Kevin Old

My quest to restore productivity to stalled personal projects

2009-05-06T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve recently discovered a few key items that have lead to stalled personal projects and steps I can take to get back to productivity.

Personal projects they are just that, personal. I could ask other developers/designers to be apart of these projects and would probably get a few to contribute, but there’s something about accomplishing a goal on my own that I am chasing. How far can I push my talents and what end result can come of it. I think this view also leads to a fear of the end result not being “good enough”.

I’ve started several personal projects over the years and most remain unfinished. What’s worse is that most are 90% complete. What’s keeping me from finishing them? The “excuses” range from “the last 10% is the hardest to finish” to being unwilling to commit to graphics and styling. And procrastination.

I stumbled upon a blog post with a quote that might help me get a jump start on finishing some of these.

People feel good when they accomplish tasks.

I know that. I’m giddy with joy when I accomplish even the smallest tasks with projects I work on professionally and personally. I can’t wait to share what I’ve learned and created with family and friends.

Get organized

Define simple and clear goals of what the end result should be. All of the projects I’ve accomplished in my professional career have mostly been with the aid of working with a graphics designer. They initially provide mockups and a voice to converse with when certain design elements are unclear or I feel could be improved. Their mockups provided the roadmap from which to work. Mockups are visual goals.
Divide tasks into unbelievably simple tasks. Beside each task write an estimate on how long it will take to complete. It seems silly, but a few days/weeks/months down the road when reviewing your task list you’ll read the description and the time estimate and think “I’ve got X minutes. I can check that off.”
Use some form of GTD. It really works.

Get productive

Do something. Anything. Related to your project.
Get fired up. Grab a cup of your favorite beverage, get in a productive environment, crank the tunes and sing along. Whatever it is, just get in the zone.
Once in the zone, pick a task that interests you. It doesn’t have to be next on the list, but it must interest you.
Give it 10 minutes and if you’re not feeling it – Stop. Pick another task.
If you’re still not feeling it, don’t panic. Step back and relax. Choose something that you know you can accomplish in a short amount of time. This is important. Back to the post, the feeling of accomplishment gives you encouragement to continue.
Do not get bogged down in meaning less pieces of code. An example would be database versioning. Sure it’s cool, but playing with DBIx::Class::Schema::Versioned for hours and hours and wondering why it just wouldn’t “work”. I then discovered at the bottom of the POD that it doesn’t fully work with SQLite. Great. I’d been motivated to once again work on my project and I picked the wrong tasks to work on. Instantly killed my productive mood.

These ideas are nothing new or groundbreaking and there are certainly others throughout the years that have written on this subject. This was written to myself as my quest to restore productivity to personal projects is ongoing.

Better git conflict resolution between binaries with --theirs and --ours

2009-02-24T00:00:00-06:00

Whichever framework I use (Catalyst, Django, etc.) for personal projects, I always develop with a local SQLite database. From time to time they can get out of sync between branches. While working on a project recently, I ran into a Git conflict between a SQLite database on master and an older copy on a development branch.

After checking out the development branch, I ran the merge:

 $ git checkout dev_branch
 $ git merge master

Git notified me that I had a conflicting SQLite file.

I posed the question on the Git irc channel and was told (thanks doener) to use the --theirs flag for git checkout.

 $ git checkout --theirs filename(s)

This says that the file(s) being merged in take precedence over the file(s) in place in the branch, thus running this will overwrite the file(s) on the branch. --ours is the opposite in that the file(s) on the branch take precedence in this merge. More information can be found in the git-checkout docs.

I was then able to complete the merge:

 $ git add umerged_file(s)
 $ git commit

I’m not sure which version of Git this was made available in, but having just upgraded for this feature it is available in the latest stable version (currently 1.6.1.3).

In the old version I was running (1.6.0.2) "git reset -- file; git checkout MERGE_HEAD -- file" would have done the same.

My move to jekyll

2009-02-21T00:00:00-06:00

I use Vim for everything. It’s just who I am. I can do more in Vim in a matter of minutes than with hours in Notepad, Emacs, Textmate, etc. Not because I don’t understand them, but simply because my skills are honed to Vim and it has become second nature to me. I find myself in Gmail at times trying to save what I’d just written with :wq!.

