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 I was listening to a podcast episode:  Command Your Focus and Attention on What Really Matters with Chris Bailey  and noticed a really good analogy. " What allows traffic to move forward at a solid space is how much space exists between the cars on the highway" What struck me about it is that I can use it to explain team productivity in different organizations I was a part of. Some of them tried to pack the sprint with tasks to the full, but in some, it was ok for the team to pick a 'safe' amount of tasks so that they could be sure to accomplish them. Before I was thinking about the benefits of slack time that allows the team to work on important things (not only urgent) and to have space for urgent things if they show up. The great feeling of accomplishment when you finish last scheduled task day before the end of the sprint and can tackle additional bug or two or the confidence to spend additional hour making code more maintainable before fin...

I liked the idea of the book form the first time I've seen the title and fortunately, it lives up to my expectations. It's not perfect, but it rekindled my curiosity towards math and algorithms. Bringing them to everyday problems makes them much more interesting. The only thing that I'm missing in the book is the application of algorithms in business settings. For example, when I mentioned this book Mateusz K he has sent me a  blog post of  Pieter Hintjens: Amdahl to Zipf: Ten Laws of the Physics of People . For example,  Amdahl's Law  mathematically proves the argument from  The Mythical Man-Month  that you can't just add new people to the project to deliver it faster because of the cost of synchronization. I want this post to be a reminder for myself of the most interesting ideas in the book so if you want to savor it yourself just remember that it's worth buying. Rating: 9/10 Contents: 1. Optimal Stopping Probably the most ...

Recently I started feeling stressed and less productive which forced me to be more conscious of my work, habits and everything around it. Thanks to that I noticed: I got a lot of notifications from Slack, Messenger and Email. I felt anxious before starting new tasks. My focus wasn't predictable, especially on harder tasks. Don't get me wrong, I felt great most of the time, especially when I sat for hour or two at a time coding. The troubling thing was that it wasn't every day and I felt it was getting worse. Most of those problems should be fixed by Pomodoro techinique I was writing about before, did it stop working? The thing is, I stopped using it. A couple of months ago I noticed that staring new tasks, and taking breaks is actually a hindrance. I could easily focus for an hour or more on a task and basically forget about Pomodoro, and feel guild about not following it or not keeping proper count. I've decided that it wasn't necessary anymore. ...

You can probably see that I do a lot of things lately and my plans for next month are always long and ambitious.  I commit publicly to them so that I feel accountable but recently more important for me is following my Priority List during the day. What is a Priority List? I want to start from the beginning. My interests go from programming and reading books to learning to play guitar and how to draw. How do I make progress in any of them? I have a strong feeling of  stretching too thin and doing too many things at the same time. There are days when I can do them all and days when I hardly have time for one or two. Am I making any progress? Am I wasting my time? I strongly believe in Habits that Leo Babauta writes on his blog  http://zenhabits.net/ . The idea is to not think about what I should do, just follow the good habits. When I have to think consciously I often fail and do something stupid like read 'news' or facebook. I want to fight with that. I have re...

Yesterday I have stumbled upon interesting presentation about productivity at work. It is called  Rules of Productivity . What interested me most: For creative work 35 hours should be maximum week length Teams size between 4-8 are best Team should have its own room (+100% to productivity). I had a gut feeling about open spaces being harmful, it is good to see it confirmed. Overtime is is not doing anything good because team needs to recover after it.  Overtime is harmful if done longer than a month.  Scheduling at 80% of team capacity is much better for productivity.  Presentation contains much more than this short list so I recommend you reading it.

I often write a reason why I picked up the book but this time I am not sure. Probably it was just easiest-looking on on the kindle. Turns out it is not that easy to read as I thought, especially if you compare it to   "Decisive" . Soon after I started, I could feel that book was written at 2002 when PDA were today's smartphones. I would also say that book would be much nicer if it was more concise and contained more stories. The book is a bestseller for a reason though. "What is the next action?" It is probably the most important question in the book. I have the same problem. My todo list is not really todo. It is just list of "stuff". Asking for next physical action really changes the way you think and work. Second important idea form the book is to group tasks by context. Most important constraint is context. I have different list for 'home', 'work' and 'commute' as for example I need guitar to practice. Last idea ...

Some time ago I have read interesting article about becoming superhero that suggested to treat your own life like character in RPG game, or superhero (it similar idea for me). I really like RPG games so this ideas was really inspiring, unfortunately I found it hard to follow and remember about it on an everyday basis. Solution for that can be really nice website called HabitRPG HabitRPG Promo & Team from Tyler Renelle on Vimeo . Project is still growing but the most important thing is working from some time now, I mean Daily Quests! Daily: I would suggest to pick this one as the most important tab and create your daily quests really simple and easy to do and then add additional one to habit when you do more of it. For me it really works. I based this on Kaizen  and it tricks me into doing bigger things just by forcing me to start it. Bigger tasks are overwhelming before you start doing them so adding daily that forces you to do it for only for example 5 minutes...

As in the blog post:  http://enja.org/2012/05/07/floating-down-a-tributary/ Tributary  is a web interface for live and responsive visual coding. It includes a code editor and provides some popular javascript libraries for visual programming. The core concept of tributary comes from the inspirational  Bret Victor video  and the implementation is derived from Gabriel Florit’s  water project . See video for yourself:   Project is new but worth a try :) http://enjalot.com/ To start playing with it just visit one of examples eg.  http://enjalot.com/tributary/2271952/squarecircle.js  click on value in source code and see how canvas is changing :) Github repo:  https://github.com/enjalot/tributary

One of the best articles I read recently! This make me think that I don't know many important thing about API Design :( http://ariya.ofilabs.com/2011/08/hall-of-api-shame-boolean-trap.html Boolean API parameters destroy code readability. After reading it I can agree and I will try avoid it in my code.Fun to read, strongly recommend! API design principles are from Nokia QT library but as author explains they in the root are language agnostic, at least for similar to C languages. http://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki/API_Design_Principles

This is how all we are: Lazy. Accept it. Great post about laziness of users: http://www.whatmakesthemclick.net/2010/06/28/100-things-you-should-know-about-people-36-people-are-inherently-lazy/ I think that most programmers forget about it.

Great post about Legacy Code and Tests. http://craftedsw.blogspot.com/2011/07/working-with-legacy-code.html Tests will slow down developers, bugs and new features will take longer, but it will be better in future of project. Tests will document code and ease support. Also QA phase will be shorter. Scout Rule: http://blog.solidcraft.eu/2010/05/boy-scout-rule-in-practice.html

How facebook pushes code to production. + description:  http://agilewarrior.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/how-facebook-pushes-new-code-live/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ahdjpgllmllekelefacdedbjnjaplfjn?hl=pl#

 find ./ -type f -exec sed -i 's/staystring/nowystring/' {} \; source: http://www.jonasblog.com/2006/05/search-and-replace-in-all-files-within-a-directory-recursively.html

Really Great post about modularization patterns in JavaScript: http://www.adequatelygood.com/2010/3/JavaScript-Module-Pattern-In-Depth

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ahdjpgllmllekelefacdedbjnjaplfjn?hl=pl#

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/unix-linux-finding-files-by-content/ simple version: grep 'string' *.txt

http://webhosting.pl/6.narzedzi.ktore.poprawiaja.wydajnosc.programisty.PHP.Musisz.je.sprawdzic

http://blog.oshineye.com/2011/05/what-is-devexp.html

http://mashable.com/2011/05/09/sitting-down-infographic/ So use Workrave to stand up from computer:  http://krzychukula.blogspot.com/2011/04/workrave.html