Dev::Blog

Minor site update - I dropped the Twitter widget from the sidebar, what with not having updated the thing in a while. I kinda came to dual realizations that a) I don’t do a lot of stuff that anyone on my friends list would find interesting and b) I can do a lot more stuff when I don’t write about what I’m doing in the first place (this also feeds back to the sparse updates here as of late).

On a related note, I highly recommend The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. I’ve had two concrete takeaways so far - checking email twice a day and separating location from function.

Tim recommends checking your email at noon and 4. I haven’t been totally successful on this one, but it’s been amazing how many situations I’ve been in where I’ve replied to something at noon, expecting resources to come back to me that need to be acted on right away, only to receive them at 5 (or later). In the past, this would rob me some serious time, checking the inbox everytime it dinged, etc. So far, no ill effects from the new email schedule, and I haven’t even set the autoresponder up yet (but again, I manage to do this maybe twice a week at this point).

I’ve also started working at the local library, which has no internet access and a strict no cell phone policy. It’s not suitable for every task (let’s just say that dual monitors can be a blessing and a curse), but coding full screen with no online diversions available is a huge thing. I don’t have access to source control or online docs, and there’s an integration phase when I get into the office, but I’ve been able to churn out some serious chunks of new code through this process. Bonus: the library’s near some restaurants I don’t normally get to frequent, and their lunch specials rock…

Technorati Tags: gtd, The Four Hour Work Week, productivity

Rick Segal writes a bit on how he says no:

It is the “for now” part that I believe may confuse people. I don’t say, I’d be interested in hearing about your progress, let’s continue the dialog, keep in touch, write often, etc. I don’t do that because the smart folks will do that anyway. They will send email with an update, I’ll respond with congrats, they ask if there is an opportunity to re-open the discussion, and there you go.

(That quote makes more sense with the surrounding context, but you already clicked on the link and read the original post, right?)

We’re not investing in companies much, but we are hiring, dealing with client inquiries and various 3rd party proposals. I knew it was time to toughen up my language, but the why of it has never been clearer.

I finally beat my inbox into submission and got back into that state of flow where, as per the GTD principles, my inbox is just a landing pad for items that I can file accordingly.

In the past, I tried doing this with a series of @Review, @Today, etc folders in Thunderbird, but I found that I wasn’t particularly good at remembering to look in those folders on a regular basis. The inbox is simply burned into my brain as the be all and end all of folders in my mail program, with everything else delegated as archival.

The solution (which seems to be working so far) is to use Backpack for my @… folders. I just forward the mails to my Backpack account (each page in Backpack has its own email address) and include a brief mention of where I filed the email in case I need the original again. Just like how I put work stuff into a FogBugz system, it’s like filing the messages to a to do list that I can check on later, but the big deal, for me, anyway, is that the work items are as far from the email program as I can get them. This leaves my email system to serve the two functions it does well - accept and archive.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Backpack, email

“A clear inbox, being caught up on RSS feeds, and regular blog posts: pick two.”

Inspired by Michael’s efforts to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout, I’ve decided to try learning the QWERTY layout. Yes, QWERTY. See, I took a keyboarding class in high school (taught by, appropriately enough, Ms. Keyes), but it never really “took,” and while I can still do it, my skill level is about the same as if I were to say, try to get directions in Quebec.

The math is compelling - if I can type, say, 40 words per minute with 6 fingers, I should be able to hit at least 66 wpm if I use all 10. With the amount of typing I do each day, I could use the time savings. Of course, it remains to be seen how useful it is when typing C# or HTML, but we’ll see.

So to get started, I downloaded the trial of TypingMaster and I’m doing the drills when I need a break or I’m waiting on a compile or download or whatever. It looks like I get really sloppy after 3 minutes or so of drills, but the drills are interesting, with a lot of letter combinations I don’t use very often, which might deprogram my personal AutoText system…

Current speed (on drills): 35 wpm gross, 24 wpm net (after errors accounted for)

Technorati Tags: keyboarding

Just signed up with IMified - they let you interact with a bunch of online services over instant messenger. While I don’t use most of the systems enough to bother, one thing I do need is a simple bare bones to do list system, and I don’t want to have to remember another URL and login.

