Tragically L33T

Daily Routine One Year Later

2010-04-19T00:00:00-07:00

So it has been over a year since I first posted my daily routine, what worked, what didn’t, and what I felt I needed to do different. That post has been a favorite, so I figured a year-later followup would be useful.

To review last years list:

BENEFICIAL

Review my todo list first thing when I get into work in the morning.

I have gotten good about this, largely because I am keeping ALL of my work in my todo list. I work in an IT Operations team, so when a new ticket comes in I create a placeholder for it and start building out tasks needed to complete the work.

Check my work email only a couple of times per day.

This depends on the type of work I am doing at the time. I have had to compromise on this a little and, rather than set specific times I check my email, I set time blocks I do nothing other than the work task at hand.

Prioritize my work.

I used to rank my work A-E and the end result is everything that stays on my list is priority A. This is not useful. I am using a tool (a separate post for that coming soon) that allows me to stack rank everything I am doing. I do not apply a false ranking to my todo items, but a true rank (should I do this before or after the other things on my list). I usually have a couple of things in a ‘working state’ at a time since my job requires a certain level of multitasking.

Update my todo list with everything that I get done or need to do.

Once you have everything in front of you it can be simultaneously stressful and freeing. Get everything down and then be realistic about what you can do. I know people who try to do it all and end up making themselves sick. They seem to fear putting it all out there because it will be overwhelming. Remember the story of Vice Admiral James Stockdale, a prisoner in the “Hanoi Hilton” during the Vietnam War. He reported that the people who did not survive were the optimists, those who always believed they would be home by some particular date. He said, “They died of a broken heart.”

From this comes the Stockdale Paradox. In the man’s own words: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

Build a list of things you think you need to do. Filter them through your goals. Be brutal, but know you are going to prevail.

Spend time on professional development.

This blog is part of it. I am working on developing my consulting business, so I am spending time on that when I have it. I am currently reading ‘Switch’ on how to affect change when change is hard.

Get a few minutes of face time with my boss.

My boss is a nice guy with a wicked sense of humor, so this is pretty easy.

DETRIMENTAL

Getting on my computer before work in the morning.

I have mostly stopped this bad habit. My wife and I commute together (and work for the same company) so timing our schedules to be ready at the same time has helped.

Check my personal email at work more than once a day.

I probably look a couple of times per day, but I have also worked to reduce and filter the amount of mail I get in my personal account. Fewer mailing lists, vendor emails, and the like have made processing my email box a quicker proposition.

Things I need to be doing

Purge items from my todo list/replyto mailbox that I have not gotten to and is not important to my goals.

The first part of this is to have goals. On the site, Brazen Careerist, I have listed my goals as:

Establish my consulting business
Present at technical conferences
Be indispensable

The last item is from Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin. It is by far the most compelling and difficult to define goal I have at this point in my life.

Define a list of goals for this point in your life. Use that list as a filter for everything on your list. Remember that there are three types of work in life: The Critical Few, The Functionally Mandatory, and The Trivial Many. What do you want to spend your time on?

Breaking tasks into manageable next actions consistently and immediately.

I have gotten better about this with keeping all of my work stack ranked. I have to break larger tasks into smaller pieces so I can work them in with all the other demands on my time. I have found a project undivided is a project never started.

I will be thinking over the next bit and a while about what, if anything needs to change on this list. Until then, stay productive.

Finding a Voice

2010-04-15T00:00:00-07:00

I have always had a tough time with the ‘voice’ of this blog. No more. I am just going to write and you, dear reader, will just have to cope! I am not going to let my lizard brain stop me from writing.

Here is a sample of the things I have in the queue:

My Daily Routine: One Year Later
Application Performance and Statistics
Upgrading to Puppet 0.25

Stay tuned!

The Lizard Brain, the Dip, and other Godinisms

2010-03-03T00:00:00-08:00

Seth Godin is a really smart guy. More importantly, he takes his ideas and does something with them.

I came across Seth in an interview he did with Merlin Mann. He talked a lot about fear and the lizard brain: the part of our brain that is only hungry, scared, selfish and horny. Its the part of our brains that ruled in high school.

It will also sabotage us if we let it.

Whenever we get close to completing something big or interesting or important to us, the lizard brain senses a threat. “What if we fail?” “Ridicule is painful!” “Better to go along in life quietly, then do something that might get us noticed.”

The lizard brain tells us to quit when success is near. Seth mentioned in his interview that he listens to his lizard brain… and then does the opposite. If his lizard brain is quiet, he probably isn’t doing anything important. If his lizard brain is screaming bloody murder, he knows he is on the right track.

I picked up a couple of Seth’s books, including Tribes, The Dip, and his new book, Linchpin. As I come across more interesting tidbits I will share them.

Moving my Blog to Jekyll

2010-02-28T00:00:00-08:00

In the past I have not blogged very often. In fact I seem to blog less often than Wordpress releases a security patch. This was making me nervous and, combined with the issues of writing posts offline at events like NFJS, I decided a change was in order.

Enter Jekyll, the static page blog generator behind Github Pages. So far the workflow of managing text files in a Git repository is working well for me. Not being able to leave well enough alone I created a Rakefile to manage certain tasks like create a tagcloud for the sidebar, creating tag specific pages listing posts, and creating a draft post.

