Francis – Page 9 – Francis Cortez

Anything You Want

Derek Sivers’s book notes have been priceless for me. I used his recommendations for guidance a lot in the past few years. Learning how he processes books he reads led me to highlight a lot more. I’ve always wanted to publish notes for all (or most of) the books I read to make the material more meaningful for myself. They do take time (and that’s sort of the point), but I’m starting to work through my backlog of highlights.

In Anything You Want, Derek tells different stories from building CD Baby and explains what he learned. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts from Derek’s book.

You can’t pretend there’s only one way to do it. Your first idea is just one of many options.

This is important in my work as a designer, and something I need to improve on. A lot of times it’s easy to just think the first idea is the best idea without taking more time to explore. In doing Crazy 8s, something always comes out of that 6th, 7th, or 8th sketch. It might not be used for the problem at hand. It might just be a germ of an idea. But it’s valuable. This goes beyond sketching and design—it’s important to set aside time to consider other ideas for any problem.

Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?

This isn’t a business. Why am I really trying to write? I want to improve. Am I helping people? Not yet, but I think there will eventually be good lessons worth sharing here. Am I profitable? Well, I’m making zero from this right now but maybe the skills will translate to something that can generate passive income.

When you want to learn how to do something yourself, most people won’t understand.

I’ve learned so much trying to do things myself. I heard something recently that reminded me there’s also a balance. It can be easy to tell people “Oh but I like doing these things.” Sometimes there’s fun stuff to learn but there’s other things you can spend time on that would be even more fun to learn.

You’ll notice that as my company got bigger, my stories about it were less happy. That was my lesson learned. I’m happier with five employees than with eighty-five, and happiest working alone.

I’ve been around startups in their earliest stages. I’ve seen that stress. I’ve seen struggles founders go through. WIth a few years of separation, I’ve seen some become very successful and some that have failed.

The title suggests having anything you want. I really like the overall lessons: running a gigantic company might not actually be what you want. It’s not for me¹.

Fully acknowledging that it’s not like that’s exactly an option for me right at this moment. I can see how some people would actually want it and don’t just want the financial freedom attached to it. They want to be in charge of something big with a lot of moving parts. If that’s the case, this probably isn’t the book for you. ↩

Friday Links Issue 06: These will be doorstops

I went to a workshop about effective presentations earlier this week. We went over storytelling and its power to make things memorable. This reminded me of something Steve Jobs said to John Lasseter:

“I’ll never forget,” Lasseter says, “Steve Jobs was kind of waxing poetically about things and he said, ‘You know, at Apple when we make a computer, what’s the lifespan of it? Maybe three years. In five years it’s a doorstop. Technology moves so fast. If you do your job right with Toy Story, this thing could last forever.’”

I first read this quote in Creativity Inc., which I want to write some book notes on. I want to improve as a storyteller, whether it’s speaking or writing.

In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big¹, Scott Adams has a chapter going through certain skills that can be added to your skillset as multipliers. One of them is public speaking and another is business writing. Some of the tips from the book can be found in his blog post, ‘The Day You Became a Better Writer’:

Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.

Presentations have a lot in common with effective writing. Good stories, simply told.

Alex Hogue² writes about online privacy—I’m not sure if that’s the best way to describe it. But Alex takes technical topics and writes entertaining pieces on them. Alex recently wrote about stalking your Facebook friends on Tinder.

Cut to me in my room. I’m about to try and “do hacking”. Around me are two computer monitors, two laptops, and no friends.

Alex Hogue writes about doing hacking. Plenty of people write about the same topics but Alex’s have been the most entertaining, by far. Here’s an earlier post on graphing when your Facebook friends are awake.

I wrote about Angela Duckworth’s Grit a few times this week. Duckworth is a MacArthur grant recipient and she talks about Ta-Nehisi Coates, another grant recipient, and his description of writing:

The challenge of writing is to see your horribleness, on page, to see your terribleness, and then to go to bed, and wake up the next day, and take that horribleness and that terribleness and refine it, and make it not so terrible and not so horrible, and then go to bed again, and come the next day, and refine it a little bit more, and make it not so bad, and then go to bed the next day and do it again, then make it maybe average.

You know, if anybody even reads what I’m doing, that’s a great day.

I’m working on getting the horribleness and terribleness on page regularly. Then I’ll write entertaining things, even for technical topics. I’ll put together good, five-sentence arguments with a chance of being read. After all that, maybe I’ll write something that has a chance of lasting forever.

Which I’ll also write notes on. ↩
Creator of swagify.net ↩

Warren Buffet’s goals

In Grit, Angela Duckworth says grit has two components: passion and perseverance. Gritty people are passionate about things that take years to achieve. That helps them through the sub-goals, some of which can be a grind.

Having a top-level goal with no low and mid-level goals can lead to frustration. It’s believing in overnight success.

Having low-level and mid-level goals with no top-level goal leads to early passion for a project and quick disinterest. The next shiny new thing will pull you away. It’s totally fine for some things, like jumping from hobby to hobby recreationally. Professionally, though, it can be detrimental because it’s hard to grow career capital if you’re jumping from thing to thing.

Angela describes a top-level goal setting technique attributed to Warren Buffet (though it seems similar to Seinfeld getting credit for marking X’s on a calendar).

Write the 25 things you want to achieve in your career
Circle the 5 most important
You’ve now identified your 20 biggest career distractions

It’s a lesson in focus. Angela adds a few extra steps:

From the 25, identify the items that lead to a common goal
You’ve now identified your top-level goals

I really like these extra steps. It reminds me of blobs combining to form bigger blobs that then absorb smaller blobs until you see your top-level goals to focus on.

Where does writing daily fit in? Some posts come easier than others or are more fun to write. Collectively I think it’s helping me become a better writer and helping me focus. Being a better writer helps with organizing thoughts and telling better stories.

What top-level goal does this lead to? I’ll think about it, because right now I’m demonstrating early passion that I hope isn’t followed by lead to quick disinterest.

Muji paper magazine notebook mini

I used to buy Muji storyboard notebooks in New York—I mentioned them in this design sprint post from 2014. I mentioned that they’re “somehow only $2” and I guess it actually as too good to be true because they discontinued them in US stores. Last year I emailed to hopefully get the online equivalent of “oh yeah we have some in the back”:

We are truly sorry, but MUJI USA does not carry Recycled Paper Magazine Notebook at this moment. Please accept our apologies for any disappointment. We would update new items at our best. Please check our online website often. Thank you for your understanding.

