Matthew Lang

Execupundit offers escape strategies that every one can do.

Last week seen a spike in traffic to my blog. Looking at the stats, I noticed that most of the traffic was coming from Hacker News (HN). It turns out that Curtis McHale submitted my Simple Tools post to the HN board. He's a braver man than I am, because I would never post my own stuff to HN.

Why? In a word, fear.

Not because of the content or opinion of my own writing, but the way in which I present that content or opinion. Fear that my writing isn't good enough or doesn't communicate my opinion clearly. I'm not a particularly confident person, but the confidence diminishes when it comes to my writing and my code. "What if it's wrong?" is always at the front of my thoughts when I'm writing or coding.I hate failing at something. Well it's actually more like fearing it. I took a step one day and said, "I'm gonna ship this for the world to see". It was the first step towards building up some confidence. Having a web product out there is a great boost to your confidence if you're a programmer, designer or wannabe entrepreneur. It has helped me to build my confidence but I don't feel that it is enough.

My next step is produce more publicly available writing and code for the world to see. I need to commit to writing more often, coding more often.For writing it means blocking out 30 minutes a day to write. Putting something on the blog every day. Allowing people read more about what you have to say. If it's garbage, they'll let you know.

For coding it means a better understanding of the code I am writing and making that code publicly available. Releasing more libraries for other developers to use and let them point out bugs and enhancements.You can only learn your craft from making mistakes along the way and learning from these mistakes. Want to be a better writer? Write more. Want to be a better programmer? Write more code. The confidence will come along the way, or so I am often told!

As for posting my blog posts to HN, I'll leave that to Curtis to do for me while I chip away at the fear with another piece of writing.

If you want the most from your Saturday, then why not get disconnected?

... to be featured in Kurt Harden's annual 25 blogs guaranteed to make you smarter.

This bike has classic written all over it.

via FGGT / photo Father Tu

How boring? It's always the same opening line when your speaking to someone you've just met. Instead pick one of these 20 things to talk about or if you're feeling really adventurous. Lie about you're job.

What do I do? I'm a training instructor for a special branch of MI5 that is looking to replace spies with animals.*

That should make things more interesting!

... inside, outside and beyond the box. Lots of thinking with Nicholas Bate.

Sometimes I think NB is watching me from afar.

For employees, the fundamental realization is that an employer who asks for more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week is stealing something vital and precious from you. Every extra hour at work is going to cost you, big time, in some other critical area of your life. How will you make up the lost time?

— Salon Bring Back the 40 Hour Work Week by Salon

I'm a firm believer that all work should be done within a specified 8 hours during the day. No more. I've been in development teams where overtime was only used in extreme circumstances and even then there was no stigma attached to doing it because everyone else is. I'd like to think that if I ever owned a company or ran a team, I would adhere to the rule of limiting work to 40 hours a week, possibly less. However, I've never been in that position so who can say.

More of an introvert than an extrovert? Some good tips here to make social gatherings and meetings easier.

It would be nice to re-visit decisions I've made recently, but I need to live with the results.

A week ago I finally got round to doing some little jobs around the house and one of them was taking a couple millimetres off the top of a door so that it would shut correctly. As it required only a small amount off the door, I opted against using a power tool.

When Jennifer's parents moved to Canada over a decade ago, her Dad left some tools for me that he didn't want to take with him. One of them was a plane that belonged to Jennifer's great-grandfather. For those that don't know, a plane consists of a block with a projecting steel blade. It is used to smooth wooden surfaces by gradually removing shavings away from the surface of the wood.

Intrigued as to whether it was still working I dug it out from the toolbox and started working on fixing the door. Surprisingly the blade of the plane was still sharp enough to take just enough wood off the top of the door for it to close properly again. This plane is at least 30 years old and still works. It got me thinking about the choice of tools that programmers have when it comes to working with code and how long these tools last.For some years now, the text editor has been my choice of tool when working with code. I used TextMate for Ruby coding for about four years before I switched to Sublime. Yes, the keyboard shortcuts might have changed, but essentially, these two are the same tool. Just plain old text editors.A text editor is such a simple tool to use and many of the more popular text editors have a history that goes back at least five years. Look at Notepad++, jEdit and others. They've all been around for years. Even at over 20 years old, Vim is undoubtedly the first choice of text editor for many programmers.

