Marc’s Bacon Honey-Mustard BBQ Chili

Ingredients:

• 1lb Bacon strips
• 2lbs Ground beef
• 1 Onion diced (I used yellow, but can be varied for taste)
• 1/2 jar Honey Mustard (5 oz?)
• 3 tbsp Honey
• 15oz can of Kidney beans
• 32oz Tomato sauce (I used Classico Tomato & Basil)
• 1 pack Caroll Shelby’s Chili Mix (includes cayenne pepper in separate packet, so you can set your own spice level)
• 10 cloves of Garlic (yeah, you read that right)
• 10 drops Liquid Smoke
• 1 lime

Tools:

• Crock pot
• Garlic press
• Wok or other large frying pan

Directions:

In a wok or frying pan, cook the bacon on medium-high heat, 4-5 strips at a time.  Get them to the point where they’re just turning brown, then remove and set aside.  Do not discard the bacon grease that accumulates in the pan, leave it there.  Chop the cooked bacon into bite-sized pieces, approx 1 inch on a side, and dump in Crock pot.  Once all the bacon is cooked, throw the ground beef in the wok and brown it in the bacon grease.  Empty the entire contents of the pan (fat, juices, meat and all) in the Crock pot.  Dice the onion and brown that in the wok, then empty into pot.

Add honey mustard, honey, kidney beans (including juice from the can), tomato sauce and liquid smoke to the pot.  The chili mix contains several packets of spices.  I used half of the cayenne pepper packet (to keep it mild) and all of the other packets, so toss those in.  Press the garlic and add to pot.  Cut the lime in half and squeeze into the mix.

You should now have filled the Crock pot with all the delicious ingredients, so mix the entire concoction together.  You can either cook it on High for 4 hours or on Low for 8 hours.  I did high the first time and low the second, and they both turned out great, so it’s really up to you.  Low lets the flavors seep in more, so I prefer it when I have the time.  Now grab a cocktail and wait till it’s done.

Once the cooking is done, stir it really well and set the Crock pot on Warm.  Grab a ladle and serve!

Did you like it?

If you enjoyed this recipe, leave a comment and let me know!  What did you like best?  What did you do differently?  If there’s interest, then I’ll post some of my other recipes as I make them.  Enjoy!

At the time though, this didn’t strike me as strange.  As a Freshman in college, you take the status quo for what it is.  “This must be how it’s done,” I thought.  My true disillusionment came when working on a side project of mine, with several Seniors in the CS department.  They could crank out code, yes, but it was buggy, poorly documented, and only version controlled because I wouldn’t look at it if it didn’t come from our CVS tree.  These were students finishing up their degrees!  I decided if that was the education I could expect, I’d be better off switching majors.  I could use my side projects to expand my programming knowledge, and get something different, but useful out of the official classes.

As it turns out, I wasn’t wrong.  Earlier this week, noted programmer Joel Spolsky wrote the following:

“It is amazing how easy it is to sail through a Computer Science degree from a top university without ever learning the basic tools of software developers, without ever working on a team, and without ever taking a course for which you don’t get an automatic F for collaborating. Many CS departments are trapped in the 1980s, teaching the same old curriculum that has by now become completely divorced from the reality of modern software development.

Where are students supposed to learn about version control, bug tracking, working on teams, scheduling, estimating, debugging, usability testing, and documentation? Where do they learn to write a program longer than 20 lines?

Many universities have managed to convince themselves that the more irrelevant the curriculum is to the real world, the more elite they are. It’s the liberal arts way. Leave it to the technical vocational institutes, the red-brick universities, and the lesser schools endowed with many compass points (“University of Northern Southwest Florida”) to actually produce programmers. The Ivy Leagues of the world want to teach linear algebra and theories of computation and Haskell programming, and all the striver CS departments trying to raise their standards are doing so by eliminating anything practical from the curriculum in favor of more theory.”

(excerpt from Capstone projects and time management, 10/26/09)

If you haven’t heard of Joel, he’s one of the top programmer-bloggers in the world.  If your job in any way involves programming or working with programmers, I highly suggest you start reading his stuff right now.

Clearly, my observations of the CS program years ago weren’t far off the mark.  Learning the detailed theories is incredibly useful, but almost worthless without the practical knowledge to go along with it.  Heck, even something as simple as version control would be stupidly simple to incorporate into the curriculum.  Example: “Whatever you have checked into your SVN project trunk at the time of the deadline is what you’re graded on.”  Wow!  That wasn’t hard at all!  But do the universities do this?  It’s almost 2010, and the answer is still No.

This is why the vast majority of companies want people with “3-5 years of experience”.  Having a CS degree fills a checkbox, it’s not 4 years of experience.  If a student relies solely on their university for their education, they’ll end up with a sheet of paper that says they’re Great(tm), but they won’t know the first thing about actually building a real software product as part of a team.  The company that hires the inexperienced new grad then has to pay the price of teaching them what they should have learned in school.  Only the kids that get great internships and/or work on side-projects, anything outside of school really, come out with practical knowledge.

When CS grads tell me they’re going to develop their next web app by emailing and FTPing files around, I used to want to smack them.  Now I know, I should go smack their teachers and departments.  Come on slackers, you can be better than this!

