- No Ridiculous Car Trips
Makes me want to visit Sweden even more now…
via No ridiculous car trips on Vimeo
- What Motivates Us To Do Great Work?
“On days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak. On days when they feel they are spinning their wheels or encountering roadblocks to meaningful accomplishment, their moods and motivation are lowest.”
As creative thinkers, we want to make progress, and we want to move big ideas forward. So, its no surprise that the best motivator is being empowered to take action.
When it comes to recommendations for creative leaders, Amabile and Kramer don’t mince words: “Scrupulously avoid impeding progress by changing goals autocratically, being indecisive, or holding up resources.” In short, give your team members what they need to thrive, and then get out of the way.
via What Motivates Us To Do Great Work? :: Articles :: The 99 Percent.
- the “Zombie Team” test
… the “Zombie Team” test for figuring out whether or not someone is ready to work on an intense project, be it a start-up or otherwise. The test is this: If zombies suddenly sprung from the earth, could you trust the perspective team member to cover your back? Would they tell you if they got bit? Most importantly would you give them the team’s only gun if you knew they were the better shot? If the answer is no to any of those questions you need to let them get eaten by the cubicle wasteland of corporate culture, because they aren’t ready for this kind of work.
- Authlogic Perishable Token changes and breaks emails
Overall, I think Authlogic is pretty great. It’s saved me a bunch of time that I don’t have to worry about user creation and user session maintenance. But this one little doozy was causing some issues when sending out one-time-use emails like invites or password resets.
The perishable_token is the suggested way to send out secured one-time-use emails because it’s updated every time the User model is updated (like, when the user logs in) so the email can’t be re-used to reset the password again for instance. I’m using it in some pretty strange ways to handle proxy users (users who haven’t actually registered yet on our site), but this issue also is present for the password-reset case.
I noticed that some users were getting rejected after clicking the link in the email saying that the perishable token was no longer valid. “That can’t be right,” I thought to myself – because I know for a fact that some of those users hadn’t logged in. But their token was still invalid. So after a little bit of troubleshooting, I realized the issue….
The token is updated every time the User object is saved. Not just when they login. And I have jobs running in the background to update the users with external data pulled from various APIs. So my job was resetting the perishable_token for every user it touched. Ok, so how did I fix the issue? Simple really – I just took control of the maintenance of the perishable_token away from Authlogic and handled it myself.
- The “Cult of Done” Manifesto
Some great thoughts about getting it done. It’s like my new favorite acronym – JFDI!
5) Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6) The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7) Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8) Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
via Bre Pettis | I Make Things – Bre Pettis Blog – The Cult of Done Manifesto.
- Engineering Management – Technical Leaders
This isn’t breaking news, but it’s a good explanation of why having technical leaders is so important. Especially at a startup with a small team (in my experience). Otherwise the tech team hears a lot of my least favorite question ever, “That’s not hard to do, right?”
All external management hires must be able to write code and show a high level of technical proficiency, up to and including the head of the technical department. If the company is a technology company, this should also include the CEO.
There is an odd misconception that this is not a necessary requirement for an executive or manager, as though programming were just a fancy form of typing. No other specialized industry seems to feel this way: banking executives are expected to be able to read a balance sheet; an automotive executive would never be hired if they didnt know what a catalytic converter did.
- Ninety-ninety rule
“The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.”
- New Research on How to Learn
I’ve always been a person who is driven to learn new things and try to solve new problems. But there was sometimes a disconnect between what I was motivated to learn and what I was required to “learn” when I was in school. Subjects and topics that I didn’t think were relevant (and still haven’t used in the real world), were very difficult for me to pay attention to for hour-long lectures in large auditoriums.
So, I have always believed that variety is the key to learning and retention. And now there’s some research that backs that up.
[...] there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.
The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.
For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.
via Mind – Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits – NYTimes.com.
I’ve been using the two techniques in bold above for a a long time in my work and personal life. By having many diverse projects in the air at once I find it’s easier to both keep interested and see each project through to completion, but also to learn, invent and retain new information, techniques, or ideas.
Finding the right balance of focus vs. multi-tasking vs. relaxing is a science all its own. But once you find your perfect ratio, your productivity and happiness will skyrocket.
- Whirlfood – social suggestions for food & nightlife [beta]
Well, this is the site that I’ve been working on in my learning Ruby on Rails series. It’s called Whirlfood (pending a better name) and it is going to be a social suggestion site that helps you pick places to eat and where to go out with friends.
But while we’re working on the algorithm, it just does some neato analytics on your data. We’ll be adding more analytics once we get the friend import stuff working – we we can analyze how you interact with your friends and look for trends. Then we’ll really start to tackle the suggestion engine. We have what we think are some pretty cool ideas for that part.
Stats Dashboard 
Fullscreen Map View 
This is just a quickie screenshot set of what the stats look like for me (and I’ve only been using Foursquare for 2 weeks while building this app). If you want to sign up and play with it, let me know and I’ll get you the link to the beta site!
- Tip: Using vim with Rails Apps
I’ve been trying a few different editors for working with Rails, including TextMate, Aptana and my trusty vim. I was leaning towards TextMate (bought a license too) but since I also develop on Ubuntu and would like to standardize tools to a certain extent, I decided to see if I could supercharge vim. The answer is a resounding YES.
This plugin is awesome. Because it is aware of the Rails app structure, you can do cool things like jumping between files using commands like
:Rcontroller Userwhich will load the UserController or:Rview places/newwhich loads /app/views/places/new.html.erb. And, when your cursor is over a reference like a has_many line in a model if you key ingf, it will jump to the file where that reference is defined.Or, if you’re looking at specific action in a controller, the command
:Rwill jump you to the view for that action (and vice versa). It even supports refactoring and neato stuff like that. These are just a few examples, try it out and read the documentation to see how powerful it is!
