Archive for GTD tag
What are you doing for the next 6 months to be a better developer?
Scott Hanselman posed the open question on his Hanselminutes podcast and there have already been some good responses. My own plan includes:
Improve programming techniques
My girlfriend gave me the well-regarded Code Complete, Second Edition for my birthday. I shall read it cover to cover and adopt good practices I am not currently practising.
for my birthday. I shall read it cover to cover and adopt good practices I am not currently practising.Manage my life
I have started reading GrinGod’s copy of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I will move tasks out of my head and concentrate on what is achievable right now.
. I will move tasks out of my head and concentrate on what is achievable right now.I have set-up these tasks now in Midnight Inbox (great but a little rough) and will keep an eye on OmniFocus. I will be prepared to use my free Moleskine I won in the Moleskinerie summer draw if neither does the job and not immediately write my own software.
Interact with other developers
My Subversion talk at the Guernsey Software Developers Forum went well. I will seek new members and engage in discussions of development with regards to local issues such as those in the finance industry.
I will spend less time on IRC as it is distracting and the non-persistent nature means good answers are lost. Instead I will help more on forums and be prepared to wait for answers to my own questions.
Learn new technologies
I will investigate technologies and learn them where they appear applicable to my work or I find personally interesting. These include:
- Ruby on Rails – clean MVC development with AJAX support… but what about libraries and performance?
- LINQ – simple but powerful object-relational mapping as standard but far away in .NET 3.5
- Cocoa – Apple’s OS X development based around Objective-C giving compilation and dynamic typing
- MonoRail – if I’m going to continue with ASP.NET it won’t be with WebForms
- SharpDevelop – the Visual Studio API is terrible and this project looks well designed and usable
Contribute more to open source
I will contribute more to my favourite open source projects. This includes:
- AnkhSVN – improve user interface and head up the 1.1 release
- SubSonic – refactor more code and help out where I can
Lead development at work
At my new job I will concentrate on the new technology and vision for the next-generation of tools to deliver to our staff and customers and lead my team as appropriate.
I will distil my experience contracting for the last 7 years into the best practices for the company and continue to lead them in adopting modern practices. We now have have source control, formalised request for change and release management procedures however we still need to embrace new tools, write comprehensive unit tests and switch to object-relational mapping for new development.
Switch keymap to Dvorak
I have swapped out my Das 2 at work for my Apple Pro with the key caps rearranged for Dvorak. I will stick to this layout until I can properly touch-type. I won’t actually make me a better developer but it should keep RSI at bay. (This post was written using Dvorak)
[)amien
QuickReminder mini-app – Time based reminders in your system tray
Whether it’s a meeting for a specific time or remembering to stop the tea brewing in 7 minutes time (lovely tea from Adagio Teas that deserves it’s own blog post) events often whiz by without me noticing. I’m not great at time based background threading… but a computer is.
Sure I fire up Outlook (which I don’t use any more), iCal (Only open when I need it) or Google Calendar, create a new event, choose the type, choose which day and time it occurs at and mentally do the math in my head for 7 minutes from now taking the seconds into consideration…. but that’s distracting enough I think “No, I’ll just remember” and I don’t.
What I want is to make a few clicks to set-up an event – ideally based on previous ones such as another “Green tea brew”. I don’t want audio alarms just a pop-up silent balloon that completely disappears with another single click.
Inspired by App-A-Day I thought “what the hell” and wrote it.
Download QuickReminder (.NET) with full source (29KB).
The source includes a few useful snippets including how to:
- Access icons/resources in your Resource.resx file without casting or resource managers
- Make your app register/unregister for automatic startup in Windows
- Access configuration settings without casting or setting managers
- Launch a URL from a label
- Make your system tray based application start-up without a form showing on-screen
Have fun,
[)amien