Tagged: Getting Things Done
Inspirations from an Open Plan Office
Out With the Old, In With the Old
Our late December festivities are done, the days are getting longer, and soon 2010 will be heading my way. The various office and user group parties are done, and there’s some time for reflection.
The thing I am noticing with the Pomodoro technique is that the daily retrospectives are satisfying, when I do them. The other huge plusses are breaks every half hour or so keep me focused on what’s really important rather than what’s fascinating at the time, and the record of interruptions helps me have a more balanced view of how the day went. So after a couple of weeks I’m still happy to be learning it. A little scientific observation of my behaviour will let me eliminate old habits and fill the void with shiny new habits. I wonder if that’ll be good or bad… In any event it will be good to toss a few of my less effective old work habits out.
Meanwhile the Genesis Video Box is bringing back some happy memories of the ’80s, and the the 40th anniversary re-re-re-issue of Red by King Crimson gives me my “new” Bill Bruford fix.
Now to enjoy the rest of the old year and anticipate the new.
Breaking Habits
I have been incorporating elements from Getting Things Done and The Now Habit to help me get things done, and the latest trove I am raiding is The Pomodoro Technique (prompted by the new Pomodoro Technique book from the Pragmatic Programmers.)
After a few days of working with it in a reasonably methodical manner I have come to see just how ingrained some of my habits and behaviors are. I thought it was hard to intentionally cultivate good new habits, but breaking the old habits it harder. Let’s see how I do with this technique.
Procrastination Conquered!
I moved web hosts at the end of 2008, and dutifully took database dumps, source code repository archives, and tar balls of everything I thought I might need.
One of the sites I curated was the Official Unofficial Crimso Archives, and for almost six months I have been planning to reinstate the archives, never quite getting around to it. There was always some nagging notion of maybe turning my beautiful early 2000′s vintage PHP into shinier more beautiful Rails code, always a reason to wait for those elusive “consecutive few free days” and I would get my head down and crank some code out.
Yesterday Daniel Kirkdorffer emailed me “I see the archives search is still down. What’s the state of that?”. In less than a day I had the archives back up and running, including the search – it took me probably less than four hours of actual work, and a little help from Gordon Henderson’s superuser abilities to get the search configuration file installed, and all was well. I have probably spent more than twice that time coming up with reasons not to do it!
Now I can still fantasize about rewiring the site in whatever cool technology I want (and maybe never get around to doing it!), and at least the two or three people who want to look at the archives can.
Now, what else is in my next actions folder?
Rails Progress (slow but sure)
Each day when I have an hour or so to spare I am picking another aspect of my “toy” Rails application to work on. My strategy is to set small achievable goals, in the understanding that I will need to do some research and make some mistakes.
Many problems I come across seem to be due to poor scaling – a developer with a database with a few tens of rows sometimes never gets a taste of a the system with millions of rows under heavy load until users are out for blood.
Thanks to Jason Frankovitz I started looking at Railscasts, and this turned me on to the will_paginate plugin for pagination.
So now I have a migration which cooks up 10,000 user rows, and then I notice the difference in the naive “list all the users” and the paginated “list all the users, a page at a time”
One feature done today… now for the household chores: cat litter changing and putting out the garbage and recycling.
Keeping going with Rails
My experiments with Rails are moving along slowly, and I’m happy with that. One of the things I have learned that I sometimes sabotage myself by expecting to do too much too quickly and then becoming despondent when things don’t move as quickly as I had expected. If I step back then I see how many things I’m doing:
- Learning about VirtualBox.
- Learning how to use Git.
- Trying to learn Rails 2.2 using Rails 1.2 tutorials (D’oh!)
- Setting up vim to be a productive “IDE” for Rails.
- Taking another look at what PostgreSQL has to offer.
With Git and Rails I’m not just trying to use the tools well, I’m also internalising their way of looking at the world. That comes in its own good time. As for using vim (or vi) effectively, I have limped along with my limited repertoire for more than 20 years, so I should not have unrealistic expectations there!