Software. A few months ago I had the opportunity to have dinner with Ramit Sethi.
We shot the breeze about business topics for a little while — optimizing email opt-in rates, A/B testing to victory, pricing strategies, and the like. Writing and selling software is solidly in my comfort zone and is what I usually talk about on this blog. If you want that, skip this post. We are going deep, deep into the fluffy bits! The conversation wandered into the softer side of things: psychology, and how running businesses has changed us as people. Knowing What Motivates You Have you ever heard the expression “That really pushes my buttons”? That particular story might evoke shades of Tiger Mom parenting. I realized something fairly early on, though: being a good, hardworking student and getting good grades are two very distinct skill sets. That’s also why I got started writing.
Scraping - How to Become a Great Finisher - Heidi Grant Halvorson. By Heidi Grant Halvorson | 10:01 AM June 22, 2011 The road to hell may or may not be paved with good intentions, but the road to failure surely is.
Take a good look at the people you work with, and you’ll find lots of Good Starters — individuals who want to succeed, and have promising ideas for how to make that happen. They begin each new pursuit with enthusiasm, or at the very least, a commitment to getting the job done. And then something happens. Somewhere along the way, they lose steam. Does all this sound familiar? More than anything else, becoming a Great Finisher is about staying motivated from a project’s beginning to its end. In their studies, University of Chicago psychologists Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishbach examined how people pursuing goals were affected by focusing on either how far they had already come (to-date thinking) or what was left to be accomplished (to-go thinking).
Scraping - How to Grow as a Designer or Developer - Noupe Design Blog. Jun 22 2011 For many of us in the design and development communities, when we first begin down this path, we tend to go in hungry searches for knowledge and like a sponge we soak up all we can find.
However, at times we can come to a plateau where we comfortably set up our virtual camp and we work from this place. Our quest for knowledge somewhat settles as does our thirst as we become distracted by trying to make our mark and establish ourselves in the community. Social alienation. Career - I don't program in my spare time. Does that make me a bad developer. 6 Practical and Powerful Ways to Overcome Depression. Editor’s note: This is a guest post from John Van Sickel.
One of the byproducts of our sedentary & isolated contemporary life is the growing epidemic of depression. Over 120 million people worldwide are affected by the black dog of depression, as Sir Winston Churchill described it. Depression is one of the leading causes of disability, missed work, broken relationships and more. Chances are you or someone you know will suffer from it in your lifetime. It is truly one of the most devastating of dis-eases (not at ease!) It’s hard to imagine GTD, when just GOB (getting out of bed) seems like a chore. Taking Cold Showers. This post is about why you might want to start taking cold showers.
I’ve been doing it for over a month now and I really like it. The seed was planted in my mind after reading an article about it on a blog called Getting Stronger. The thesis behind Getting Stronger is that rather than damaging you, that stress can, in the right conditions, make you stronger by forcing you to adapt and thrive under tougher conditions. Its an interesting premise and one I can easily get behind. By the way, I love taking really hot showers and hate being cold in general so when I first read the lines: Want to experience the benefits of hormesis very directly? I was like “This guy is nuts. It sucked. I was gasping for air the entire time, my skin felt freezing. Mental context switches are evil.
This week I’ve run across two examples of technical strategies to reduce mental context switches.
The first example is Pete Kruckenberg’s story of why his team chose to develop a web application using node.js even though he had extensive experience in Perl/Apache. One of his arguments is that since the client-side code has to be written in JavaScript, it saves mental energy to use JavaScript for the server-side code as well. Even for someone who knows JavaScript and Perl well, it takes mental energy to oscillate between the two languages.
There’s much more to node.js than its use of JavaScript. It requires a very different approach to developing web applications. The second example is Ryan Barrett’s blog post Why I run shells inside Emacs. Mental context switches are evil. Barrett explains that he first tried configuring Emacs and his shell to be similar, but the very similarity made the context switch more irritating. Both examples highlight the cost of context switches. Related posts: