A common thread from everything I’ve been reading and thinking about lately is that an effective worker or firm (any type) must constantly seek new ways to maintain and improve productivity. I’ve been on a non-stop mission to drive up my own person efficiency for about a month now, and just by taking five minutes a day to really think about it, I’ve made remarkable strides, though I know I have a long way to go.

I realized that since getting my MacBook Pro, it’s the only computer I use at home and at work. But I have two great computers at home too–a Windows box and a CentOS Linux box each running 2+ GHZ and 1+ GB Ram. They were going to waste! So I hauled them into the office and stuck them under my desk, plugged them into my previously empty KVM switch, and now I have a lab server (Linux) which mirrors our development and production servers to speed update times and allow for easy collaboration with others in the office and a Windows box which I’ll use for testing.

For any computer worker who has a strong desire to be more productive at their job, I have one small tip–invest some time and money (if need be) in learning to type faster. I’ve seen a hundred programmers who can’t go more than 40 or 50 WPM. It’s what we do at least 40 hours per week… so why not take the time to learn to do it exactly right?

… and you’ll soon find yourself hopelessly addicted to tea.

At a coffee shop near the University of Minnesota this evening, I found myself unconsciously ordering a Jasmine tea rather than coffee or espresso. It’s my fourth cup today. I need help.

Welcome back to my unauthorized look into the seedy underbelly of a web application. (did you miss part one?) Today: the database. The model. The schema. The sick, twisted, gang of data that lurks beneath the surface of nearly every web application. This isn’t for the faint of heart, so if you can’t bear to imagine your precious information being crammed feet-first into a database, I understand. Otherwise, read on for the thrilling story of a dictator with some complex data modeling issues. (more…)

I’m currently ignoring an interview with David Heinemeier Hanssen, the creator of Ruby on Rails (a favorite programming tool of mine) for the sake of some decompression. Talking about code always makes me want to write something big from the ground up, though, which I need to avoid right now (way too busy!). Besides, I always have ArcSite to tweak and improve.

I decided to spend my Saturday at this all day conference called MinneBar. Lots of fun so far – went through a Ruby on Rails re-introduction course, and I’m now about to listen to a discussion of Net Neutrality. More later.

Take heart web developers everywhere, even the big boys have problems. I went to Flickr to find some interesting photos and this is what I saw:

The moral of the story? If you are going to have errors on your site, at least show a witty message.

April 22^nd marks the 35^th Anniversary of Earth Day. Raise your awareness and Get Your Green On:

#1) Calculate your ecological footprint at Earth Day Network to find out how many planets it would take to sustain 6.5 billion clones of yourself.

Apparently I’m not doing so well:

IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 4.1 PLANETS.

#2) Learn about sustainability initiatives in the IT industry at the Green Grid:

“The Need for Datacenters to Go Green

Until recently, electiricy usage wasn’t a major IT concern. In fact, the electricity costs for running and cooling computers generally wasn’t even considered part of the IT budget. Servers didn’t draw much power and their density in datacenters wasn’t significant enough to create any concern. All that has changed with the nonstop growth of the Internet and the world’s businesses, governments, and other institutions filling up rack after rack with more powerful servers to keep up with the growth….”

Read the full article here (and watch out for typos).

#3) Stay current with green tech news and updates at the Green Technology Blog, like David Filo’s comments on Yahoo’s efforts to achieve carbon neutrality.

Do you have a Mac? Do you use iTunes? Does it frustrate you that Apple has chosen to make it a dumbed down music manager that lacks some truly useful features? Me too!

Check out Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. Doug has collected a truly great collection of script that are free to download, easy to install, and add new features to iTunes. More iTunes tips after the jump.

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You are paying for 7MB of pure, broadband DSL speed, but are you getting it? To know for sure check out Broadband reports speed test. After you’re done (and presumably disappointed) browse through the rest of their site. It’s a great resource for all sorts of information, tools, and networking goodness.

Here is my result:

I just finished a great book, “Better” by Atul Gawande, a surgeon, scientist, and writer. A primary message, applicable outside of the world of medicine, is that we should always be counting something, even if it’s just to see if there’s a reason to be counting. I have decided that I’m going to count the hours of sleep I get in a night versus the time of the 50th line of code I write the next day and the amount of truly productive time I spend at work. Why the 50th? It’s easy to get through 1. I could get through 1 just to allow myself to count it. To avoid externalities such as meetings, I will pause my clock whenever I could not for any reason be working on code.

I’m going to give this trial counting run a month and then I’ll examine my results for a direct correlation. I suspect that I’ll find one, and will thus be able to compute the minimum amount of sleep I need to be maximally productive.

Think that sounds hard to track? Guess again – I’m a software developer – the script is already written, and the results shall be tracked in a database.

“truly productive time” – I will gauge this myself to be total time spent “in the zone” doing maximally productive development work. Since I am also compelled to measure my billable time in our time tracking system, I think I will be able to derive some valuable measurements from this experiment whether there is a direct correlation between sleep.

One… one unproductive hour spent reading The Onion and harassing my coworkers! AH HA HA HA HA