Nicholas Shook

I have been hoping to find an easy wordpress plug-in for syntax highlighting. Creating a Github Gist only to embed it in my blog is way too cumbersome. So I downloaded the Prettify WordPress plug-in and ala it works (well kinda, but I’m sure it will get better)!

def hello
  puts "Huzzah!"
end
hello

In 6 days I turn 25, blegh. It will officially start the latter half of my 20s, I can rent a car, and my physical health will apparently start declining.

But on a good note, I did finish school which is pretty cool. I also finished the intro to Mongo course I took which was fantastic. In order to graduate I just have 2 papers, 230 hours of working for ACLU’s NV Chapter and a mobile development course. I am trying to figure out good Rails blog extensions, and I am leaning toward mounting an instance of Middleman, which is a great way to serve static pages, on top of Rails. Middleman also has a blogging extension, that I may look into. But the more I think about it, the more I don’t necessarily want my thoughts organized in a temporal manner. I also may just end up sticking to WordPress and upgrading the theme here. My original thought that necessitated rails would be a way to scrape and collect all my social media postings, but I’m getting swamped with work and may not have time to work on that anytime soon.

Speaking of, getting back to it.

It feels great having took my penultimate law school final yesterday and it’s going to feel great shaving this abomination of a mustache tonight. I get that movember is supposed to raise awareness for prostate cancer, but I just look like a pedophile. Thank god, I have a girlfriend who won’t leave me for looking like one.

My first task once break starts is to finish Local Foods, a community CSA project. A couple weeks ago, I participated in an AT&T Hackathon and got to learn about PhoneGap, specifically their new product build which lets you to compile android, ios, windows, blackberry and palm native apps using just a browser. It’s pretty cool, I think for it to be better it needs to have some sort of mobile simulator that you can navigate to see how it works on each device; or in other words, testing was a pain.

Afterward, I need to make a nice my personal website, I know it will do leaps and bounds for impending my job applications.

Alright back to work, hope to maybe do one more post on this blog before I migrate to the new one.

3 out of 8 classes done or 37.5% done with my penultimate semester of law school. Feels good. I signed up for classes next semester too, my writing research requirement, which is TBD but I’m sure I’ll blog about it over break; 322 hours of working for Legal Aid‘s Bankruptcy Project, which will give me exposure to Bankruptcy, something I’ve gotten interested in and set me up to do pro bono work after law school should I choose to get a job in software and want to continue doing law; and finally beginning mobile development in the graduate CS department.

Yesterday when doing some research about lawyers, I found that there are approximately 1MM members of some state bar in America, and another 50,000 or a 5% increase of new lawyers each year. Damn, the year over year increase, especially given the fact that there are fewer new job openings, is kind of alarming, but perhaps some good can come out of all of this. For one, even with all the lawyers we currently have, access to justice for indigent people is still piss poor. About 50% of this country does not a lawyer firsthand they can trust, and the amount of free web services that display legal information in a simple manner is still very negligible. Granted, there are now a ton of websites that offer cheap “legal advice,” but this is not the way I want to see the legal market disrupted; despite the virtualization of our world, nothing beats face-to-face interaction.

Anyways back to work, I have to finish my religion paper, my gaming paper, my bankruptcy website, and take two finals before I can finally relax and not think about law school.

I’m excited that I am about to wrap up my last semester of classes… maybe ever. I found someone who can give me an internship to learn how to code over break, I have a legal software start-up idea that’s been getting good feedback (exactly what I want to do), and I know that if I finish this bankruptcy project I will have a lot of leverage interviewing for bankruptcy attorney positions should I choose to do so. So I guess things are good.

I am really, really digging this MongoDB tutorial which has been a thorough intro so far into this database. I have read some pros and some cons to working with Mongo, but it seems like a great solution for both my Bankruptcy project and my legal start-up idea. I love Rails, especially the community here in Vegas, and will always intend to use it as a framework for web applications which, in conjunction with my desire to use Mongo has led me to look in depth into Mongoid, an ORM built with Rails-like migrations in mind. On the front-end I have been trying to get my hands dirty with Knockout.js, while working for my friend Tom and our idea we pursued at CleanWeb Vancouver, though I admit of all the technologies I’m working with, it’s the hardest to wrap my head around.

I think it’s safe to say that every technical decision I’ve made has been predicated on the available resources I have had to learn from. But it’s also safe to say there’s nothing wrong with that . Anyways back to work (which I’ve been drowning in), after this semester/year is over I will just have one paper and 7 weeks of pro-bono work and I’m done with school! Yeaaaaah buddy!