No luck. On the Japan trip, we were walking through Muji near Tokyo Station and I was excited to see these storyboard notebooks—they’re somehow only 100 yen. They’re perfect for Crazy 8s (PDF).

I picked up four. I’ll share some sketches in the future. First I have to do the sketches. I want to figure out what the index page for this blog should look like. I’d like it to live on beyond 100 posts so some kind of categorization will be good.

Quitting

One Grit chapter covers raising gritty children. Angela’s household has a “Hard thing” rule:

Everyone, including mom and dad, has to do a hard thing. A hard thing is something that requires daily deliberate practice.

You can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other natural stopping point has arrived. You can’t quit on a bad day.

You get to pick your hard thing. Nobody picks it for you.

It reminds me of something I heard on a podcast¹. The example was editing audio. There are people trying to build platforms and they want to be audio engineers and editors for themselves. It takes a lot of time. Their argument is that they like doing it. Fair point, but it’s also taking up time that could be spent on something more important for their business or on something they enjoy more that’s completely recreational.

There’s a balance, of course. Angela Duckworth gives two examples of things she’s quit: piano and French. Piano didn’t come easy to her and she wasn’t very interested in it. Easy to drop. Dropping French was more interesting, because she found it interesting and she was picking it up quickly. Why stop? Because it was still taking up time.

Less time spent on piano and French freed up time for pursuits I found more gratifying. Finishing up whatever you begin without exception is a good way to miss opportunities to start different, possibly better things.

Applying this to my 100 Days, 100 Posts project, I don’t feel like quitting right now. I’m enjoying it so far. Some days I’m not in the mood to write. It’s fine, I try writing anyway. But you can’t quit on a bad day.

The natural stopping point will be 100 days. Halfway through, it’s fulfilling and I don’t see that changing in the second half.

After 100 days, I definitely want to keep making things every day. I’ll continue writing in some form. Publishing daily might not be quite as important. Trying to write, re-write, and edit in an hour or two each day means I’ll either 1.) write very short things or 2.) skip some steps. Taking the blocks of time I can squeeze into 2 or 3 days should allow me to go through the revision process. That’s where I’ll be able to improve.

Right now, there are times where I don’t edit. Editing and rewriting is the hard part of writing. That’s where deliberate practice comes in. Writing freely and blasting through a first draft is where you can enter flow. If I skip editing then I don’t think I’m getting better at writing.

I’m getting better at posting daily, which is a useful skill to have. It means I’m able to think about something to write about, write about it, then go through the logistics of adding links and images, then sharing it.

All of those things are useful but I want to edit and think more about the structure and paragraphs and sentences and words. (And to stop writing about writing.)

Right now isn’t the natural stopping point, so I’m going to keep posting daily.

I need to deliberately practice remembering my sources. ↩

Very Fresh Noodles and other pictures from the week

Here are four photos from this week.

First, a look at my lunch yesterday. Very Fresh Noodles in Chelsea Market. I originally planned to only post this picture, but I didn’t think I’d have enough to write about to go with it. If you like Xi’an Famous Foods, it’s about as good for a few bucks more. Which is about what to expect from most things in Chelsea Market.

This is from last weekend. Korean BBQ with a few friends on one of their terraces. Grilling is one of the things I miss most about living in California and Washington. The only other non-commercial grills I’ve been around in New York: (2013) shared grill at Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn for 4th of July, (2013) grill the size of a large dinner plate at… somewhere in Brooklyn.

Here’s a typical basket for me at Trader Joe’s. I used to go on a weekly run but now it’s about once a month. I promise I’m not one of the heathens that puts their basket on the ground and kicks it forward the entire length of the line—meaning the entire perimeter of the store when it’s busy. It’d be odd to kick a 10-lb sled around without the store.

A day or two before Manhattanhenge and not the right time or place for it.

Hard work beats talent

I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Grit over the past week. I finished it once and have started listening a second time through. I haven’t written book notes for an audiobook before. I’ll try to write 2 or 3 posts based on Grit. Here’s the first.

In Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth writes about the importance of grit in life. She explains why grit is something worth striving for and suggests how to build grit.

One concept discussed, of course, is deliberate practice. She shares this quote from a basketball player, “I probably spend 70 percent of my time by myself, working on my game, just trying to fine tune every single piece of my game.”

There’s a section about deliberate practice and flow. Some think the two concepts are at odds with each other. Her take is that deliberate practice is for improving skills. Flow is for performance.

I remember reading about the same basketball player a few years back. Something I remember sticking out was that he avoided pickup games when he was younger. For a lot of people, pickup games are all they do, so it’s both practice and performance. And probably bad forms of either one.

I looked around and found some of the things his coach made him do instead of playing pickup games. It sounds an awful lot like deliberate practice:

He made the boy write basketball essays, diagram the mechanics to jump shots and told him to memorize a quote that has shaped his life: Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.

That player, of course, is recent nWo member Kevin Durant. That excerpt is from the Seattle Times, a few months before the Sonics (RIP) drafted him. Some more from the same article:

Brown forbade Durant from playing pickup games or scrimmaging. He stressed conditioning and an array of shooting, dribbling, passing and defensive drills. Every day was boot camp. Brown taught Durant three basic moves — a pull-up jump shot, a two-dribble jumper and a baseline drive — that formed the foundation of Durant’s repertoire.

On the other side of that memorized quote: hard work meets talent and now you have Kevin Durant.

As far as how this applies to writing, I’m not sure what the performance would be for a writer. You’re rarely watched during the writing process. Maybe it’s just that you aren’t watched during your performance, because you can certainly enter a flow state while writing. It’s probably what Malcolm Gladwell means when he describes the actual writing as blissful.

The thinking and organizing and editing is the hard part. That’s the deliberate practice.

Sunday Journal Issue 02

In last week’s Sunday journal, I wrote a little bit each day about that day’s writing. This week, I didn’t write every day and forgot to start the journal for the week at all.

I made a few CSS changes, but I’m holding off on any major design changes until around post #75. I’d like to build a categorized index.

Saturday — July 16: I finished some posts and uploaded them. I back-posted to fill in some missing days. That might be cheating in some way, but nobody’s keeping track and I never really laid out solid rules for myself.

Here: My goal is to finish 100 posts in 100 days. Most post dates are accurate, some are approximate, and some are completely off but I want to fill those days in because it helps me keep track of things.

These sandwiches were very good.

I listened to Simon Rich on James Altucher’s podcast. James summarizes the appearance in one of his posts:

Simon Rich, one of the funniest writers I have ever read, the youngest writer of SNL ever, and now working on two movies and a sitcom, said to me, “if you don’t wake up and want to write first thing, you probably shouldn’t be writing.”

