New Stickers!
Locate those Missing Puts!
Do you co workers sometimes forget to remove their #puts; or do you sometimes forget where you put* yours? …
Now you can find them ;D
* Pun intended
“rake spec” with Rspec 2
Working The Pomodoro Way
The last two weeks I have been practising the Pomodoro Technique.
The Pomodoro Technique was created by Francesco Cirillo 18 years ago.
The basic idea is to:
- Choose a task to work on.
- Set the Pomodoro to 25minutes.
- Work on you task.
- When the timer rings, take a short break (I take 5 minute breaks)
- Repeat
Every 4 rounds take a longer break (I take 15 minutes).
There is a great e-book for you enjoyment.
While working the Pomodoro Technique I have found that I am able to get into “the zone” a lot quicker.
My advice:
- Be as strict as possible with the structure.
- Make sure you have a task before you start. Dont just float into a cycle.
- If you’re on OSX, I recommend this app. It is also open source!
- Have a drink and a snack, like dried fruits, next to you. If you become thirsty or slightly peckish, it won’t interfere with your current cycle
If you have any tips, post them below.
Edit:
In the comments Paule asked for suggestions of things to do in the 5 minute breaks.
The idea of the break is to allow you to disconnect from your work. The book mentions that this “allows the mind assimilate what’s been learned in the last 25 minutes”.
So in layman terms, thats anything that doesn’t make you think too hard.
A few things that I do:
- Eat. Something that doesn’t require too much preparation, like a piece of fruit or a chocolate bar (but not too many ;) )
- Read email. I do not answer my emails. If they require a reply, I star them.
- Read Twitter.
- Read Quora.
- Talk to other Railslovers.
- Get a quick drink.
- Read a quick blog post.
- Prepare/start the washing machine
- etc…
If you find yourself thinking “fuck! Quick! What should I do?”. It may be worth writing a list of things that you can do and pick one.
Freckly + Freckly App
At Railslove we use Freckle and Pivotal Tracker for our client projects.
We wanted a super simple dashboard that just showed us a list of our Pivotal projects and the total number of hours we’ve worked on that project.
You can find the project over here.
I will eventually get round to writing some decent documentation for it, but to roughly get started:
As an added bonus, I didn’t like any of the existing Ruby library so we bundled the code we were using and released it as a gem. It currently only two of the API calls, mainly because that is all we needed. I do plan on extending the gem to cover the whole API.
Heres a quick run through