angry of not being listened to. So in this little life experience, I felt how it is important to give your attention to others.
In the following talk, you’ll receive 5 little exercises to improve your ability to listen. Starting from now, I’ll try to apply them ! If you wish to join the effort, I added the list of exercises on the bottom of this articles.

5 exercises :

  • Silence : 3 minutes of silence a day to recalibrate and be able to listen to silence again
  • The Mixer : listen to how many channels of noise you can hear in a noisy environment
  • Savouring : listen to everyday sounds to find out the hidden choir
  • Listening positions : adapt your listening position according to what you are listening to and playing with those filters :
    • Active / Passive
    • Reductive / Expansive
    • Critical / Empathic
  • RASA : if you are leader, spouse, friend, parent, teacher :
    • Recieve : pay attention to the person
    • Appreciate : making little noises like « hmm », « ah », « ok »
    • Summarize : Using the word « so, you said that … », « if I’m right you think that … »
    • Ask : To make sure you understood well

Good listening 😉

Getting to FOSDEM 2014

Begin february I went to the annually biggest european conference on Free Software in Brussels, the FOSDEM. It was the opportunity to get in touch with the developper’s world and to listen to some conferences presenting libraries or tools that I may use in my project.
Since I’m developping a python web application I wanted to go to the javascript and python rooms to listen to their talks. I was surprised to see how small those rooms were. The rooms were completely full and it was almost impossible to get into it. I had to abandon the idea to listen to javascript talks. I was feeling frustrated because lots of javascript talks sounds very interesing. Fortunately the talks will be available on the web later.
In the python room I could listen to some interesting talks. Here is a little overview of the subjects :

Eve Framework

The Eve framework is a new web application framework that provides a quick tool to develop rest API. Powered by Flask, MongoDB, Redis and good intentions Eve allows to effortlessly build and deploy highly customizable, fully featured RESTful Web Services. You can also find more information on their blog.

Debugging

  • Sentry is a tool to manage the errors generated by a production application. When you application run into an exception you will get notified on sentry and it will generate a ticket. Sentry can also be connecter to any task management system like Jira.
  • Pyrasite is a module that allows you to execute code in your application during its execution. It is a tool for injecting code into running Python processes.
  • New Relic is a powerful tool to profile the thread of your application and determine which part of your code is the most heavily loaded anytime. The Thread Profiler is a low-impact profiling tool used to identify app bottlenecks in your production environments

Alembic

Alembic is a tool for database migration.

Python Fibers

Fibers is another implementation of eventlets. Eventlets are event-based threads that can be executed in a single process.

Databases

Couchbase is a document based database, so it is an interesting alternative for mongoDB for some specific cases.
We also got an interesting talk about how the New York Times decided to setup Cassandra in their software architecture.
But the last talk I heard was about mongoDB and gave some tips to switch from SQL to NoSQL : How mongodb can tackle most of your problems.

13^3-13^2-13^1-13^0=2014

As every 365 days we are incrementing the year number. And the as the tradition says, we have to whish each other a happy new year and take some good resolution for the coming year. I like this tradiction allthough I always forget to whish happy new year to some friends, and I know that resolution will have hard times.
If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point.
A couple of month ago I saw a TED video about the time we have to keep doing someting new to get used to it and make it a habit. I think it is a good time to share it.