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.

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

After a considerable amount of thinking and experimentation, I have reached a powerful conclusion. Gone are the days of tracking my life in various applications spread across various medium–the tool I have settled on is the conventional legal pad. It’s about the size of my laptop and much thinner, so it can ride with it in the bag, it needs no power, I don’t look like a loser using it on the bus, and in manageable doses, it’s easy enough to search. The last time I tried this, I imposed rules about how to take notes, schedule tasks, and recall information, even going so far as to limit certain pen colors to certain functions. This time, anything goes, and it’s working great.

My aunt, an attorney in Nashville, keeps a paper calendar and task list after similar electronic organizational woes. She does an amusing pantomime of the lawyers that use PDAs who sit in court trying to find a date that will work for the next hearing.

Greetings, new readers. My name is Austin and I’m a developer here at ArcStone. Most frequently I develop in PHP, but I have also done web application development in Java, Ruby [on Rails], Perl, Python, and other sorts of development in C#, C, C++, and Tcl/Tk. This series of articles will attempt to explain the technically complex (and thus often misunderstood) parts of my job for the non-technical or less-technical readers. This is a good place to start if you’re curious about what web application development is like, and more importantly, what it’s like to work with ArcStone to develop your web application. (more…)