Matthew Lang

Many readers here will know of my support of the social platform, App.net, and how it has become a worthy alternative to other social platforms. It's a place where I hang out daily, watching conversations happening, taking part in them on the odd occasion and using the 256 character length posts to bash out my thoughts, opinions and ideas through out the day.

I wasn't particularly surprised by the news yesterday that the App.net team is having to scale back its number of employees and rely on contractors to maintain and support the App.net platform. The App.net team have been quiet of late and there hasn't been a visible enough uptake of new members for me to see that App.net platform is growing. It's not all bad news though, Dalton and Bryan have said they will continue running App.net indefinitely.

I've heard so many arguments that App.net doesn't have the user base to sustain growth and given the recent announcement from Dalton, it's hard to argue against this. The thing is though, it's still making enough money to sustain the platform, but this for me is the worrying part.

App.net started as a platform that required payment before you could create an account here. $36 per year is the cost. It's not much for many people, and there's even the option of paying monthly. It was this pay wall that guaranteed that there would be some sense of mediation of users coming onto the platform. If you were serious about joining you paid up. Dalton's recent post reads that hosting is covered by the renewal of paid accounts, but how much of the hosting costs are being used to support free accounts on the platform?

I want App.net to survive and continue to grow, but the free tier account has always been a sticking point. Accounts that don't contribute to the sustainability of the platform and their continued use of other features such as Broadcast means that they're using up part of the hosting of this platform while giving nothing in return.

I could be wrong about this and I don't have the numbers to prove my argument, but I would like to see the platform reducing the features that are on offer to free accounts and continue to add more value to paid and developer accounts. If these accounts are the ones that will sustain App.net in the future, then surely they must be the primary focus rather than building features for all in the hopes that some free tier accounts upgrade?

It's not all bad though, the App.net team have open sourced the Alpha client for the platform. It's from this point on that I hope that contributions made by the community will drive this social platform back into a more healthier state of sustainability and growth.

I love the community behind App.net. My timeline is a much more pleasant place for reading than any single day that I had when I was on Twitter. Interesting conversations and shared links provide a much better environment than being the one account in millions on Twitter.

I'll continue to post on App.net until the lights go out, which I hope is years away from now.

via FGGT

The last two months have been something of a blur. Client work has taken up most of my day now and even into the night as well when I shouldn't really be working. A pattern, or lack of pattern has emerged.

It started a couple of months when I decided to scale back on my daily writing. I thought that not writing as much would let me focus on getting other chores and such done. Truth is, it was the start of a slow decline in what I had carefully built up over the best part of a year. The daily routine.

My work day pretty much had the same format for the most of last year and it worked for me. I had the same routine in the morning for preparing for the day ahead and the same routine at night for reviewing the day. It worked for me.

Once I stopped writing on a daily basis though the routines started to be skipped, and then the calendar was running empty, the task list built up and before you know it, my daily routine consisted of nothing more than simply putting out fires. I've been in that place before and it wasn't a good place to be.

I ended up reacting to problems rather than anticipating problems and setting time aside for them. I was context switching multiple times a day and losing focus. My inboxes and lists were stradily climbing with not view of the bottom of them.

No more. The routines are back in place, the daily writing will be started again and a plan of attack has been formalised. Let's see where this goes.

I've been reluctant to explore other services for hosting web applications, but with costs for even a small application on Heroku I've been considering other options.

Last week I successfully transferred the hosting of my blog from Heroku to Linode. Performance wise Heroku was ideal for this website and it handled the traffic well enough considering that I ran the site on one dyno. So if performance and uptime is satisfactory then why make the move?

I've got a number of other Rails applications that are sitting on Heroku. One is a production application, while the rest are simply prototypes and work in progresses. For the production application I've enabled a number of addons to ensure the application responds well to traffic but these addons come at a price. By the time I've added the minimum addons needed I'm looking at close to $100 dollars a month. That's expensive for just a small application.

The beauty of Heroku is that it requires little maintenance. Need more dynos? Add them on. Need more worker processes? Add them on. Everything is easy to maintain through the Heroku web interface. That maintainability comes at a price though and it's a price that I think is becoming too expensive. This is where the move to Linode comes in.

At $20 per month for their basic server it's much more cheaper than keeping a two dynos running on Heroku. This is only half the story though. The other half to this puzzle is Cloud 66. It's a fully configured application stack that sits on your Linode server. It's geared towards Rails and other Ruby based applications so it fits my criteria nicely. The nice thing about Cloud 66 is that it handles the setup and maintenance of your application stack giving you the choice to setup servers with different cloud providers if you need to.

I'm still in the early days of using Cloud 66 and Linode but so far I'm liking what I'm seeing. The end goal is to move all my main Rails applications over to Linode and with some running using Cloud 66 and some just running on a bare server without Cloud 66. Heroku is a great service for hosting Rails applications but it's price is far too expensive for me and when there's cheaper alternatives out there that don't require as too much maintenance.

