Like most developers who have been developing awhile, I have my favoured ways to keep myself productive. Most are standard: careful use of caffeine, a frequently-curated TODO list, an obvious place to check my priorities, occasional retrospectives and so on.
I also have a few less-common ones that...
Do you sell an online product? Or do you want to?
Have you considered some sort of an online presence for the buyers, to let them talk to each other? It seems like a really good idea. If a lot of people are trying to learn the same thing, letting them talk to each other could be amazing. I know I get some wonderful buyers of Rebuilding Rails and Mastering Software Technique. And I’m an old-fashioned geek. I always want to throw a party to get all my friends into the same room so they can meet each other.
My idol on this one is Nate Berkopec. In addition to being a great conversationalist, he sells the definitive ebook on Rails performance and runs multi-day workshops about it too. But if you buy the ebook, you get an invitation to the Slack workspace. And the Slack alone is worth the price of the book, because anybody who is anybody in Ruby performance hangs out there. They’re not all talking, but they’re available for questions.
His book is good. But it still pales in comparison to having everybody who’s interested in the topic centered in one place. There’s simply no way Nate could give you as much value as everybody else put together… So he doesn’t. He invites you to a group of everybody else put together. It’s a really good idea.
So I’ve sold you on it, right? It’s simple. Make a Slack workspace, all the cool people will hang out there, everybody will buy your product to get access and you can retire to Bermuda.
Not quite that easy, no.
I recently purchased a Canon EOS 250d (also sold as the Canon Rebel SL3.) I thought, “hey, the 200d has been around forever, it probably won’t be hard to get it working for video streaming and recording my talks.”
I was naive. If you own one, you may have the same problem. (NOTE: I HAVE A SOLUTION...
I help folks practice to get better at writing software. So sometimes I’m asked, “how do you practice well in general?” A lot of my answer comes from The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle. I find that the good books basically agree about what makes good practice. I’m also quoting this article for a few...
(This visa used to be called the Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa and is now called the Global Talent visa. Same thing.)
People ask me why I moved to Inverness. Lots of reasons, of course. But one thing that seriously helped was a flexible visa to get me and my family into the United Kingdom. One reason...
In a moment, all of you readers are going to hate Matt Bird. I get it. I hate him too.
He’s a professional screenwriter who also wrote a great book about how to write. You’d think that might excuse him a bit, but no, I’m not letting him off the hook. Some crimes are unforgiveable. You’ll see.
Here...
After about 3.5 years of writing and researching about Ruby performance on AppFolio’s company blog, I’m going out on my own, to work for myself.
My hope is that having moved to the Scottish Highlands, I can make a living selling my books Rebuilding Rails and Mastering Software...
My kids are mercifully distracted for a few moments. The giant jumble of colored blocks on my calendar has a gap right now. No due dates are marked in red in my overgrown to-do list.
I am free to practice. I have skills I certainly want to practice.
And here I am, staring dully at the teddy bear next to my monitor, not practicing. Why? Here’s one: I am afraid of wasting this precious practice time, of throwing it away on nothing worthwhile.
What if I’m practicing wrong? What if there’s some better way to do it, and I’ll be sad that I bothered? What if I’m a sucker because I’m putting in hours that do me no good?
I can’t magic my fear away, but I can talk through it and explain it. I always feel better afterward. Care to come with me on this little journey?
Many of you know that I’ve been AppFolio’s Ruby Fellow for over three years. I feel like it’s been a great run, both for me and for AppFolio. I hope it’s been a great run for the rest of you. I know many of you have said very kind things about my articles about Ruby performance.
My time as Ruby Fellow...
You’ve probably seen the little excerpts of Orangutan Jungle School on YouTube (or elsewhere.) If you haven’t, they’re awesome, and worth watching.
Here’s a fairly representative example.
But basically, people doing orangutan rescue are doing a lot of filming what goes on with their six-hundred...
