For whatever reason I’ve been made my gym’s “Member of the Month”. I had to write a short paragraph which I include below.

Last year I dedicated myself to strength training and managed to smash all my previous personal bests on all my lifts. Now this year I switched my focus towards Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu with the aim of losing weight and improving my conditioning ahead of this year’s competitions. Looking back on all the years I’ve spent in the gym, I wasted so much time not pushing myself as far as I was truly capable of, and only recently have I found the ability to really dig deep and to be relentless in my training. This year has been as much a mental progression as it has a physical one.

A lot of this wouldn’t have been possible without the great support and encouragement of all the staff in the gym. With such a great fitness team around, I’m never short of ideas for my own workouts. It’s a real inspiration to see how hard both they and their clients work, as well as motivating me to also do the same.

I’ve written before about the notion of developers going stale. Day in day out I see examples of ydiw, but not of the “You’ve made a mistake, let me fix that for you” nature, but more of the “The 80′s called, they want their program back” type. I can forgive bugs and mistakes, but I just find it very hard to not get annoyed with antiquated and long-winded ways of doing things, especially when there are far better/easier/quicker ways of achieving the same goals with other tools.

Burying your head in the sand about different techniques and technologies does no one any favours, especially yourself. You don’t need to learn each new shiny language in depth or even at all, but just reading a bit about it or even trying it out will propel your game so far ahead of the pack that you’d be foolish not to do it. Now maybe you don’t care, maybe you’re just not interested and that’s fine, it’s not for everyone, but then don’t make others suffer because of your laziness/lack of enthusiasm. I don’t come over to your house and shit in your living room, so please don’t do it in mine.

It just pains me so much when I see things being done wrong. You can call me a fanboi if you want, but I don’t simply bang the drum of the technology I use because I’ve been brainwashed, but because I’ve been where you are now and discovered something better. Now you can always ignore my advice, after you’ve investigated it yourself, but don’t just dismiss it out of hand. So many people make out like it’s such a great sacrifice to try other technologies. But how long would it really take to try something? Not even a few hours. You’re not willing to give up a couple of hours for potentially days and days of re-couped time? Get out of here!

Finally, if not for yourself, do it for your clients. Would you trust a doctor who used methods from the 15th century? No? Then why should your clients trust you if you’re still using crazy old ways to get stuff done.

So let’s make the world a better place and make my life easier at the same time. Right, I’m off to play with HTML5 and CSS3.

I had the worst tooth ache last Thursday so couldn’t sleep. So while being up for most of the night I thought I’d whip up a small app to track my Facebook friends using the new Facebook Graph API. I’m always curious to see who has removed me on Facebook, and now I can finally see who has. Check it out here http://who.removed.me

Recently I switched from Evernote to Notational Velocity. I was so sick of the Evernote iPhone app and saw that Notational Velocity synced with Simplenote. Since trying them both out I haven’t looked back. Now, Notational Velocity supports tagging but Simplenote doesn’t, and as I like to search by tag, this was a bit of a problem. So taking the Twitter approach, I simply hashtag my notes, which makes them incredibly easy to find in both Notational Velocity and Simplenote. I don’t put the hashtag in the name of the note but just as the first line. I found that putting the tag in the name looked a bit untidy in SimpleNote. A nice side effect is that in Simplenote, the tags appear as the preview line. Problem solved. #notationalvelocity #simplenote

There’s always that storyline in films and TV shows. Parents despair as they become more and more distant from their angst ridden teenage son/daughter who complains of just being mis-understood. There all the signs of neglect on the parents side, not spending time with them or not showing enough love. Then there’s normally some sort of horrible event that brings them all together again to be one big happy family and they all live happily ever after. Think John McClane in Die Hard and his daughter Lucy, or Sean Archer in Face/Off and his daughter Jamie. The parents and the teenager are living separate lives and there’s a clash when they come together because neither understands where the other is coming from.

As a developer this problems often occurs when working with people not from a technology background. Warren Buffett’s famous advice is to “Invest in what you understand.” and while many managers take the time to understand their market, they don’t take the time to understand the technology/processes of their business. It’s no surprise to me that the only company that I’ve worked for that’s actually achieved a measure of success is run by people who not only have a very clear understanding of their market, but who also have a very clear understanding of the technology they provide. What of the others that are no longer around? It’s no surprise I spent a lot of time at those places trying to explain how things worked and why things couldn’t be done. And while some businesses are about pushing the boundaries and innovating, to do so requires a knowledge of the limitations of what currently exists.

As a developer I have been as guilty of this sin as everyone else. It’s very easy to take no interest in the customer and to care only about the technology. Perhaps to a degree this is an even worse situation to be in over having management that don’t understand technology, as when this happens, solutions that are unusable by anyone are usually delivered. I know for a fact I have delivered plenty of products without ever asking myself who the product is actually aimed at, all the while being completely feature focused. When I think back to those products, it’s a wonder they survived any sort of usage at all. Now, rather then only caring if something can be done or not, I try and ask myself who will be trying to achieve a task and what is the best way for them to go about doing so. As with anything, there is a balance that needs to be found.

Managers, understand the technology. Developers, understand the market.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who started his autobiography, My Life, with a reference to the book: When I was a young man just out of law school and eager to get on with my life, on a whim I briefly put aside my reading preference for fiction and history and bought one of those how-to books: How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, by Alan Lakein. The book’s main point was the necessity of listing short-, medium-, and long-term life goals, then categorizing them in order of their importance, with the A group being the most important, the B group next, and the C the last, then listing under each goal specific activities designed to achieve them.

The message is simple. List what you need to do and prioritise it. While that is the core message of the book, it also covers what to do in various situations. What to do when you perhaps feel like you don’t have enough time to complete an A task, or find yourself procrastinating but always doing B or C tasks instead of the more important A ones. The main thing I took away from the book though was to always ask yourself, “What is the most important thing I could be doing right now?”. It’s surprising how asking such a simple question of yourself can have such a huge impact on what it is you actually spend your time doing.

  def self.attr_accessible(*args)end
  include Clearance::User

My full user model ended up looking like this:

  class User

    include MongoMapper::Document

    def self.attr_accessible(*args)end
    include Clearance::User

    key :email, String
    key :encrypted_password, String
    key :salt, String
    key :confirmation_token, String
    key :remember_token, String
    key :firstname, String
    key :email_confirmed, Boolean
    key :lastname, String

    timestamps!

  end

Perhaps if I have time, I will look into adding attr_accessible support to mongomapper myself.

Update 13/03/2010: I believe the dependency on attr_accessible in clearance has since been removed. So this small hack is most probably defunct.

I had been feeling a bit sluggish in my morning workouts so wanted to increase my pre-workout carbs, but as I live close to the gym I wanted to ingest them as early as possible so as to not upset my stomach too much while exercising. I decided that an apple first thing suited the bill perfectly in terms of carbs and placed one on my alarm clock that evening so that I could just pick it up at the same time as turning off the alarm. Eating one in the darkness and while lying down was strange at first, but I found that afterwards getting out of bed was incredibly easy. And it’s been that way ever since. I’ve been doing this now for a few weeks and it has made such a difference compared to days where I don’t have to get up particularly early.

I think I may have found a new habit for life.