It is what inspired my switch to jekyll. After years of using Textpattern and Wordpress and writing very few posts, I realized that I was becoming frustrated with using textarea WYSIWYG editors. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say to the world, it was just that the sheer process of writing inside a browser made the task daunting. The problem was my editor. I finally realized that if I changed my blog software to allow me to use Vim, I’d be more motivated to write.

Combine all of that with the fact that I wanted to keep the source and content in Git and jekyll just seemed to fill the void. I also took this as an opportunity to freshen the design of my site and simplify it all.

I look forward to posting more frequently and watching the jekyll project grow.

Why I Git It

2008-07-25T00:00:00-05:00

Yeah, I know. Cheesy title. But, it’s true. I’ve been using Git for the past several months and am amazed at it’s powerful simplicity. The concepts are easy to grasp thanks to great documentation and real world examples.

I’d heard all the rage about the other SCM‘s. I’ve looked into Mercurial and Bazaar, but wasn’t as impressed with them as I was with Git. After following the timeline of emails as Linus wrote and shared his new creation and watching his visit to Google, I gained a whole new respect for distributed revision control (DRC).

It’d been hard to miss all the talk around DRC, but thought it’s only benefits were to interact with my repository when I didn’t have connectivity. I was almost always connected, so my Subversion repository was all I needed – so I thought. Having read a post about cloning repositories, I decided to investigate why so many people were now using Git. While researching Git, another article about “forking” caught my attention and slowly I started to see all of the wonderful benefits I’d been missing by not using a DRC – specifically Git.

Most notably:

Branching – the way it’s suppose to work! This is “throw away” branching at it’s best!
Cloning – This is extremely useful when stumbling across projects on services like Github. Instead of the traditionally checking out a copy of the trunk or a branch in CVS and Subversion, Git clones the entire repository into a local directory for you and “…creates remote-tracking branches for each branch in the cloned repository”. A great example is Reddit. When they released the code, I cloned the repository and every few days I can run “git fetch” to update the remote-tracking branches. I can run “git pull” to update the remote-tracking branches as well as “merge the remote master branch into the current master branch, if any”.
git-svn – Simply put, this is brilliant!!! Having all of my repositories in Subversion this allowed me to have a “trial run” with Git. I was able to make a local “Git clone” of my Subversion repository, interact with it and “sync” the changes I truly wanted committed to the Subversion repository. I could create as many throw away branches as I liked and the Subversion repository never knew anything about them. Needless to say, the VERY DAY I started playing with Git, I made my last commit to my Subversion repository and haven’t looked back since.
git-stash – Again, BRILLIANT!!! Stash “saves your local modifications away and reverts the working directory to match the HEAD commit”. Every developer I’ve talked to about this with has the same reaction – (AWESOME!!!!) – as we’ve all been in the situation where they were working on a new feature and they need to fix a bug. Most of us have a “fixes” version of trunk in a separate directory for just this purpose. But with git-stash, you can have this freedom with a single working copy!
git-diff – Git tracks content, not files. Each commit is tracked by it’s sha1sum, shown beside each when issuing a “git log”.

I was also impressed with the wealth of information and comparisons of Git with other SCM’s others had put together.

Recent news about Gist show the flexibility of Git repositories. Thanks to services like Github Git is gaining more respect and notoriety, almost like the movement when Subversion first came on the scene.

Hope for Perl on App Engine

2008-07-23T00:00:00-05:00

Finally, after months of users begging Google to support Perl on Google App Engine (GAE), there looks to be a positive response as Brad explains.

The majority of the work will have to be done by the Perl community, but Google is giving Brad and other Google developers 20% of their time to be devoted to this pet project.

When launched I played with GAE briefly and once I saw the support for Django I took another look. Since I don’t program daily in Python it takes me longer to the most basic things I as spend my time writing pseudo code when unsure and looking up syntax later. I’ve yet to test the sample Django app out on GAE, but hope to someday soon.

Catalyst moves away from YAML

2008-07-10T00:00:00-05:00

It appears that to the Catalyst community YAML isn’t the best config file format any longer as they’ve chosen to switch in favor of Config::General – which defaults to the "apache config format"

From Config::General’s POD:

The format of config files supported by Config::General is inspired by the well known apache config format, in fact, this module is 100% compatible to apache configs, but you can also just use simple name/value pairs in your config files.

Catalyst::Plugin::DebugCookie even provides the updated configuration style in it’s POD:

 <Plugin::DebugCookie>

    secret_key 001A4B28EE3936

    cookie_name my_secure_debug_cookie

 </Plugin::DebugCookie>

The following command can be used to dump an existing Catalyst app’s config into an Apache style conf file. You’ll definitely have to edit the resulting file, but at least it’s a start.



 perl -Ilib -e ‘use MyApp; use Config::General; Config::General→new→save_file(“myapp.conf”, MyApp→config);’

An incredible motivational tool - Resilience

2008-07-02T00:00:00-05:00

I’m a fan of The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch watched a show I’d DVR’d the other day. The show was about the "Comeback" mindset. Most of us know that our dreams don’t come true overnight and that on the way to our dreams we often have a hard road and sometimes get discouraged. The show featured people who had been knocked down, but came back.

Of the guests on the show the following quote by Dr. Karen Reivich made the most impact on me:

Resilience. It’s learnable. The heart of resilience is believing that you can affect change. [It] might not affect the whole situation, but there is an aspect of the situation you can control.

Excellent advice not only when times are tough, but as motivation when solving even the most difficult day-to-day problems.

Colorful grep

2008-07-01T00:00:00-05:00

I’m not sure how I’ve made it this far in my career and never knew that grep had a color option to highlight the term you’re searching for in the results. Guess I’ve never really needed it that bad, but since stumbling across this, it’s made things a lot easier to view.

To make this seamless you can add this to your .bash_rc or .bash_profile:

alias grep="grep —color=auto"

Thanks to asommer’s .bash_rc for pointing this out.

Transform password into digest inside a DBIx::Class model

2008-05-28T00:00:00-05:00

I’m working on a project using Catalyst , and I initially coded the password hashing (compare the passwords then build the digest, used during the signup and change password processes) directly into my controller (could be placed in a Utils package) and passed the digest to the create/update like so:

my $pass = $c->req->param("password");

my $digest = Digest->new(‘MD5’)->add($pass)->digest;

…

$c->user->password($digest);

Reading the Catalyst mailing list I learned about store_column(), part of DBIx::Class::Row .

Upon storage of a row (an update or create), it allows you to override the default "store this value" and manipulate the value into whatever you’d like.

Using the code below I was able to move this logic out of the controller/Utils package and into the model where it belongs.

sub store_column {

    my( $self, $col, $val ) = @_;

    $val = Digest->new(‘MD5’)->add($val)->digest

              if $col eq ‘password’;

    return $self->next::method( $col, $val );

}

This technique can also be used to perform calculations .

CPAN via a Pipe

2008-03-30T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve tried to monitor the CPAN recent feed to keep up with updates to modules I use and find other useful modules, but the volume of updates has gotten to much to handle. While it’s great to see so many updates, I simply don’t have the time to look through them all.

Apparently, I’m not the only one with the problem as a while back NotiCPAN was created to notify users of updates to specific modules. Problem is you must select each individual module you’d like to watch.

In the sprit of being lazy, I thought up a way to monitor what I’d like via a Yahoo Pipe. With it I’m able to enter the types of modules I’m interested in and subscribe to it in Google Reader. I like the fact that I can watch all Catalyst modules by simply specifying that I want “Catalyst” in the title or if I specify “YAML::Tiny” it’ll watch that one module for now and if others enter that namespace it’ll automatically pick those up.

It’s a very simple concept, but has helped me a great deal.

Feel free to check out the pipe and I’d love to hear of other uses.

jQuery and hidden items

2008-03-29T00:00:00-05:00

Doing some resent work with jQuery a div that is initially hidden from the user, I went round in cirlces when I kept getting nothing when trying to get the div’s margin information via:

$('#myitem').offset()

I kept getting zero returned for the top and left margins. What I needed to do was to show() the div:

$('#myitem').show().offset().hide()

This allows me to get the margins, but ultimately keeps the div hidden from the user.