In the course of our discussion he must’ve referred to 50 different books and comedians and movies, etc.

In the podcast episode, Simon says his favorite writer is Roald Dahl, for both his children’s books and his short stories. I didn’t know Roald Dahl wrote short stories. I bought one of the Dahl collections—The Umbrella Man and Other Stories. I also picked up Simon Rich’s The Last Girlfriend on Earth: And Other Love Stories.

Sunday — July 17: This morning I read one story from each of the books. In the podcast, James says he rarely laughs out loud when reading but it happened often when reading Simon’s stories. He’s right, I laughed a lot while reading Unprotected.

This is story of my life inside wallet.

Go read the entire thing on The New Yorker. I’d love to write something that made people laugh as much as I laughed reading it. Which I understand is years and thousands and thousands of words away. First, I’ll continue writing anything at all.

From the Dahl collection, I read The Great Automatic Grammatizator. It’s about a machine that writes stories.

“There are many other little refinements too, Mr. Bohlen. You’ll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”

I’ll use this ~~trick~~ illusion whenever I want to seem sagacious and exterous.

These days, you can learn more about machines that write stories on, you know, websites for companies that make machines that write stories.

Planning next week

It’s still early in the day, so I’m going to go on with my day. Tonight, I’ll try to finish a couple of posts from the Japan trip.

I’ll also plan the coming week’s writing out and I’ll try outlining what I can. And preparing posts in Google Docs so I can go in and write. I’m still struggling with starting and finishing a single post without jumping around to other posts, looking things up, or whatever else. It’s not making me a better writer, but it’s probably making me better at posting consistently.

Sort of about affirmations

“Projects tends to rot if you leave it alone for a few years, and it takes effort for someone to deal with it again.” — John Carmack in the release notes for the Doom source code

I found the source for an app I made in 2014. It uses Grunt as its build system and I actually only had to kick the tires around for half an hour to get it running locally. The database still exists, so a lot of my thoughts for about 4 months are still in there.

I’d like to put together a better demo clip. Right now I’m pumped to see that this app still even works so enjoy this GIF where nothing is legible.

I can’t remember how long this took. Here are some stray thoughts explaining what it does:

You log in with your Twitter account.
A timer on the right has two bars. One shows what I recall being one minute intervals. The bottom one keeps track of I’m guessing 25 minutes.
The left side has an ideas list. You would fill that with a few words describing a writing prompt.
So you’d open this app up, choose one of your ideas, then start writing.

As far as tech goes, I made it to learn Angular. It also uses Firebase for storage and authentication.

I wanted to build a tool for writing daily. The prompts list has a default template that I’d usually use to kick off daily writing. It has some questions like “What made you laugh¹ recently?” There was a misc. section that I would write affirmations in. “I will work for Google.” — Me, like 50 times.

At the time, I shared this with maybe 5 people, tops. Two years later, I’m at Google as a designer on Firebase.

So, yes, I think affirmations work and I don’t worry too much about if it’s science, psychology, faith, or anything else.

These are by far the most entertaining things to read in my backup. ↩

Friday Links Issue 05

It’s been a bit of an off week. After posting ten things last week, life happened. Meaning summer in New York. I met up with friends. Stayed out later than usual. Slept in. I didn’t make time to write. I returned to the gym after freezing my membership for three months.

Back on the wagon.

Kurt Vonnegut Explains Drama — Derek Sivers

Derek Sivers posted this in 2009. Kurt Vonnegut describes life like a line graph. Movies and books are roller coasters while real life is a pretty straight line.

That’s why people invent fights. That’s why we’re drawn to sports. That’s why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal.
We’re trying to make our life into a fairy tale.

Social media is our highlight reel. It gives us a chance to edit our lives for others to view.

“Oh did you see so and so’s picture on Instagram? Always traveling. Do they even work?” A lot of the time they’re traveling because they work so much and need to get away to keep from burning out¹. Social media gives us the layers and brushes to hide and show what we want.

Eric Ripert appeared on The Watch podcast

Andy Greenwald had Eric Ripert on his show to talk about 32 Yolks, Eric’s memoir. In building software products, it’s important to keep the user in mind². The same goes for chefs.

People in love, you can see… even in the street you can see who they are. People in business, you know they are focused on the discussion and so on. It’s our job to notice that. It’s not that difficult but you have to pay attention.

They discuss art and craftsmanship. Chefs create art. Dali needed to learn the craft and how to re-create a clock. It’s learned through repetition. The art is in having the imagination to melt the clock. Ripert doesn’t think anything’s wrong with excelling at cooking as a craft. But the steps beyond that are what interest him.

He’s interested in creating beautiful and imaginative dishes. Then the craftsmanship comes back in re-creating the appearance and taste of pieces consistently. First you make an omelet. Then you mix ingredients together until three stars come out.

Seth Godin on the Beautiful Writers podcast

When Tim Ferriss asked about Seth’s writing ritual, he didn’t quite answer. This time, though, he shed some light on the nuts and bolts.

I don’t think you need to wait until you’re in the mood to write. But I do think having tools that give you a proustian boost that remind you of what it is to do your best work are critical. At least for me.

If I’m starting a new project I go to Muji. I get the big size spiral bound. I get just the right pencil or the pen. It’s only for that. No grocery lists are going in that thing.”

Happy to hear he likes Muji. I bought a stack of their storyboard notebooks in Japan because Muji discontinued them in America. They give me a creative boost. Seth’s answer reminded me of The Creative Habit. Twyla Tharp talks about starting projects:

I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me.

For Seth Godin, a lot of his projects require thinking and sharing thoughts through words. His box is a notebook.

For Twyla Tharp, her box is a box.

Looking at design sprints this way, the team has a giant box: the room. The group creates ideas and sketches. They stay on walls in the same room for a week. People leave the box for lunch and breaks. Everything happens in that giant box.

My programmers, a box is a new repo for bigger projects and a new branch for new subprojects.

I’ll continue exploring different boxes for writing. Right now it needs to hold a spreadsheet and some docs.

The Artisan Files: Jeffrey Way

One of these weeks, I’m going to experiment with creating screencasts. My favorite screencasts have been from egghead.io and Laracasts.

Early on, egghead had a minimal site (HN thread) with a killer Angular demo using Webstorm. I bought Webstorm pretty much right after and still use it. I used Angular for side projects and today I happen to work on a large Angular app.

Laracasts is fairly new to me. Vue seemed to be popping up frequently and I wanted to try it out. I really enjoyed Jeffrey Way’s Vue tutorials.

