vineet

What works for me is trying to find the right way of 'tricking' myself. Every few months I feel like I have a week that is not as productive as I believe I could have been, I then basically try a trick (often something that worked for me in the past, but sometime a new trick that I might find on a site like this one).

Some tricks that have worked have been:

1. Pomodoro (actually more specifically: http://tomato.es/).

2. Redefining what I wanted to get done: For example, I used to want to run 30 minutes 5 days a week, but found that I was not able to start doing it because of being busy, tired, or for some excuse. So, I chose a distance that I could easily do in 20 minutes and decided that no matter what I had to do the distance, if only by walking. Not only did I do it with this new definition, but my excuse of being busy driving me to actually run instead of walk.

3. Making a commitment with a friend on a similar topic: This would mean reading at the same time, cooking, sleeping, etc.

4. Getting a new toy related to the task to get me to do something slightly different. This could be buying a new book on the topic, or a pad to take notes.

5. Making a commitment to much smaller sub goals when doing the task.

6. Trying to list and prioritize the easier sub-tasks so that I fool myself into making progress.

7. The carrot and the stick: I let myself get a nice breakfast outside when I wake up earlier (or do something that I have been needing to do), and I sometime say that there has to be some penalty (like not sleeping until I finish atleast one task).

8. First thing in the morning: Trying to do a quick version of the task before I do anything morning. This to me means before making any decisions (involved in serious tasks), as well as before consuming any content (blog posts, e-mails, etc).

To add a little more to the above, I take pride in me persevering, so if I actually do try a new 'trick', I work at it - often taking a few weeks to make it happen. And I often get it into my routine if only for a few more weeks.

I would like to see this happen.

I am caught in between a 100 different things in the next few months so I doubt that I can be of too much help in the short while.

Yeah, but before I get to trying out your features I want to experience it as a user would.

I would recommend creating another page for this user experience, calling it the 'demo', and changing the current demo page to a 'try it now' page.

Looks cool. I think I would find it more useful if I could see a demo (not of the authoring, but of the result).

There is a related cool system: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/lapis/

It is actually a text editor, and doesn't come up with Regular Expressions but similar textual constraint patterns.

I am actually a huge fan of GitHub - I love that they are working on the social features which I have been feeling a need for.

However, even the above sentence does suggest GitHub should somehow charge per user.

Anyway, the last section was interesting:

> Here's the ultimate reality: when tools make you start doing things differently in your code, you know you've fallen into a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario. I just did a huge refactor on a project where I realized I needed to introduce 5 or 6 more jar projects just to tidy a few things up. Counting out these considerations a coin at a time to your undertakers is worse than serfdom.

HBR typically has great articles, but this seems horrible.

Their primary reason for open-sourcing was quality? I am not arguing that open-sourcing can help improve quality of a code base, but if you have quality problems and need it, you should hire better developers.

Quite frankly, for most things that you need for your codebase, even if you open source, you need to do the thing that you need yourself. Fine, there are exceptions - if you work with open source you can likely get a bigger community, potentially build partners, and do more things - but you can't open source expecting the quality to go up.

I am really curious: Why does getting access to the source code matter?

(I am just asking since it seems to be a selling point, and I have never really modified the code of a tool that I have used. For example, how many people modify Eclipse, or Maven, or BugZilla's source code?)

NReduce is definitely cool, but I would love a more lightweight version of it.

(I don't mind videos chats, but I creating videos updates that are accessible to everyone, would mean me focusing too much on the message as opposed to driving progress).

Some of the story behind Spar: http://www.slideshare.net/wyrmwood/ultramodern-frontend-dev-...

Yeah, I was surprised about how big a deal he was making of 'abstractions'. I genuinely can't think of a single real-world developer tool that did not have support for it.

Even UML had support for PSM, PIM, etc.

I like. I hit some bugs when adding/working with tables, but I guess this is beta. I am looking forward to really trying to use it in the not so distant future.

It would be great if you could not only let me select the starting template but if you could let me choose from a dozen skins - say from Bootswatch, or similar features like lavishbootstrap.com, and the 'dice' feature at boottheme.com).

Found a number of tools that I hadn't heard of before. Love the effort.

I disagree with a number of points in this article.

Businesses have been built on reading code. We (Architexa) are one such example, but there are lots more companies trying to help you browse/understand code. One of the older companies in this area is SciTools, which makes the 'Understand' product.

Beyond the above trivial point. The problem with books is that they are often designed to start from only one place (the first chapter). Blogs overcome this by letting you start reading at any post. If there really is a tool that is needed, it is a tool that helps you pick a way to start reading code. It is NOT to give you the one annointed way to read code (from where the writer started writing the code). You sometimes care about the code from the start to finish, or MUCH more likely you would want to read the code in a manner that aligns to your tasks - perhaps by seeing how the code responds to some event (by looking at the event hook), or seeing how the code uses a library or subsystem like the filesystem (by finding dependencies to the appropriate library).

Code reading/understanding is a big problem. And I am biased, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done here.

By the way, I would love your thoughts on what we are doing. Please check the video on our homepage (http://www.architexa.com/) and let me know either here or via e-mail what you think.

