What do you do?
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!
Thinking ...
The same old 7
Sometimes I think NB is watching me from afar.
Bring back the 40-hour work week
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.
Being socialable
More of an introvert than an extrovert? Some good tips here to make social gatherings and meetings easier.
Wishlist Wednesday - A time machine
It would be nice to re-visit decisions I've made recently, but I need to live with the results.
Simple tools
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.
A better review ...
... 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 :-)
Todays physics lesson ...
... brought to you by xkcd.