The other choice developers have is an integrated development environment or IDE for short. These are the power tools of the software development world. IDEs are development tools that are designed to aid developers by providing built-in shortcuts that increase programmer productivity, but where they fall short is that they are tied to the programming language or platform they were designed for.

Being tied to a few programming languages or a platform is very restricting. Inevitably IDE's get releases every couple of years to take advantage of the latest new features from the programming languages and frameworks they were designed for. Re-learning the ins and outs of these news tools every couple of years is the kind of time I'd rather not waste. These tools are too complicated in my book.

That's the beauty of simple tools like our plane, like our text editor. They last a long time. Just like the plane made fixing the door a simple task to do, the text editor makes working with code a simple task. You just have to know how that programming language works in order to make the best use of your chosen text editor.

There's a lot to be said for the simple tools we use.

... where Patrick Rhone looks at how he's still using his first generation iPad and why it's the tools you never think of that get the job done.When I replied to Patrick's original post on App.net on how I'm still using my five year old black Macbook (believe me, that's old for a programmer) for development, his reply back was a great summary on why we use the tools we do:

It's what we believe in. ;-)

Thanks Patrick :-)

... brought to you by xkcd.

A little reminder from Dustin Curtis. Avoid the trap of worrying about what you lose.

Start a new coffee shop that prides itself on not only making better tasting coffee and food and provides a better customer service, but also pays their UK taxes.

Try Nicholas Bate's time management plan for a better day.

Glad to hear that I'm not alone. I don't always think that I am a terrible programmer, but some days I just can't afford to spend the extra time in making my code better with time restrictions set that can't be negotiated.

A good coder knows when something should be quick and dirty, and when something should be thorough and clean.

via Dan Shipper

Good luck pedaling that off the building!

via FGGT

... to say yes to forking a new career path.

Otherwise you're project is going to stall and get nowhere.

Know that when you start just a side project, you’re starting so much more. It’ll completely consume you. The worst failure in any side project is to devote time, energy and sanity for any sustained period only to close the doors.

Side projects are a means to an end.

— Side Projects by Andrew Dumont

A passive income stream. That's why I'm working on Journalong. Growth has stalled in the last couple of months though, so I'm looking to rectify that with a site up-lift and highlighting more of the features I've shipped in the last couple of weeks.

... we all have them. However it's never too late to turn them around.

... the Internet?

Barring a few replies out of common courtesy, it's now been three months since I stopped posting to my Twitter account and moved over to App.net. So what's the change of scene been like?

It's good to hang out some place else, and while I may not have the following that I had on Twitter, I'm happy to post here for the foreseeable future. App.net doesn't have the numbers that Twitter has, so at the moment I'm following most of the same people I follow on Twitter. Not many of these people are actively posting on App.net, but it's forcing me to consider following others that I might not have considered before. Not a bad thing really.

The big change though that sets App.net apart from Twitter is that there is no free account. Yip, this is a paid service that you are using and you're probably thinking that a service that doesn't have a free account would be restricting itself, but this is precisely why I like App.net. Not only does it ensure the healthy and continued development of a product paid for by its users (or customers if you prefer), it also provides a barrier that many people aren't going to cross.Twitter's free service means that anyone can sign up, and while that's all well and good for everyone, I'm not looking for a service that allows just anyone to connect with you.

The subscription fee that App.net charge ensures that there is little chance of accounts being created on the App.net network that currently pollute the Twitter network. Spam accounts, celebs and retail companies to name a few. I don't follow any of these type of accounts on Twitter, but knowing that there is little chance of these kind of accounts polluting the App.net network means that the quality of posts by it's users should remain higher and in turn be a much more interesting place to hang out.It's early days though, but I for one am enjoying my change of network.

Which is why I love working on Journalong. The small problem I had with keeping notes and thoughts in plain text that I could pick up on any of the devices I use was the problem. Next thing I know I'm running a small product on my little corner of the web.

Today, why not start something small?