This is cool. Would love to see it as a bookmarklet.

Nice.

I see this as a nice stepping stone in between coding and creating and creating unit test.

I have been a fan of Bret Victors work, but the video here has gotten me really excited.

Very cool.

Just a quick caution from someone who has been building similar tools (not as fancy though), is that runtime instrumentation can often severely slow down the main app to the extent that people often don't want to run such tooling.

Or, Google can release their Map application ASAP and try to build more of a foothold in the iPhone market. I guess then they would have to fear Apple rejecting their app when the time is convenient.

Very good point. I am a big fan of what you are trying to do with Gondor.io.

Yes, bootstrapping freemium is hard. I would love to see discussions on how to do it right.

Don't get me wrong. I am revenue driven. I am not crazy about freemium. But I see way too many entrepreneurs not putting themselves into the mind of their target users.

I would trivial Gondor.io as a more specific Python oriented version of Heroku. The benefits are hopefully more obvious, and I would argue that freemium is not important for Gondor.io.

However, the problem I have had with micro-blogging platform is in the details, which often results in me not using it more than twice or thrice. I would easily pay $250/year if ThoughStreams worked for me, but I don't know that. Currently the site looks great and it makes me really want to try it, but I doubt that I will be able to make a decision in 30-days. I am willing to try though.

Best of luck!

Please don't take lessons from app.net. They may have some good ideas behind themselves, but quite frankly I have not figured what they are.

I don't know.

There are many people who just expect freemium to solve all their problems. Freemium needs to be carefully applied, and needs to make sure to be aligned with evaluation needs of potential paying users. Most times startups do not work on the details to make it happen.

30-day evaluations are really helpful when an urgency exists to use a product - in my experience for lots of business sales. But now-days I often get distracted with some project and am not really able to evaluate the product the first time around.

I look at freemium as an evaluation license for as long as you are not doing anything serious with the product. Ofcourse, you need to define the terms of the freemium part. Companies like Heroku do a great job with it.

Thoughtstream is cool. But it needs atleast a 30-day evaluation for me to get a sense of how easy it would me to use.

But perhaps even take the idea further. How about the ability to create up to 30 thought streams for free. Anyone who has created that much will see its value and will want to pay?

Glad to see the Heroku updates. It is definitely becoming one of my favorite tools.

Next step, I hope they roll our websockets support.

Google "skeuomorphism".

Couple of thoughts:

Build your physical network: The best way is to attend User Group meetings and Conferences. With time try to get involved as a speaker and with the organization of these groups.

Built your online network: I would recommend contributing regularly to an open source project or two. Also you can blog to help build your online presence.

Code outside of your work more: Glad to hear you launched your iPhone app. I think working on another project is not a bad idea. This is not to say that what you have already done is not enough, just more of a 'always be delivering code that is not necessarily on your employers schedule'. You seem to have a background in 'big data' projects - I would try to build something on a similar topic but using some of the open source projects (like Hadoop, or Twitter Storm).

Type of company: You seem to be a little in between. Good coders want to work for software companies (as opposed to being part of an 'Enterprise IT' shop). Your bank background might mean that people in 'Software Companies' will not pay as much attention to you. You can make the transition, but it is not as easy.

Headhunters: Try talking to one or two of them. They can help find you a company that is a good fit.

There are lots of points above, just choose the ones most in line with you.

Looks interesting. But perhaps give a use case so that we can see where it will be useful (in particular the forking action)?

Yes, $7.5M, so they should contribute ~75 engineers. But, not just them, also Cisco, EBay, Amazon, and every company having a lot of usage of Eclipse.

And the same line of thinking for Linux, and other open source projects.

Perhaps Eclipse and the open source community as a whole needs to consider asking for more than just making their code/products free.

I know of way too many people giving so much to open source projects, building 'successful' communities, but having a hard time getting enough investment into the community to guarantee the future growth of such ecosystems.

I am a fan of how much Google has put in Eclipse. I think Google employees are on the Eclipse board, they pay Eclipse committers, and might be one of the bigger contributors to the foundation.

However, I do think that Google (and most companies) should step it up even more. Consider how many employees Google has using Eclipse, and how many products Google has building on Eclipse. They are doing a lot with Eclipse and should contribute a lot.

Yes, Eclipse is open source, and companies do not need to contribute to it. But the benefits of open source is a lot more than the free price, it is the freedom to improve bugs that affect your development, and most importantly the freedom to make sure that some single company is not leading the product/project in a strange direction.

I do think that every company that uses Eclipse as an IDE for its employees should have a moral obligation to donate $500 (the typical price of an IDE) to the Eclipse Foundation. And if you are building a product on top of Eclipse, then perhaps 10% of the $500 per user of your product.

Yes, I know I am asking for a lot. Yes, donating to the foundation does include the full time salaries of committers. Yes, there are more companies than Google that need to be doing this. And, yes, I do fear that the tragedy of the commons is to be expected by default for any successful open source project.

I love IntelliJ, but I keep coming back to Eclipse because of all the plugins available for it. I would love to see IntelliJ somehow build the 3rd-party community of plugin developers.