I know I need it to try and sell myself by creating an in-depth top-caliber for freelance web work. I tried experimenting with Locomotive CMS, which is supposedly based on Rails and I wasted 4 hours of my life. blegh. Here are some things I find horrific about it:

• It’s NOT FREE! You either pony up to pay to use your IDE to develop on your own machine or your stuck using a crappy online text-editor and having all of your assets be loaded into S3. Which def ignores some of the great things about the asset pipeline in Rails 3. I get it, software developers need to get paid but a) maintain your code and b) don’t tell me to ‘fork it on github’ if you keep something vital (editing the views) secret.
• Set up takes 20 minutes just to follow the instructions and wait for everything to load.
• You have to use Liquid instead of traditional HAML/ERB. Why do I need to learn another template language?
• There is little to no documentation anywhere. It took me 30 minutes alone just to figure out the route structure. Apparently you can’t name your routes if you’re ‘displaying a model.’
• I can’t edit the TinyMCE (which is the WYSIWYG editor they use) to include absolute url paths. This was the final straw and drove me nuts.

Blah. I guess WordPress is fine for blogging for the time being. On the up side, I’m enjoying my online class in MongoDB and the goal is to build a blogging application with Bottle. I’m sure by the end of that class I will thoroughly understand what it takes to build a blogging application from scratch and can easily apply my own CSS/Javascript to make it look nice.

I guess I’ll wait until the class finishes (which is right when winter break starts!). Patience is a virtue…

My bankruptcy professor liked what he’d seen so far. I recently found out that Sublime Text supports regex (duh to most developers) and it’s made my life a lot easier parsing the Bankruptcy Code and Bankruptcy Procedure Rules. As of today I have created JSON out of these files and have imported them into a Rails app using the rake db:seed rake task. For my next deadline, I would like to include more parsing of the procedure, especially times and dates to create a temporal outline of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy motion. Additionally, as a way of reducing traffic to the website to cut down on costs and keep it ‘private,’ I’ve stumbled across this gem that I intend to include which adds ‘invite-only’ functionality to Devise, a common authentication gem. I definitely intend for only lawyers to use the bankruptcy application, as I believe software that ‘solves legal problems’ for ‘everyday laymen’ borders on UPL, and subjects the creators to some serious malpractice claims.

It looks like I get to work on this project next semester too. Pending me going ballistic in an interview, I will be externing for Legal Aid’s Bankruptcy Project next semester. I feel can easily make the case for automation and consequently for me to continue this project as a means to see more indigent clients who frankly need the help. Going into this year, I never thought I would get gun-ho about bankruptcy, but I must admit it’s really interesting (and unfortunately necessary).

My project makes me think of Richard Susskind’s book, The End of Lawyering. He argues that the need for humans in jurisprudence is diminishing and that many of the day to day tasks lawyers do could be optimized by using machinery. I am certainly adding to that cause. However, I will always believe that a lawyer should always underwrite or kind of ‘insure’ any recommendations a program makes. Even with the rapid, exponential growth rate of technology, I highly doubt software will ever get competent enough to displace lawyers as a whole.

Finally as an aside, I have found a professor who is willing to supervise me for my thesis requirement. I think I want to write about the IP implications that software businesses face when they employ people around the globe. I’ve thought of this since my personal experience of hiring a Chinese developer to make a website for my start-up I tried running my first year. What would stop him from selling the exact same website to 100 American companies? And there are much bigger implications of this, like if I hired someone via Mechanical Turk to help me write some code, what would stop him from copying my exact idea in his locale? I figure my paper could speak about service, jurisdiction, whether arbitration agreements would suffice, and how these cases would be litigated.

For my bankruptcy project I thought it would be nice to have a JSON version of the code (statutes, not the product of hacking). Unfortunately, I could not find a legislative API out there (but lots of mumbo-jumbo about how we should build one). While there is no JSON, the government has a website with text and pdf versions of all of the U.S.C. After peeking at the html of the GPO’s html of statutes and thinking about what is important, I have thought up the following JSON format that could work with 11 U.S.C. § 1106.