Creating a draft post was pretty straightforward:

desc 'create a new post in draft mode'
task :new => [:require_input] do
  title = ask("Title: ")
  filename = title.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z0-9]/,"-")
  template=File.read "lib/post_template.markdown"
  File.open("_drafts/#{filename}.markdown", 'w+') do |f| 
    f << template.gsub(/POST_TITLE/, title)
  end
  sh "git add _drafts/#{filename}.markdown"
end

Publishing a draft to the blog will consist of a git mv of the draft file to the _posts directory with the data appended to the filename.

As for comments I have switched over to Disqus, which allowed me to import my Wordpress comments and link to them on my Jekyll blog.

MyProgWriMo - Day 15 - Reset

2009-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

So I have been working on my project, but Tapestry has been kicking my butt. I have decided to step back and reset. I have useable DAOs and crappy DTOs and not much else.

So I am resetting. Grabbing the code that works, dropping Tapestry (the documentation on the IoC container and testing is not great) and going back to basics. Hibernate, Spring, Sitemesh…

MyProgWriMo - Iteration Zero Complete

2009-11-02T00:00:00-08:00

Yesterday (11/1) I:

Created a basic project structure using a maven archetype
Checked that structure into source control
Setup a Hudson job to run continuous integration

Today I have a light load (since it falls to me to feed the wife). I want to get my first page to render in Tapestry and continue research into the elements I will need like custom dispatching.

MyProgWriMo - Day 2 - Lessons Learned

2009-11-02T00:00:00-08:00

This is going to be harder and easier than I thought.

So Tapestry supplies its own IoC container, so no Spring at this point. Also there is a nice Hibernate integration, so I am starting to mess with my entities and figure out the needed annotations.

Maven profiles seem to manage the different configuration aspects of my application such as properties for development versus a Hudson build. So I can find it in the future, here is the profile snippet for development with a in memory database:

<profile>
    <id>development</id>
    <properties>
        <hibernate.dialect>org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect</hibernate.dialect>
        <hibernate.connection.driver_class>org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver</hibernate.connection.driver_class>
        <hibernate.connection.url>jdbc:hsqldb:mem:autoblog</hibernate.connection.url>
        <hibernate.connection.username>sa</hibernate.connection.username>
        <hibernate.connection.password></hibernate.connection.password>
        <hibernate.connection.pool_size></hibernate.connection.pool_size>
        <hibernate.connection.autocommit>true</hibernate.connection.autocommit>
        <hibernate.cache.provider_class>org.hibernate.cache.HashtableCacheProvider
        </hibernate.cache.provider_class>
        <hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto>create-drop</hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto>
        <hibernate.show_sql>true</hibernate.show_sql>
    </properties>
</profile>

NaNoWriMo, meet MyProgWriMo

2009-11-01T00:00:00-07:00

My wife is, for the second year in a row, participating in NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. In a effort to leech off her enthusiasm and not distract her by watching House reruns I will be doing MyProgWriMo, My Program Written in a Month.

The plan is to write stories that capture the work to be done in a month, hold one week sprints to execute stories, and release a functional (if not pretty) program at the end of November.

This is the first time I have tried a time-boxed activity like this, so we will see what happens. I will attempt to blog about the experience, but will focus on completing the stories first.

I decided to focus on Java development for this project. I have not done any serious Java programming in YEARS, so I needed a problem set that I understood well so I could focus on the HOW instead of on the WHAT.

SO, here it is. In one month I plan to write (with tests) a blogging platform. I know! Its so cliche… But I understand the issues and there is lots to learn.

Now, no one just writes Java code anymore (or so it seems) so I will be using some tools along the way. Hibernate (duh) will be used for persistence. Spring (double duh) will be used for IoC. I am thinking about Tapestry for presentation, but I have not gotten that far.

Stay tuned, boys and girls. It should be a wild ride.

Oh, and why didn’t I choose Grails? I am pretty sure I can do this all in Grails. I want to know I can do it in Java as well.

Announcing Toolbox

2009-10-08T00:00:00-07:00

I have just released a 0.1 version of Toolbox, a simple command for managing version of Java tools and frameworks. See the project page for details.

NFJS – Fall 2009 – Day Three

2009-09-24T00:00:00-07:00

Ah, the final day of No Fluff…

I spent the morning talking with Barbee Davis and Suzie Lewis Ship about topics ranging from science fiction to Agile development. As a result I missed Ken Sipe’s Iteration 0 panel.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Developers - Ken Sipe

Ken’s session is about applying the The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey to software developers.

Covey’s seven habits are:

be proactive
begin with the end in mind
put first things first
seek first to understand, then to be understood
synergize
sharpen the saw

Ken referred to a blog post ”Top 5 Attributes of Highly Effective Programmers”. The attributes from that post are:

Humility
Love of Learning
Detail Orientedness
Adaptability
Passion

He has his own list:

focused on a mission with a vision
best researcher
best debugger
god complex when it comes to software development
- not a lack of humility
- just optimism to be able to do anything on the computer
quality focused
detailed oriented!

Clojure - Howard Lewis Ship

I have never programmed in Lisp. Considering the other panels in the same time slot I figured I would do something about that and increase my knowledge with the Clojure session.

Clojure is a partial Lisp clone on the JVM with support for software transactional memory to keep your concurrent processes running smoothly.

Hacking Your Brain for Fun and Profit - Nathaniel Schutta

This was the last panel I attended for the weekend, and a lot of fun. I enjoy thinking about and discussing learning techniques and such.

The only topic I will touch on here is the need for sleep. According to the research Nate referenced, if you consistently get six hours of sleep when you need eight it is like missing two nights of sleep. Staying up one night results in a 30% drop in cognitive function…

So go take a nap. A 26 minute nap gives a 34% boost to performance.