As luck would have it, IMified has a basic set of organizational tools built in. including to do list management. The interface is basically a set of menus, and you drill into them with successive messages back and forth.

But enough about IMified - it’s just that it happens to be a perfect example of how a multiple message SMS (mobile phone text message, natch) session would work. The next time I have to put one of those together, I’m making a bot to prototype it and hopefully leave in the wild once things go live (except for premium rate (pay) SMS I guess). It’s a great way to get the message (sorry) across to clients without having to explain how to send a text in the first place, though granted, you’d probably have to do it in front of them, as I imagine the number of chatters at that level are about the same as the number of (non-BlackBerry) texters…

Technorati Tags: IMified, SMS, mobile

OK, if Google Reader is so great (which it is), why oh why can’t it do anything with embedded YouTube videos? It’s like they’re not even there.

Yeah, I guess that just makes the case for GR being the most productive newsreader ever, but still. Someone from Google should talk to someone from YouTube, you know?

Robert Scoble notes that Google Reader’s got a new “trends” page that shows your reading stats for the past 30 days. I thought I was reading too much news, but it turns out I’ve only read 1455 items, which might seem like a lot until you see Scoble’s count of 25,000+.

More interesting are the bar graphs in the upper right, which show, among other things, time of day stats. According to Google, most of my reading occurs early in the morning, at noon, and at the end of the work day, so my addiction isn’t cutting too much into my productivity, but there’s a nasty spike around 2pm that I need to work on…

Oh, if you use Google Reader, here’s the link to the trends page. And YAY! They’ve added “sort by oldest” to the view settings!

Technorati Tags: Google Reader, Internet Addiction

While I finally got our spare Mac working over the holidays, I’m still pretty PC based due to my day job. The biggest thing I miss from my Mac days is OmniOutliner, and I might have found a replacement with My Life Organized. It’s not a feature for feature match, but it’s got most of the stuff I used for basic todo lists, and best of all, it’ll work from a USB drive so I can take it with me to the 3 or so PCs I’m using on a regular basis on any given day!

Technorati Tags: Outliners, GTD

Of all the things I miss about working at a larger company, it’s having other developers around. Not so much for the ability to work on larger projects, but mostly to have people to bounce problems off of. I think if I was to graph out my time allocation for the past two years, I’d see a huge spike in “working through a coding problem.” I don’t think I’ve gotten dumber, but I have gotten slower, and it’s all due to those roadblock kinds of coding errors that, without a second pair of eyes, simply “take as long as they take” to solve.

Today I lost 4 hours to debugging some javascript when the problem was in the HTML. Once I realized what was going on, I did the happy dance followed immediately by the argh argh argh dance. That should have taken 15 minutes to fix, but I let myself get drawn down blind alley after blind alley…

I don’t see a new hire in the near term, so what’s a single dev to do? Here’s the plan: from now on, don’t spend more than 15 minutes on a problem.

This is one of those “turn your weakness into a strength” things - there are always 5 or 6 projects going on here, plus maintenance, so if I’m stuck on a problem, I’m moving onto a different task in 15 minutes. Whatever it is, it can wait until I get stuck on the new task. I’ve had too many cases in the past where I come back to a puzzle and the solution is lying there with blinking runway lights. Yes, some of these puzzles were actual sudoku puzzles. No, switching from a problem to sudoku doesn’t count.

I’m also going to use a timer to track those 15 minutes so maybe I’ll cheat less. Hopefully there’s a Vista sidebar gadget (the site’s down at the moment), but I’m tempted to bring in a real timer so I can share the joy with my office-mates.

It’s not the be-all, end-all solution, but it’s a start. I’ve only just realized what’s been slowing me down, so hopefully this’ll lead to some new realizations and improvements. Of course, if I speed up too much, we’ll never hire any more developers…

Technorati Tags: GTD, debugging, productivity