My audience at Laracasts is a bit different: they’re working professionals (at some level or another), who want to stay up to date on the latest tooling, techniques, and patterns. I think of Laracasts as eight-minute abs: just short bursts of knowledge for you to fit in whenever you have the time.

I want to try creating my own resources providing short bursts of knowledge. I’ll follow some principles Tim Ferriss follows for his podcasts. He based his process on avoiding a pitfall other budding podcasters run into: after a few episodes, they’re overwhelmed with the effort required to edit. Early on, Tim decided to stick to minimal equipment, long episodes, and minimal editing.

I’ve made a couple short screencasts before. Rehearsing and choreographing takes a lot of time. I want to try recording my screen for half an hour, pulling clips out, and skipping audio. Instead I’ll write text to go with each video clip. I think it’ll be easier to follow along, but we’ll see.

I also know a couple people that actually do mostly just travel and are very happy. ↩
Writing it out, this seems so completely common sense. The hard part is following through on the principle when other solutions would be more interesting to make. ↩

Stray thoughts: 4K Monitor

This week hasn’t been the best as far as my writing goes. This will be the first edition of stray thoughts. I’ll write things that come to mind. There will be minimal editing. This will be the form my cop-out posts will take.

I got a 4K monitor (U28E590D on Amazon) during Prime Day.

My laptop can’t drive it at full resolution at 60Hz.
Well, it can.
Well, it sort of can. The monitor can do picture in picture. Then I plug an HDMI cable in and a DisplayPort cable into my laptop. The laptop thinks two monitors are attached. I thought it’d be okay but it just gets a little funky trying to display things in the center of the screen.
I had a mount for my previous monitor. It doesn’t raise high enough for it to make sense to mount.
I like Infinite Jest, please roll your eyes somewhere else.
The other books are Starting Strength and The Animator’s Survival Kit.
I won’t be writing book notes on any of these three books anytime soon.
If you look closely at the chart on the monitor you might see I’m getting upwards of 5 viewers.
For half a second, I considered whether it’d be worth it since it’s a TN panel. Then I remembered I run f.lux at nearly all times and colors don’t matter much.
I’m a heavy f.lux user. I can’t wait for a future Paperwhite to have some kind of amber light. I’ll jump on it.
I’m a light blue light blocker user, but I’d like to make it more of a habit to put them on at night.
Then I could sleep at a consistent time, and maybe get up and write things that aren’t bulleted lists of random thoughts.
I listened to Simon Rich on James Altucher’s podcast (2014). More on this later, I think, because he shares a lot of thoughts about writing.
Based on that podcast, I bought a Simon Rich book and a Roald Dahl collection of short stories. More on these later, also.
I will go ahead and post this. I’ll fix typos in the morning.

This isn’t quite a one-sentence post for the sake of posting, but it’s close. Thanks for bearing with me.

Focus

I planned to write about focus today. I knew that by looking at my writing schedule spreadsheet. But looking at the schedule reminded me that I needed to upload yesterday’s post to my server. Then I tried making a gulp task to handle deployment. Then thirty minutes went by. All before writing a word down about focus.

Now I’ll write about distractions. The key to focusing is identifying distractions and learning how to avoid them.

Location, location, location

Distractions come from having other options. People build cabins and go on retreats to cut out other options. When I’m bored at home it seems like there’s nothing to do. When I’m trying to write, there seems to be tons of things to do. I can clean. I can read. I can eat. I can cook because I want to eat.

So I don’t write much at home. This might be different if I could have other locations within my home. But I rent a shoebox in New York. My desk is on the wall at one end of the apartment. My bathroom is at the opposite end. From my desk, I could probably read the ingredients on the toothpaste tube if I squinted enough.

I write at coffee shops when I can. There’s not much else to do there. A lot of other people are there to work on things also. They want to be alone but with people. In, like, not the super depressing way.

I’ve been trying to write in parks. The people watching can be too good. I mean, just hanging out at a park relaxing is a thing. I’ve done that alone. It doesn’t work for me.

I’ve tried writing on buses and subways. This works surprisingly well. I actually focus on the writing. And on the subway I don’t have Internet access. Which, of course, is the ultimate distraction.

You vs. the internet

Ben Orenstein, a developer at thoughtbot, says conference speakers need to be more interesting than the Internet. If the internet is the final boss, asking people to put laptops away is like a cheat code. It works, but wouldn’t it be more satisfying to be the most interesting thing in the room? Otherwise, why bother being a speaker?

When writing, it’s just you and the internet.

Go offline: When using a computer to write, you have the entire internet at your disposal. You can turn the wifi off. You can even unplug the router. Or set it on a timer.

Stay offline: This starts to get into what writing really is. A lot of it is in the thinking. In Deep Work, Cal Newport suggests separating offline work time and online work time. If you’re in an offline time block and something comes up that requries the internet, write it down as a task for your next online work block.

I do something like this by adding comments in Google Docs. They act as a todo list when I go into finalizing a post—done during an online time block.

I want to try splitting an hour like this:

15 minutes online: Set up some links, excerpts, and outline.
30 minutes offline: Write and fill it in. TKs/comments for everything else.
15 minutes online: Edit, finish up links, images, and upload the post.

My system to focus

~~First, I select an animal to sacrifice. Here are my preferences in order of effectiveness~~.

Know what I’m working on: A schedule helps. Before creating a schedule, prioritization helps even more. If you’re working on the most important thing, you won’t waste time thinking that you could be working on something else.

Remember, you can be great at anything—but not everything.

Know what I’m supposed to write: This involves thinking, organizing, outlining, working with index cards, and other things that aren’t writing.

Write somewhere else: I wrote some of this on the bus. There’s not much else to do. I try to disconnect, at least partially.

Have coffee ready, use the restroom: And other small logistic things. This is really identifying reasons to get up during a time block and preventing them from happening.

Answer a few questions: Something I really enjoyed in Smarter, Better, Faster is the set of questions Charles Duhigg goes through before reading through a research study. I’ll paraphrase it.

Now: What do you plan to do?

First: What’s the first step?

Distractions: What issues might you run into?

Solutions: What can you do to avoid those issues?

Success: What does success look like for this task?

Steps: What’s necessary for success?

After: What task comes after this one?

Put on some tunes: Or white noise and sounds of the forest. I use focus@will, Spotify, or various iOS apps.

Set a timer: I’ve tried using the Pomodoro Technique. It seems like, without fail, I lose focus before the 25 minutes are up. Yes, it sounds ridiculous saying I have a hard time focusing for 25 minutes. But focus requires practice. I’ve been trying 15 minutes lately and it seems to be working better. I’ll work toward increasing this.

