Productivity++

Trolling through work the last few days, just thought I'd share a few of the things I have done/know I have to do in order to have the best day at "the office."

Sit, or stand. Don't lie down.

Living in Napa was tough. I didn't have a chair to sit in just a futon that was not ideal. I lay down a lot, and that just screams failure. Once I moved to New York, I made sure I either had a) a desk that I could stand at, or b) a chair that is only comfortable with good posture.
Hanging out at the General Assembly can make this difficult with their beautiful (and by beautiful I mean seductive) black couches, but I know it'll be a good work day when I can find a chair or find a place to stand at the bar.

Find a script to get rid of reddit.

I have a ridiculous habit of hanging out on reddit and clicking on imgur links nonstop. There are scripts all over github to disable select websites, so I'm going to turn one on that just says "Problem?" if I attempt to access it. Self-restrain can come later.

Do a warm up.

For now, I do about an hour or so of warm up work each day. Read out of a book and do "write as I tell you to" code; something relatively simple and gets my mind going. It reminds me of when I taught how students complained about doing Daily Oral Language every single day insistent that their writing was "fine", but nonetheless they sucked it up, did it, and after a few months we all slowly began to see improvement. It's a witless activity, but a great reminder that 99% of the errors in code are probably my fault, even to the point that I just didn't copy it correctly. Eventually, I'd like to move onto using this hour to just looking around on github or stackoverflow to learn new code to implement or find questions within reason that I could answer. But for now, I still have a lot to learn.

Make everything on my computer huge.

I started doing this for a couple of reasons. One, as monitors become better and better, the resolution increases, and then everything gets smaller. I'm not getting old, but if I'm reading an ebook online (probably because I was too lazy to take out my kindle, or put the book on it), I like to make the text readable to the point where I'm not squinting or leaning forward--again, something that doesn't promote good posture. On a typical ebook or article, this is at least 2 cmd+'s on Chrome, somewhere between 20-24 lines viewable on a full screen computer. I do the same thing with terminal (2 cmd+'s), and set that to "hacker mode" (pro mode) to contrast the typical black-text-on-white that I see on the web, or even my textmate workables. This all lets me focus more on my work instead of straining to determine where I left off or to find a bug in the code.

Meet someone new.

This I kind of take for granted since I live in New York with 8 million people, but I make it a goal to talk to someone that I haven't spoken to before. This sounds like simple networking, sure, but just a matter of opening my mouth every day for the last two weeks has gotten me two job interviews, plenty of business cards, and chances to meet people I would have never met otherwise.

Work with a goal in mind.

Short term goals seem tame, but any responsible person understands that in order to succeed, you need reachable daily goals. I figured that out the hard way when I would tell myself "I'm going to read these ten articles and then do some crazy stuff with it!" That never happened, and I got frustrated fast. Instead, I'm finding what's doable within a day, getting that done, and taking a break before I try to figure out what my next steps should be.



On that note, I've finished all my CSS review, and what's left on github of my splash page is just garbage. Tomorrow's gameplan: rewrite this from scratch on paper, and start doing the visual designs in inkscape. I'd like to get this page running on just HTML and CSS before I start cruising into javascript land again--or before I implement some anyway.
I also completed the next three exercises in Zed Shaw's book on Python (my current daily warm up). If you haven't checked it out yet, I highly recommend it.

Moving along with Validation

Just a couple things to share today:

HTML review is complete. Probably missing some essentials, but the core is there and I can more on to CSS. Best things I realized:

HTML is all about structure. It should really be all about the framework.
CSS is all about presentation and what I want all this information to look like. The more I break it up with id, class, div, span, the more unique the website can be.
I assume, then, that JS is about interaction. How the website works with the user. This is where the legit coding comes in, and ideally, where I can start using my ruby background to design some really neat things.

Also want to share a couple one page web app links:

Get Skeleton: This is a framework that helps you format a single webpage. All the code you'd ever need.

Node.js Web App: From an up and coming startup founded in New York City (I believe), a founder shares how node can be used to form a solo page for a web app. hij1nx breaks it down fairly clearly--skills coming from his lecturing experience, I think.

Follow my splash page work on github. It's slowly coming along, and I have a much better idea of how to present all this information now. Looking forward to writing all original blog CSS code as well.

Interview Week 1 Completed

Just finished the last job interview I had lined up of several since last week. There are two hopefuls; one I'm hoping I'll hear back from soon, the other wants me to come in for round two later this week or next.

I'm meeting with Jon to discuss some website designs for his Disc Jockey business. Hopefully he will approve a couple, get me the things I need from him, and then I can get this website figured out by the end of the month--something to add to my starving portfolio.

In the meantime, working on splash page for heypodo.com (I'm sure everyone has noticed the contents is just a blog for now), and flipping through this article on web standards sent by Chris Korhonen. Another reader suggested I run the webpage through my mac, though I'm looking at more "open" hosting options. I assume I can get through this and write up my own blogger markup for something more interesting than this simple template.

Till then!

Finished a rails app

It took me all day--including several breaks to do some job hunting, updating websites, and buying two domain names--but I finished the whole Ruby on Rails introduction guide, and I understand for the most part what's going on. It seems like Rails is best for multi-user support, which is the main reason why I think startups are so "on it" now, especially the ones that revolve around social networking.

The mvc infrastructure is actually quite a piece of art. Rails is so well integrated within itself that it really isn't that difficult to create and move things around, particularly when you get to writing the different views and methods. Of course, writing views takes some html/js/css knowledge... so I'll get to that. Posted the outcome on github (or should be up shortly after this update).

Gameplan now? Get back to rubying. I fixed up secret santa a bit more so there are 4 less variables and all the data is stored within one array instead of the 4 or 5 I had before. Next step is to implement STDIN to save a group of information into the array, and then it should be at its final stage of development.

Then, it's onto the next ruby quiz I want to check out.

So... new week, new goals. HTML and CSS reviewfest, and if all goes according to plan, get that website cranked out!