This structure would only work for the U.S. Code, and if I were to build a web-app that encompassed all American law, I would store U.S.C. as its own document structure in something like MongoDB by prepending the JSON with something like “U.S.C”. A few thoughts about the design choices I made:

• Including hierarchical schema (title, chapter, subchapter, section-number) is important because government officials have put an immense amount of time in categorizing law so why not take advantage of that?! Plus it makes it easier from a UX perspective to sort and group issues.
• I figure title and section-number should be integers because they are oftentimes reflected in citations, i.e. 11 U.S.C. § 1106. However, I feel the chapter and subchapter needs to be strings because they have unique titles and it does not seem to make sense to build a hash table mapping each chapter/subchapter name to its number.
• I put the entire text of a statute one one line because I realize each point is delimited by a hyphen, semicolon (or in the case of the penultimate item in a list “; and”), or a period. There is no reason to add extra fluff because a client-side script could take care of the parsing.
• I have only one “amended_by” section because all statutes in the U.S.C. are created by Public Law, or acts of Congress. The numbers in the array reflect the public laws that amended that statute in reverse chronological order. I have thought about embedding amendments in statutes, but I think amendments or Public Laws are best served by being their own document structures because judges and lawyers regularly examine Public Laws as a whole to determine legislative meaning.
• Finally, if you take a look at the text version on GPO’s website versus this JSON, it foregoes the GPO’s discussion of a similar statute exempting retirees. I did not include this because the exemption did not specify § 1106 and I feel there are numerous number of exemptions that the government did not include.

Next step for me is to convert all of Chapter 11 into this format and reference it in my bankruptcy app. At this point, I realize I don’t need a database so my discussions of Neo4J and Mongo were premature. I can simply contain a folder of all the JSONed statutes and use Javascript to reference these files. For the purposes of this project, I do not have to worry about the Public Laws or related cases (which would necessitate its own JSON structure). That being said, I hope to work on making a law API as time frees up (most likely post law school/bar).

While it is my full intention to work for someone else for a while because I know I can use the experience, I can’t help but think of entrepreneurial endeavors I would like to work on down the line. One thing I’ve been keen about is how a legal start-up can grow with a LLP organization instead of a C Corp/LLC etc. The advantage to this strategy would be a start-up could then offer legal advice, and not just information.

I’ve thought my start-up LLP could do the following:

1. Create software for intake interviews and give automated actionable recommendations based on user input. (These recommendations would need be ‘insured’ by lawyer so that they do not constitute UPL)
2. Create automated contracts/demand letters/IP agreements which will be vetted by a lawyer (hopefully briefly!) before being based to a user.
3. Have online office hours with video chat enabled. This way I could theoretically work in a co-working space and pass the savings of not having a fancy office/having to commute to the user.
4. Allow users in some instances to pay based on the outcome of their case (just like regulare contingency agreements).
5. Refer cases we cannot handle to other lawyers and still collect legal fees with a typical fee-sharing agreement.

The obvious benefit to getting into this realm is that there are legal boundaries prohibiting your every-day software developer from creating a product that dishes out legal advice. The downside, I cannot ask typical VCs for capital in exchange for equity unless they have a JD.

Finally, my girlfriend has determined that she does not want to play politics and pursue the website which was the subject of my last post. While I understand the desire some students have in needing information to decide how to vote, I sympathize with my girlfriend that she does not want to be the one to proffer evidence. I guess I’ll have to work on my website portfolio in other ways .

Our law school SBA (basically the equivalent to student government) has had a bunch of turmoil recently. Half of the board has resigned, and the president is up for a vote of confidence next Thursday. Or in other words, if the majority of the people that vote in the upcoming election thinks that the president is not deserving of his position, he will get the boot. My girlfriend is on the board, and it is no secret that she does not stand for the president’s performance. There has been a lot of back and forth between the president and the members of the board, but it seems like the crux of the argumentative quibbles has centered around ‘is the board defaming the president?’ There is no correct answer to this question, but students have asked for, and rightfully so, documentation to assess this matter.

My girlfriend has asked me to make a quick website which will contain correspondences of how the president allegedly bullied and abuse his power. Unfortunately for me, one of my favorite ‘negative’ political websites has been changed substantially. During the GOP conventions, Obama had a great website in black and red that outlined how each candidate would falsely attack the President, and include the President’s website. The color scheme, font and the greyed images all connoted that the GOP candidates were just evil before I had a chance to even examine the text. In making this website, I have thought about employing such rhetorical strategies in defense of my girlfriend.

But, I think I’ll opt differently. The decision to vote one way or the other should hinge on an unbiased reading of actual e-mails, text messages and letters written between the president and the board members. I plan on making a website similar to Yammer’s API documentation, using nothing more than Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS/JS. I’ll probably opt for a grey color scheme and a plain font to connote a neutral, content-focused website.

I hope that this site will shed more light on the situation. And I hope a resolution one way or the other will come about soon. I miss talking to my girlfriend about non-SBA stuff .

In good news, I’ve worked out three times since my mom called me fat (trololol) and am going to the gym now.