I’d like to build a trigger

In the Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin describes a system for creating a sense of calm. His website provides a summary (and also a clip from the audiobook):

To create your own catalyst for peak performance, first identify the one key activity that is most relaxing for you. Then shape a simple routine comprising this and four to five additional personal relaxation methods you know work for you. Practice this routine daily for one month during down time to entrench a calm state of mind.

With the routine in place, he describes the next step of substituting the relaxing activity for a performance activity. A sense of calm is helpful in stressful situations. You then work to compress the routine into a few minutes that you can do anywhere.

Sitting down to write isn’t exactly a performance situation. It’d be great to apply these steps to build a routine that triggers a state of focus.

In the meantime, I’ll continue with the usual: sit down in a coffee shop, set a timer, and then listen to recordings of coffee shops to drown out the coffee shop noise.

Write Every Day

In Write Every Day: How to Write Faster, and Write More, Cathy Yardley discusses different strategies to implement when establishing a writing routine. As usual with writing books, it’s targeted toward novelists¹. Here are some of my highlights.

if you talk about something, it’s a dream… if you schedule it, it’s real.

I didn’t tell many people about this goal to write 100 posts in 100 days². I also didn’t have a schedule my first few weeks. I had a post where I thought “oh just gotta fix a link and write the last few sentences”. Which was fine. But then a bunch of them piled up and I needed to track things.

I also didn’t really have a good place to store ideas. And had a handful of posts I knew I wanted to write ‘next’. Then I’d jump around between them or just get decision fatigue. With the schedule, I know what posts to focus on that day. And I can rest easy knowing that the others are somewhere in the future.

it takes approximately five finished manuscripts under your belt to gain a workable competency.

Workable competency. That’s a good way to put it. I’d love to be workably competent. Even at a very good pace, writing every day and finishing a manuscript every six months, that’s still 2.5 years. If I keep this pace up, I’ll hit workable competency around post #900.

By the end of this project, I worry that instead of having the experience of writing 100 posts, I’ll really have written my first post 100 times. With no improvement between the first and the last. That might actually be the case because I’m not revising and revising and revising and thinking hard to say things in fewer words.

On the other hand, I’m sure the 100th post will come easier and be a little more organized on the first pass. it’ll hopefully be slightly, slightly less *](http://franciscortez.com/two-crappy-pages/)[crappy*.

You don’t get a chance to write until you set the container. It creates a commitment, and it helps you get control of your day, rather than being at the mercy of it.

Something I enjoyed during my short stint with Morning Pages is the rule that you stop after three pages. No more and no less. You finish and move on with your day.

Early on, I was writing longer posts and not finishing things each day. In trying to fix that, I’ve been looking to split posts up if they get too long. I’ve adjusted too far on the other end so sometimes I’ve split a topic too small and don’t really have enough to say for something to stand alone.

Setting the container and moving that container to a specific time in the day makes things real. It reminds me of Cal Newport setting a flexible schedule for deep work.

“SMART” goals. That stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time Bound.

Stretch and ‘SMART’—these two types of goals were my biggest takeaways from Charles Duhigg’s Smarter, Better, Faster. Making a conscious effort to set both has helped. The stretch goal is having a successful blog³. Here’s the breakdown for one of the ‘SMART” goals:

Specific: Finish 100 posts in 100 days.
Measurable: A post is ‘finished’ when it’s online. I learned a few weeks in that some posts felt ‘finished’ in Google Docs but there were still some stray links and images to add. Then they built up and I was about 85% done with a dozen posts. Meaning none of them were finished.
Attainable: I’m currently on pace. I got in the hole early so am having to do a couple weeks with two posts each day.
Time bound: 100 days.

I wonder if there’s a giant pool of people reading books like these for NanoWriMo and things like that. ↩
I told my girlfriend. I told some friends I’m trying to write. That’s pretty much it. ↩
Though it took a few weeks to realize, oh, I’m blogging. And I’m still not completely sure what it will be about by the end of it. Though it’s starting to seem like it’s about writing and reading. ↩

Creativity is like breathing — Oatmeal

I really enjoyed this comic about creativity by The Oatmeal. (And also enjoyed the article I found it in: Tobias Van Schnieder: Creativity is like Breathing.)

You inhale things by reading and watching and listening to different things you enjoy. Then you exhale through creation. Inhaling or exhaling for extended periods without doing the other can lead to bad things.

Example of inhaling too long: Part of this 100 Posts, 100 Days project came from thinking about how many books I was reading. I realized I was reading these books without applying things. I’ve described it as inhaling the same way you house food at a buffet without enjoying each individual dish. Without applying, I wasn’t really learning anything.

Example of exhaling too long: in that Oatmeal post, Matthew Inman talks about working on a comic¹ for five days without leaving the house. I can’t think of anything quite like that. (Though I could see it happening if I were self-employed.) There was a time earlier this year that I was working on a small app for myself to review book highlights. My actual work was pretty intense at the time. I was programming for a few extra hours each day. I was burning the candle at both ends but with the candle in a trash fire. (Though relative to other stories on burnout, it wasn’t so bad.)

I’m more balanced right now. This blog is a good outlet for exhaling and a lot of it requires inhaling. And it’s different from my day job, which I’m guessing is also a good thing.

If I can figure out how that web app works, I’ll show how. Actually, I’ll try to fire it up.

His very moving strip about a plane crash. ↩

Writing at: Bryant Park

I’m trying to write in different locations to get a better sense of what kind of place is best for writing. I wrote some notes while writing in Bryant Park.

What do I hear? There’s an area in front of the library where a woman is playing piano and singing. It’s pleasant. I can’t make out the words. Conversations are going on in all directions. I also can’t make out the words. Some construction to the left of me.

What do I see? There’s a spot in front of me where people stand to pose for pictures every few minutes. Otherwise, the lawn is closed and empty. There’s a lot of green on the ground and a lot of buildings if I look up even a bit. Someone at a table in front of me has Chipotle and his Gorilla Pod is set up so I’m guessing he’s doing some kind of timelapse. The people in front of me are taking some pictures in front of the lawn. Posing. Can’t hate.

What do I feel? Hot. Definitely should’ve gone with shorts today. I found some shade. Once in a while there’ll be a breeze. It’s just short enough to be useless for comfort and cool enough to make me think about finding a cooler place.

What do I smell? Nothing notable. A couple people passed by with trays of Blue Bottle coffee. I bet that smells pretty good. Though you gotta get pretty close to iced coffee to smell anything at all.