Hopefully, documenting this here will help someone if they run into in the future, or it’ll help me the future me if I ever forget.

Charting and Graphing with Javascript, Flash or API

2007-12-13T00:00:00-06:00

There seems to be a lot of work around generating Charts and Graphs as over the past few months there have been several major graphing/charting projects to come to my attention.

Google Chart API – Most recently Google jumped into the graphing and charting arena by providing a REST API. This is another good move for Google and looks to be a solid first release, providing more initial documentation that I’ve seen in any of the Google API’s.

Open Flash Chart – These are really slick graphs and charts! Want interactive, easy to implement, and (yes, I’ll say it again) slick looking graphs and charts? Then have a look at Open Flash Chart (OFC) and you’ll quickly understand why I think it’s one of the best of the bunch. They have every type of graph or chart you’d need and make getting your data to the SWF file a snap. Just provide it with a data structure by using one of the many helpers for just about any language and you’ll have impressive graphs and charts in minutes. It’s gonna be interesting to see which major companies will come to use these graphs and charts.

Flot – Uses jQuery to produce some very nice graphs and charts. This is definitely a project to watch in the future.

A key concept for design

2007-11-26T00:00:00-06:00

Never be afraid to make decisions. All decisions are temporary. Make them, and be willing to be wrong. The only way to get better is to learn from your mistakes and accept that you�re only as good as you can be in any given moment.

This is the third item in a list of six tenets of design, but in my opinion should be number one. Why? It’s a primary concept of programming (and life) – trial and error – and might be the key concept that helps bridge the gap between programming and design.

I am a programmer. When I make a mistake with code I have a compiler to tell me that it’s wrong. I make an attempt at a fix. Wrong again. Rinse and repeat. Until it’s right.

Who knew the concept could be that simple for design?

While I am in no way a designer, I’ve learned several techniques to structure information so that users can quickly find what they are looking for. I didn’t learn it overnight (just like programming). Nor have I learned it all. I’ve read a few books, blogs and studied great designs. They all make it look so easy! But, it’s just like programming – they rinsed and repeated until they got it right.

I’ve been through several iterations when coding the design for this blog, but until now I can say that I haven’t truly thought of designing in the same way I do programming. I guess I just expect to magically be able to create the perfect design in the first sitting, rather than let it evolve.

What makes designing different than programming is that there is no right answer. It’s how I view it that makes it good or not. Maybe this shift in thinking will help me to take risks – temporary risks – with my designs, until I get it good enough – for me.

Javascript CDN's

2007-11-20T00:00:00-06:00

As a developer, I’m encouraged when I see projects like CacheFile.net. Yahoo was the first to start hosting their YUI files. Shortly there after, Dojo followed with AOL’s support.

Until CacheFile.net these were the only two libraries available on CDN’s. Now all of them are available. All of that said, I am slightly concerned that the project will run out of a budget quickly, unless a major sponsor (come on Amazon, here’s a great opportunity) steps forward. I’m interested to see who this develops.

Perl is not dead; It's Pot Roast

2007-11-19T00:00:00-06:00

When I think of Perl I’m reminded of a Slow Cooker, in that it is what it says. Perl is Practical. Sometimes practicality takes time (hence the months and years between releases – Pot Roast takes time). Extraction and Reporting are self explanatory. Perl is a Language.

According to Wikipedia:

Languages live, die, move from place to place and change with time. Any language that stops changing begins to die; any language that is a living language is a language in a state of continuous change.

When I look around at the various frameworks, existing expansions, continued development, community involvement, published works, plethora of jobs, news and evangelism I simply cannot see anything but a thriving language.

Critics have and will continue to have the debate whether Perl is alive or dead, but in the meantime, we continue to develop and innovate with Perl, ever so effortlessly adapting to the new “concept on the block”.

Web Services, API’s, frameworks, blogs (read the about page if you’re wondering why I use Wordpress), social networking, scripting, etc. – Perl can do it all. Just like any other language.

Sure, competition and collaboration are great. They are what spawn new ideas and solutions. I’m reminded of the jQuery vs PrototypeJS war. jQuery pioneered the concept of using CSS selectors to get to DOM Elements. Brilliant. Now, these and many other libraries have that functionality. But it took time – like Pot Roast.