Something I hadn’t expected, but makes sense in retrospect, is the correlation between prior experience and willingness to learn new things. The class represented a huge cross section of prior-experience from student to student. Overall, those who knew the least starting out were the ones most willing to embrace new ideas and technologies. The eagerness with which the “beginners” jumped into their ideas was truly inspiring.

Soapbox: Pro’s and Con’s

I spent a decent amount of time in and outside of class evangelizing Rails since it was so appropriate for a lot of the project ideas out there. This had different effects on different people. One group actually ran with it and built their entire project with it. A few people were probably bored to tears by my rambling. The majority of the class now knows me as the “Ruby on Rails guy”. I’m glad that I was able to expose more people to the framework, but I don’t think I was effective in conveying the core concept that I work by:

If you’re going to tackle a problem, use the best tools available.

Rails is a great tool for a wide variety of web apps. It is not the be-all end-all solution to life’s endless problems. I think I came across more as “Rails is the answer to everything” instead of what I was shooting for “Use new tools, not just what you already know.” A large part of this problem stems from our own group using Rails for the backend; something I was actually trying to avoid.

The aim of the class is for each person to learn new technologies and develop something with them. Our project, due to the nature of its complexity, was going to require a lot of coding. Once it became clear that we were going to need our own backend DB, I wanted to avoid using PHP. Not because it wouldn’t work just fine. There’s nothing wrong with it, especially for a project this small. The problem, as I saw it, was that 4 out of 5 people in our group had a medium to high level of experience with it. That doesn’t allow for a lot of “new” learning.

My motivation for using Rails in our group was to introduce already-skilled programmers to something new, even if it meant limiting my own exposure to “new” things. For my own learning, I made sure to take time outside of our group meetings to teach myself other pieces that I haven’t seen or used before. The most visually interesting result of that is the drag-n-drop ordering of Categories. Working out the SQL queries needed to find stores that are open at a given time definitely stretched my boundaries. Obviously not as major as learning a whole new language, but it was a great way to push myself beyond what I already knew coming in.

If You Could Go Back…

Were I to do it all over again, I would have spent more time trying to preach the core philosophy of “use the best tool” instead of keeping the focus on Rails. For example, I only realized last week that we, it appears, are the only group using any kind of version control. Giving a talk on basic SVN usage, I think, would have been valuable to the class as a whole.

I had a lot of fun working on Open Past Midnight for this class. After all, I’m a programmer. But the neatest part of this class was getting to see what other people came up with, especially when they had to work with limited experience. That constraint can be incredibly discouraging, but they pulled through beautifully.

That said, we’re transitioning the Open Past Midnight project to Rails since we’ll need to be dealing with our own database.  I’ve already got Evan set up with the dev environment.  Then again, he’s running Leopard, so it took all of 5 minutes.  The other teammates all use Winblows, so it might take some extra time.  Either way, I am eternally grateful that Rails 2.0 now uses SQLite as the default DB.  No longer will I need to take time to explain MySQL privilege tables to my classmates when all they want to do is some basic development.

More to come in later posts, but we’re still going to try and deploy this project on Dreamhost.  Since it’s hardly a commercial endeavor, I’m not as worried about DH’s poor Rails support.  It will be interesting though to see how far they have (or have not) come.

1. Building a completely image-free site by hand.  Something I haven’t done in a while, considering all of my recent work with point-of-sale and e-commerce.  The verdict: I’m in love with Rails, not HTML.
2. I wanted to really get a feel for the differences using SciTE on my laptop versus Textmate on my desktop for the same, small project.  The verdict: my next laptop will be a Mac, purely because I love using Textmate.  If you’ve got a mac, but haven’t tried it out, I sincerely urge you to.

The thing I’m really looking forward to playing around with is OpenLaszlo.  It looks very powerful, and I’ve got a few ideas for projects where I could implement it.  The most interesting would be to use Laszlo’s DHTML output to create an interface to a Rails app.  Muhahaha.

This should also motivate me to continue my regular postings. For those readers that have been patiently waiting for the printer driver I talked about here, it will be posted this week.

This year, I plan to try my hand (literally) at 9 instead.

In the spirit of 99% of the rest of the Rails coders out there, I’m jumping on the bandwagon and making my own blog.  For years, I’ve hated even the word “blog” as to me the idea represented adolescent ramblings from dissatisfied narcissists.  This is probably due to the original uses of blogs by the ever verbose “pre-teen” crowd, posting such brain teasers as “OMG!!! SO JEFF TOTALLY JUST IM’ED ME AND WE’RE LIKE TOTALLY GOING TO SEE A MOVIE TOMORROW BUT I DON’T KNOW IF IT’S A DATE WHAT DO YOU THINK?” (spelling corrected for readability).

Thankfully, the idea of blogging has spread to people that actually have something worth talking about.  Bruce Shneier and Jim Hollan always have interesting things posted.  My friend Kevin Clark is definitely my go-to person for cutting-edge Rails info.  Not to mention I’ve owned drelmo.net since February of ‘99, yet I haven’t done anything interesting with it in years.

So here begins my attempt to contribute something useful and insightful to the “blogosphere”.  Let’s see where it goes.