What do I taste? I have half of a Blue Stone Lane iced coffee left that I’m sipping on. It’s great. Iced coffee always tastes better when it’s not me putting it together. I don’t mean that in a sense of a cold brewski being better after mowing the lawn. I mean the taste alone. I need to learn how much of everything to put. I’d guess it’s a lot more sugar than I think.

How was it for writing? As far as outdoor spaces go, right now I’m pretty much just comparing it to Washington Square Park. Bryant Park has a lot of tables so it’s probably better logistically. But so is my living room so that’s not exactly the point of writing outside. People watching is better at Washington Square Park. Despite having no table, I was able to focus better at Washington Square Park.

I’ll keep trying to write outdoors once or twice each week. I enjoy being at parks. It seems like a healthy thing to do. I get my sunlight. I might try Central Park or the High Line next. I’ll be sure to write about it, even though I’m not sure it makes for a great read. I think a future rundown of thoughts on different outdoor spaces for writing might be interesting.

Sunday Journal Issue 01

I’m experimenting with a writing journal. Maybe if I have a decided place to put these thoughts on writing, I won’t litter the rest of my posts with them. Also, I’d like for the other posts to be somewhat evergreen, with these being open to content or commentary on the week’s events. Let’s see how this goes.

Sunday — July 3: I started putting a spreadsheet together to track posts to mark statuses and things to do.

Monday — July 4: My friends did our big BBQ thing yesterday so I had a lot of time to write. Instead I spent it tinkering. I spent way too much time with the Hazel app trying to automate things. I’m happy with the result—I can add images to posts pretty quickly now.

I also had plans to start posting these things publicly (vs. just having them in a local Jekyll installation) around post #75. So that I wasn’t feeling satisfied just talking about a goal. But I realized that if things aren’t public, I never get them to a completely finished state. It seemed like half my posts had one link or image missing that I intended to fill in later. And it just adds up.

Tuesday — July 5: I’m starting to accept that this project—100 Posts in 100 Days (or OPIOD for short, or OPOD for shorter¹)—will mostly be about writing. A lot of the material written about writing habits frame it for novelists. Since I’m not writing a novel, I guess my mind wandered until it had something to focus. And that seems to be writing about writing. Lately it seems like everything’s been framed in terms of how it applies to writing.

Also, I spent like 20 minutes making this Cell GIF to represent compacting trash. Well, most of it was just reading DBZ wikis, not actually making the GIF.

I just found a backup of my old daily writing app in Evernote². I will definitely be writing about this. 54 pages of my thoughts from February to June in 2014. I built a small web app to learn Angular and used Firebase as a back-end. I’m embarrassed to say how many results searching for “I will work at Google” brings up. Two years later I was involved in launching Firebase 2.0 at Google I/O.

Just saw that underlines get converted to <ems> which isn’t great because all the links get italicized. Gonna go with a CSS fix for now. I might regret it later.

Wednesday — July 6: Yesterday, I wrote at Bryant Park and the New York Public Library (the main reading room was closed, likely due to ghosts). I finished up *book notes for *Save the Cat. I also opened up a new file and started outlining. This morning I’m sifting through that pile of garbage to see what I’ve got.

My math is wrong. I realized this today. I’ve had mid-August in mind. I forgot I started this project and then went pretty much two weeks without writing. So it’s more like 100 posts in 86-ish days.

I have 47 days until I hit 100 days, and I still have about 65 posts left. I’m going to keep the original August 23 goal and push. For the next 17 days, I’ll do two posts each day to catch up.

I think I can step up the book notes. I already read them, and that’s the time consuming part. Maybe I can make screencasts to show some things. Or start doing photo posts. Anything that lets me create posts quickly while having some value.

It’s time to double down on systems and structure. If that creates formulaic writing, maybe it’s fine for now. I’ll have to set up posts. That’s where book notes and the Four Link Fridays can come in handy. Maybe I can think of a third template.

I have an idea. This journal was going to be part of the Four Link Fridays. But it’s getting longer than expected. And the previous Friday Link posts (issue 01, issue 02, issue 03) are already some of the longest posts I have. This journal will be its own post. I’ll think about making it a weekly thing.

Thursday — July 7: This schedule spreadsheet is actually working pretty well in helping me focus on one thing.

Green means it’s done, blue means it’s done but I need to push the changes, pink means it’s today (aka focus on writing this one), yellow means it’s done but I need to do non-writing things, and red means I need to write and edit.

I have an Ideas sheet where I add post ideas, but I also use Google Keep and random Google Docs. I should probably start thinking of a system for this.

Friday — July 7: The links post took longer to write than expected. Through the week, I collected links in a combination of pinboard.in and Google Keep. But putting the post together still took longer than I planned. Also, writing about interesting links means re-reading the content and that takes longer sometimes.

In Keep, I was adding a bunch of links about one topic in a single note³ and I’d open all the links then browse through them. Ten minutes gone, easy. In the future I’ll try creating the excerpt there with enough context to write my thoughts without jumping around to different sites.

Saturday — July 8: I tried writing with UFC 200 in the background. Pro tip: don’t do this. It makes watching not as fun and writing not as productive at all. So I stopped writing and enjoyed the last few fights. I haven’t felt that invested in a fight event since Mayweather/Pacquiao. I knew I liked wrestling but I didn’t know I cared about Brock Lesnar that much.

Sunday — July 9: I’ve mentioned that I use Focus@Will for different sounds for focusing and lately have been using Spotify to play ambient and classical music along with some white noise. This week some of that showed up in Discover Weekly. Not ideal.

A friend and I have a shared playlist called “edm novices” to try and share what we think kids are listening to these days. It’s probably way off. But I’m listening to it right now and it seems to be good for workign without ruining my Discover Weekly.

Right now I’m at La Colombe. We have good iced coffee at work but I can’t make a drink as good as this and I should take the time to learn. I can probably get 80% of the way there.

This week I got away from outlining and giving myself structure before sitting down to fill things in. I’m trying to learn a couple things that can sort of be separated: improving as a writer and posting regularly.

I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Grit by Angela Duckworth. I just finished a chapter focused on deliberate practice. It was a good reminder that regular feedback is an important element of effective practice.

Improving as a writer: I’ll need feedback on drafts and finished things. First, I’ll need a body of work for people to read. Then some people better at writing than I am. (Narrowing things down 0%.) The harder part is getting them to read my writing and be willing to give feedback. I’ll cross this bridge when I get to it. In the meantime, I’ll just keep trying to find out what pens people wrote with.
Posting regularly: Now here’s something quantitative that I can measure from my cabin in the woods/Dunkin Donuts. I can track how long it takes to write each post. And I can find where I’m distracted or wasting time.

