Regarding: 'INTERVIEW'

How Software Engineers and Designers Can Increase Their Focus —

Finally, a How To Be Productive system I can get behind:

Q: Favorite web or mobile apps for getting focused?

A: I don’t use apps to get focused. Playing around with productivity apps is just another way to procrastinate. You become more productive by getting into the habit of doing actual work regularly, not by constantly thinking about how you can get more work done.

I don’t even use a to-do app. If something is important, I’ll remember it. If I have an idea I’m afraid I might forget, I set a reminder in my calendar on a date when I know I’ll have time to work on it. On that date, I’ll either work on it, discard it, or reschedule it.

Don’t miss Lukas’s definitive tip for massive increasing productivity and intelligence at the end. It’s money in the bank.

howtogetfocused.com 00:10

Scott Chacon on The Geek Talk —

Working with Scott is such a huge honor. I don’t even have words to describe it, really. He’s a class act. You get a glimpse of it in this interview.

He even lets loose some GitHub secrets:

At GitHub we don’t have a project tracker or todo list – we just all work on whatever is most interesting to us. No standup meetings, burndown charts or points to assign. No chickens or pigs. It’s sort of the open source software style of business – everyone itches their own scratch. Inexplicably, it works really well and keeps everyone engaged, new features appearing quickly and bugs fixed rather fast. No managers, directors, PMs or departments – and it’s the most agile, focused and efficient team I’ve ever worked with. Maybe we should write a book about it.

Do whatever you want. Do it now. Don’t fuck around.

thegeektalk.com 15:41

"In practice, nothing works." —

From the apparently just published, Coders at Work (Apress, 2009), Brad Fitzpatrick Talks About Programming:

In practice, nothing works. There are all these beautiful abstractions that are backed by shit. The implementations of libraries that look like they could be beautiful are shit. And so if you’re the one responsible for the cost of buying servers, or reliability – if you’re on call for pages – it helps to actually know what’s going on under the covers and not trust everyone else’s library, and code, and interfaces. (…)

They should have titled the book, “In Practice, Nothing Works”. Anyway, you can grab the — ick — PDF ebook for $20 on Apress.

blogoscoped.com 18:46

GFS: Evolution on Fast-forward —

A discussion between Kirk McKusick and Sean Quinlan about the origin and evolution of the google file system (GFS). Really good interview. They’re fairly critical of the original design and how GFS is being used today. There’s also some discussion of an entirely new and incompatible version of GFS, designed from the ground up for the types of workloads GFS is being used for today.

queue.acm.org 11:04