work - Leonid Mamchenkov

John Resig : Write Code Every Day

John Resig, of the Khan Academy developers and the author of jQuery JavaScript library, ran an interesting experiment on himself – write code every day. The rules were very simple:

I decided to set a couple rules for myself:

I must write code every day. I can write docs, or blog posts, or other things but it must be in addition to the code that I write.

It must be useful code. No tweaking indentation, no code re-formatting, and if at all possible no refactoring. (All these things are permitted, but not as the exclusive work of the day.)

All code must be written before midnight.

The code must be Open Source and up on Github.

Some of these rules were arbitrary. The code doesn’t technically need to be written before midnight of the day of but I wanted to avoid staying up too late writing sloppy code. Neither does the code have to be Open Source or up on Github. This just forced me to be more mindful of the code that I was writing (thinking about reusability and deciding to create modules earlier in the process).

And he got some very interesting results, not to mention – a whole lotta work done.

While I’m not the biggest fan of productivity boost experiments, this one does resonate with me. I’ve done a similar one when I was learning photography. I decided to take at least one picture every day with my camera (no mobile phones), with no automatic settings. Some days were better, some were worse, but I manage to run it for about four month and I couldn’t believe how much better I got – I was still a noob, but the difference between the first days and the last days was huge! The routine, once you get into it, is a very powerful tool, apparently.

For about a year or so now I’ve been avoiding any side projects, trying to recover from a previous burnout. But now, slowly, I am looking into ways to get me back on tracks. This approach looks interesting enough for me to consider.

Management by wandering around

The term management by wandering around (MBWA), also management by walking around, refers to a style of business management which involves managers wandering around, in an unstructured manner, through the workplace(s), at random, to check with employees, or equipment, about the status of ongoing work. The emphasis is on the word wandering as an impromptu movement within a workplace, rather than a plan where employees expect a visit from managers at more systematic, pre-approved or scheduled times. The expected benefit is that a manager, by random sampling of events or employee discussions, is more likely to facilitate improvements to the morale, sense of organisational purpose, productivity and total quality management of the organization, as compared to remaining in a specific office area and waiting for employees, or the delivery of status reports, to arrive there, as events warrant in the workplace.

Who knew that was a thing?

7 habits of highly successful Unix admins

Don’t wait for problems to find you
Know your tools and your systems
Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize
Perform post mortems, but don’t get lost in them
Document your work
Fix the problem AND explain
Make time for yourself

The Expert

I have recently shared somebody’s Facebook post with this video:

A lot of people laughed about it and that was that. A few dug deep into the story and found where it came from. But until today I haven’t really seen anyone coming up with the solution. Here it is, for historical purposes.

Found here.

Ergophobia – a fear of work

Ergophobia, (derived from the Greek “ergon” (work) and “phobos” (fear); also called ergasiophobia), is an abnormal and persistent fear (or phobia) of work (manual labor, non-manual labour, etc) or finding employment. Ergophobia may also be a subset of eithersocial phobia or performance anxiety. Sufferers of ergophobia experience undue anxiety about the workplace environment even though they realize their fear is irrational. Their fear may actually be a combination of fears, such as fear of failing at assigned tasks, speaking before groups at work (both of which are types of performance anxiety), socializing with co-workers (a type of social phobia), and other fears of emotional, psychological and/or physiological injuries.

Wikipedia