This 100 Posts, 100 Days project will help me improve on the process and being consistent. Establishing that is a good step toward improving as a writer in a “gotta get the reps in” sense. Eventually I can combine quality and quantity and end the day by pulling my dentures out and sitting down to a chamomile tea.

Meanwhile, I’ll just keep working through that spreadsheet a few scrolls up.

Or 💯PI💯D, for uncool dads. ↩
I thought this was lost forever. All this while trying to find a freaking rsync script. ↩
For example, I searched for creative projects involving a 100 day timeframe. There’s a bunch. ↩

Technical Blogging

In Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise into a Remarkable Online Presence, Antonio Cangiano shares his knowledge about setting up, running, and marketing a technical blog. There are good sections on creating good content that can apply to any sort of blog.

I’ve accepted that this 100 Posts, 100 Days project I have is, well, a blog. I thought it’d be good to read up on how I can approach this if I look at it as a blog. Here are some excerpts I enjoyed.

After picking the main topic, jot down a list of ten articles you could write for your blog.

Again, I think it’d be good to think of themes to write about and how they might break down into posts. Ten is a lot though.

What’s the reason your blog exists? Why did you start it in the first place? What’s your compelling story?

This question is way too deep. Because I want to exist? But it’s a good refresher. Why am I doing this in the first place? I wanted to be a better writer. I’ve been successful before when writing regularly. The things I wrote about opened doors in my career. I’d like to continue that.

Your goal is to make it just as obvious, to yourself first and then to readers, why your blog is worth following.

It’d be worth following because other people are probably trying to start writing habits of their own. And they aren’t novelists. It’d be good to take the Ben Orenstein and Sandi Metz idea of spreading the benefits of speaking at conferences, but for blogging. Ben also says blogging is important for capturing your beginner’s mind.

I can help someone.

I know it’s a long way off, but eventually it’d be good for this to also be funny. Because everyone likes the guy who’s trying too hard to be funny.

Write down goals for your blog. What do you want to get out of the blog you are starting? What do you expect from it in one month, three months, a year, three years?

One month: Learn to enjoy writing, build the habit (I think I’m here now.)
Three months: This will be around 100 posts. Seth Godin says you should find ten people to share with first. At this point I’d like to have, say, my first 3 or 4.
One year: 150 posts? After hitting 100 posts I’d like to keep a weekly publishing schedule. The value of one weekly post would have to exceed the value of the 5 posts. I also need to define “value” in some measurable way.
Three years

Right now I’m trying to review all the past books I’ve read through and highlighted to build up a set of book notes. A year from now it’d be great to write book notes once per week and a link collection once per week.

After picking the main topic, jot down a list of ten articles you could write for your blog. You don’t need to write the actual articles yet, just the titles. When you are done with this task, ask yourself whether doing this exercise left you excited or frustrated. Was it hard to come up with ten titles, or could you have kept going for ages? The main point of this exercise is to understand if you have enough to say about the topic at hand.

I’m learning that I’m not good at estimating how much I have to say about different topics. Sometimes it seems like things are going to spill out of my head, only to get stumped a couple paragraphs in. Other times I’ll be slow to start on an idea that seems like it might be a dud. Then I get into it and a few pages later I’m wondering if I should split it into multiple posts.

I’ll try this exercise out to see if I can pick a good theme to focus five posts on for a week. If I can think of ten titles then I might be able to write five posts and maybe one will be good.

I can start with a comparison of photography and writing. Before digital tools you had fewer shots at things. Now we can just fire away and post as we please. There are pros and cons to this. I need to focus on how to take advantage of digital convenience without falling in its traps.

Create lists of products (e.g., 5 Books Every Agile Developer Should Read). They can be cheesy or downright good advice. Opt for the latter.

Thank you for reading part one of my series: 5 Books Every Writer Writing 100 Posts in 100 Days Should Read.

Mindless Eating

In Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink explains food habits people have and suggests ways to eat better. A lot of the book focuses a lot on eating less: “Cutting out our favorite foods is a bad idea. Cutting down on how much of them we eat is mindlessly do-able.” This keeps things practical because that’s the most immediately relatable concept. Assuming people eat a lot of bad food, getting the total amount down is a good first step. Then you can focus on quality and replacing bad food with good. Finally, you can earn the right to inconvenience your friends with your odd orders. Then take it one step further and share your thoughts on food.

It reminds me of 59 Seconds, where Richard Wiseman boils a bunch of research down to straightforward suggestions. Which, all, in turn reminds me of Derek Sivers’s “Just tell me what to do” directives approach.

Here are some of my highlights.

Simply thinking that a meal will taste good can lead you to eat more. You won’t even know it happened.

Not completely related, but it’s so rare now that I’ll eat somewhere without looking things up on Yelp. And then I end up liking everything. I like good food and am not picky. This means you should never ask me for food recommendations. I like everything. Since I think everything will taste good, I eat more of everything. Not a good combination.

Most diets are deprivation diets. We deprive ourselves or deny ourselves of something—carbohydrates, fat, red meat, snacks, pizza, breakfast, chocolate, and so forth. Unfortunately, deprivation diets don’t work for three reasons: 1) Our body fights against them; 2) our brain fights against them; and 3) our day-to-day environment fights against them.

That’s enough reasons for me to believe, and it’s easiest to change your environment. 59 Seconds has some eating tips also and suggests a very straightforward environment change: Put a mirror in your kitchen.

The more you think of something, the more of it you’ll eat.

Going through a paleo phase, one of the takeaways that stayed with me is the initial kitchen purge. You’ll eat what’s in there, period. I still don’t keep many snacks around. The brain is too strong and too dumb.

The bottom line: We all consume more from big packages, whatever the product.

In other words, volume trumps calories. We eat the volume we want, not the calories we want.

Here’s where we can start replacing low quality with high quality food.

A smart strategy is never to have more than two items on your plate at any one time. You can go back if you’re still hungry, but the lack of variety slows you down, and you end up eating less.

Variants of this conversation are happening at every buffet in America:

“I want to eat until I feel like garbage.”

“It’s gonna be awesome.”

At times, Mindless Eating seems like it’s explaining how to deceive your brain. Sometimes, that’s what’s needed because we’re idiots. If, like me, you don’t believe in yourself, check the book out..

I didn’t have the time to link to this elegantly, but I’d like to point people toward Bill Barnwell’s article about his own weight loss: The Easiest Way to Lose 125 Pounds is to Gain 175 Pounds. It’s the best health article I’ve read in the last few years.