The other benefit to this move is that I'm starting to learn more about the internals of hosting Rails applications again. I'll use Cloud 66 for most applications, but I will aim to have a Linode server for small Rails applications that are just ideas. Learning how to host Rails applications without all the Heroku magic can only make me a better developer as it broadens my knowledge as a developer. That's all I'm aiming to be, a better developer. And if this hosting move help me do that then I'm happy.

... with Execupundit.

via FGGT

Carl Holscher is.

We all have strengths and interests. I have been the Mac Guy. But I need the Excel Guy and the Photoshop Woman to be successful. We all have our strengths. And when our knowledge falls short we use the teams’ knowledge.

— Team by Carl Holscher

Even the best kept habits require a break. Regardless of how well you think it's working for you as a habit, it's only when you step back from it, breaking the habit, that you can see the true impact and value of it.

If you're like me, you'll have tried to introduce hundreds of habits in an effort to improve your health, your career, your finances or even your relationships with people. For me some of them have truly stuck over the years. Keeping a journal is one of them and something I do on an almost daily basis. Whether it's a family event, work or even a thought, it gets written down and saved for a future review or reflection. It took me a number of months to get this habit down on a daily basis and while I can see the benefit of it, I've never taken a break from it.

Last week though I decided to drop the journal tools for a few days and just enjoy the time off I had with the family. It was a real eye opener. In that time I realized that although keeping a journal is a good thing for posterity and also for remembering where I was with some work, I was missing something.

Looking back at my journal entries over the years and months, there has been a subtle trend in my journal entries. In the past I would journal once a day with a review of the day, now though I'm logging journal entries multiple times a day. Whenever I complete a bit of work, whenever I have the inkling of an idea, or even when a link catches my eye but I want don't want to just read it later, I want to read it from a particular angle. Every day I'm working I'm writing multiple journal entries as I'm working. When the weekend rolls around, the context of my journal switches and I focus on one entry for the weekend if I did something with the family that was fun.

Before I didn't recognize the pattern of my journal activities and how I was switching between work and family journals. Having stepped back from the habit of keeping multiple journals, I can see that the shift in change is better for me. When I read the last month's worth of entries I found it so much easier to read the frequent updates per day rather than the single monolithic update done on a daily basis.

I also realized something else. I put too much emphasis on writing a journal entry every day when it wasn't necessary. Having not kept a journal for the best part of a week, I can see that it's okay to miss a few days here and there. It's taken a break in my habits to see the true value I'm getting from keeping a journal.

Sometimes we end up switching to automatic-pilot when we habituate processes that we think will make us better people. Truth is though, we need time away, a holiday from these habits so that we can properly evaluate and review their value. Only when we can do this can we see how that habit is truly working for us.

Software is a form of product that will deteriorate and expire with time. With this in mind, how easy would it be for you to switch software from your preferred tools set to a new one?

I try and not be too dependent on the software that I use on a daily basis. I do have a favourite set of tools that I use but I'm always conscious of the fact that whatever I'm using might not be around tomorrow.

Take for instance my to do list. I've been using Todoist for some time now. What would happen if Todoist stopped trading next month? Or even next week? Barring a natural disaster, I'm pretty confident that most services, including Todoist, will allow a small window of time for you to transfer your data across to another application of your choice before that company closes down.

The good thing about software as a product is that there's plenty of it. We're spoiled for choice when it comes to software and with the now common place app stores from various technology companies, there's an app store for most major hardware platforms.

What happens though when software becomes a dependency?

I've heard many people say that their preferred software product for a particular task is 'X' and that they just couldn't do their job without it. Perhaps that's true if you're in a specialist job working on the next wave of new technology and innovation, but for most of us this just shouldn't be the case. We should not be dependent on just one particular brand of software to get the job done. If you're so dependent on one particular software product then I'd say that you're narrowing your choices down too much.

The text editor is my daily tool for writing and cutting code. My preferred text editor is Sublime Text, but for any reason that Sublime Text was to stop being supported or even cease to exist, then what's my options?

We'll I've played with Vim enough over the years to make the jump to that, and there's a number of other text editors that I could pick up like Chocolat that would do the job just fine. Yes, I may have invested a considerable amount of time getting to know the shortcuts keys of Sublime Text but if I had to then I would comfortable picking up something else. We should always have options to fall back on for the selected tools that we use on a daily basis. In most cases this second set of software might be products we've tried in the past or something that we previously have experience with.

Investing time and effort into a particular software product is fine if it's something that you will use on a daily basis for about 8 hours a day, but anything else is simply a product or tool that could be replaced with alternatives already on the market or a custom made option if needed. Software isn't for life, it's simply a temporary means to an end until we find something better that works for us. With this in mind, are you to dependent on the software you use?