Friday Links Issue 04

Here we go. I’m approaching 40 days. Posting every day is feeling more and more routine. I really look forward to writing every day now. There few days where I have to squeeze it in between the margins. With some focus on scheduling and tracking things, that kind of day is becoming a rarity.

I started a writing journal that I’ll post on Sunday. Some of the meta dispatches that I would include in previous Friday link post we’re getting pretty long so I made them even longer and moved them out to their own post.

How writing 1000 words a day changed my life — Srivinas Rao

I would wake up every morning and I would just put my fingers on the keyboard. Most of what I wrote was garbage. It mainly still is.

But when I powered through the garbage(sometimes the first 200 words), I ended up with gold. I figured if I was willing to produce enough garbage, I would come with just enough gold to meet all my deadlines and expectations.

I’ve been listening to The Unmistakeable Creative podcast lately, hosted by Srivinas Rao. He’s mentioned that he writes 1000 words every day, and this post explains what he’s learned through that routine.

Writing seems to be powering through garbage and then cleaning up the garbage. I’m not even at where I’m finding gold yet. I believe following the process will pay off. If I stop posting, then I probably have stopped believing that. But even forty days in, I’ve learned enough to know that something good is coming out of this.

In another post, Srivinas discusses the planning, organization, and tools for consistently writing 1000 words a day. He uses MacJournal for his distraction free writing tool. For the most part, I use Google Docs. Other times I’ll use iA Writer. I looked at some MacJournal screenshots and it seemed familiar. Turns out I own a license from a 2009 MacHeist. I’ll have to give it a go.

Timequake excerpt: Swoopers and Bashers — Kurt Vonnegut

Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done. I am a basher.

Now I’m forgetting where I heard this concept mentioned. I have a feeling it was a podcast. So much for my memory. I’m trying to be a swooper. But I do notice that I can fall into a basher mode. I’ll work on sentences too much. There’s something to just getting things down. I’ve found that setting a timer is really helping.

It reminds me of something that Addy Osmani says about Programming: first do it, then do it right, then do it better. That mirrors closely writing systems wehre the first draft should just get ideas on paper as fast as possible, the second draft should fix organization and mechanics, and third draft should be where things sound nice.

Writing it Down — Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson has posted every day since 2003.

As all of you know, I write every day. It is my discpline, my practice, my thing. It forces me to think, articulate, and question. And I get feedback from it. When I hit publish, I get a rush. Every time. Just like the first time. It is incredibly powerful.

I’d like for writing every day to be my thing also. I also don’t really have a system for feedback. Which is currently fine because I also don’t happen to have any readers. When I hit publish, I then go through 5 or 20 posts to make sure Jekyll compiled the site correctly. And that I didn’t mistakenly upload a draft with [insert good story here] notes to myself.

Also, the post I excerpted is one of the few where Fred mentions writing daily¹. I admire his restraint in this. I would probably start my post in bold letters calling out the consistency and raw determination I have. Actually I can do it right here: “For my first post today because by the way I write every day…”²

Argentina On Two Steaks A Day — Maciej Cegłowski

The classic beginner’s mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon.

I love steak and this article made me want to visit Argentina almost strictly to try their beef out. But I’m linking to this mostly to point to all the things Maciej makes. He’s the sole developer of pinboard, which I collect links with all the time. I’ve enjoyed Maciej’s dry humor when responding to people on Hacker News. I learned that he has a pretty extensive blog where he writes mostly about food and travel and doesn’t write very much about programming at all.

I didn’t start this project thinking I would write about writing so much. Something I’ve really enjoyed is noticing all the people who write regularly who who don’t consider writing their first job.

I poked around the site more and was surprised to find out that Maciej is the person who put together a talk I had seen before: The Website Obesity Crisis (transcript with slides). He also speaks about more serious topics. (He threw a joke in at the very end and it absolutely killed me.)

However, the posts where he discusses his routine are excellent. ↩
And now I’m realizing I actually do mention this in just about every post. Just gotta start bolding it. ↩

Teaching one thing at a time

I wrote a couple issues of a design newsletter earlier this year. I’ll eventually talk about why I stopped. Actually, I can do that right now: writing an email was sort of scary because you can’t edit once it’s sent out. Eventually I’d like to have a mailing list again so I’ll just need to get over that.

I was about 80% done writing issue 3 when I abandoned the project¹. Anyway, I remembered that the draft some somewhere in Google Docs and thought it had a bunch of stuff about podcasts I enjoyed. It didn’t. But there were a couple other things I can use for future posts.

Then I remembered the writing about podcasts I like is somewhere in Evernote. So and I sort of found it.

A lot of people know her for her rules:

Your class can be no longer than 100 lines of code.

Your methods can be no longer than five lines of code.

You can pass no more than four parameters and you can’t just make it one big hash.

When a call comes into your Rails controller, you can only instantiate one object to do whatever it is that needs to be done. And your view can only know about one instance variable.

A lot of this is over my head, but I certainly know that five lines of code helps you focus on doing one thing.

Sandi also wrote Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby. I’m not a Ruby developer but I own a copy because it’s regarded as one of the best programming books out there, regardless of language. I wanted to learn Rails at one point in my life. One of the hardest things in programming is naming things. And if it’s hard to name, you’re probably not doing one thing with it.

If the simplest description you can devise uses the word “and,” the class likely has more than one responsibility. If it uses the word “or,” then the class has more than one responsibility and they aren’t even very related.

This can be applied more broadly. My favorite screencasts (egghead.io and Laravel) were enjoyable because they were short and taught one thing at a time. When I make a screencasts, I want to focus on teaching one thing a time. If I notice that the title might have and then it might be worth splitting into another screencast.

In that Bike Shed episode with Sandi Metz, there’s a Q&A at the end (it’s a recording of a live event). She answers a few questions about speaking. She really, really encourages it. It reminded me of another thoughtbot developer, Ben Orenstein. He also encourages speaking, teaching, and also blogging:

People who are in the market for a programming job should blog every day. Write about what you’ve learned so far. Don’t make the excuse that you’re just a beginner. Imagine someone who is two months behind you and write for them.

The key is writing it down when you have the beginner’s mind. You have empathy that is pretty much impossible to recreate once you gain more knowledge.

Sandi says if you learned something in the last six months, there’s probably something worth documenting and sharing with others. If it would’ve been helpful to you six months ago then it’s likely helpful to someone right now.

So I’m going to try to teach some things. But first I’ll make sure to write what I learn down as I learn it.

I will not abandon this project. Note: If you’re reading this in, say, 2017 and the count on the front page is still around 37, then I probably abandoned this project. ↩