QCon London
Damned that was a pretty full on couple of months. No time to do jack. Anyway, I’m seeing a little bit of daylight. Well QCon in Finance Exchange was a great day. Some great talks and a good crowd of people. However, no rest for the wicked, onto QCon London and planning the Architectures in Financial Applications Track.
But I have, just for fun, been taking a look at Apache Sling and have just got as far as installing it. Baby steps…
The Six Ps
It’s been a long time since my last post. Alas, my workload has been verging on the ridiculous lately and I have not been able to get to the toilet for the last week. Total control. Apart from projects kicking off left, right and centre at Cognifide, I’m working very closely with the folks at Skillsmatter and Trifork to make QCon Finance Exchange a something-to-behold day. I’m the track host and I had absolutely no idea, zero, zip to the amount of planning that goes into one of these events. That said, the line-up is looking pretty damned special, with just one more big hitter about to join the party… 
If you’re thinking of coming along, i’d sign up now because places are going rather quickly…
Anyway, so long as you respect the Six Ps - Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance - then I think we’ll be okay. I’m so looking forward to my next spare 5 minutes of freedom…
GTD: Zero Bookmarks in my Browser
As you might have guessed I’m in Getting Things Done mode. So after setting up my personal wiki, the new home for my weekly reviews, I turned my attention to the browser. I spend a hell of lot of time in my browser so I decided to spend a few minutes seeing if I’m using it well.
When I first started using a web browser I was taught to bookmark pages and organise them into folders that are hierarchically structured into a tree-like form. For the last couple of years though I’ve found bookmarks in a browser to be a complete pain for a number of reasons:
- Firstly, I use a three browsers: IE, Safari (& with the latest webkit.org) and Firefox. Safari is my favourite, Firefox has the best tools and IE is what I use on customer sites. Firefox is what I call my default browser because it’s has everything I need to work effectively. Firebug, mouse gestures, scrapbook, foxmarks, tree style tab, piclens and delicious to name a few. If Safari could do all of these, I’d use Safari for sure, but it doesn’t.
- Secondly, I cannot stand the pain of keeping bookmarks synchronised across different browsers. I know about plugins to synchronise bookmarks across different instances of the same browser (e.g. foxmarks) but not different browsers. Also, I don’t think I would use it anyway.
- Thirdly, organising bookmarks into a tree is just not an effective way to manage large numbers of urls. Ugly and usable.
The typical way I work when moving about on the web is that when I land on a page, I have two options: save this page or not. If I choose to save this page and i have not read it, I need to record that fact as well. That is why I am big fan of tagging bookmarks and delicious (particularly since its recent upgrade and better url delicious.com) is my choosen vehicle for doing this. So here’s what I do:
- Do some stuff on the web (I’m in my default browser Firefox)
- If I want to save the current page, Command-D to bring up the delicious plugin
- I add my tags and if I’ve not read it I add a notread tag
All done in 5 seconds from the keyboard, no mouse. At the end of each week, I ruthlessly step through my notread pages in delicious and either read or delete them. I very rarely have anything from the previous week taken over into the next. And that’s it.
So, last week I visited every page I had as a bookmark in my browser and added them either to my personal wiki or delicious. Not surprisingly, I got rid of 90% of my bookmarks (note to self, tip to spring clean bookmarks within delicious). Now I have Zero Bookmarks within my browser. The first thing people say, no bookmarks in your browser, but what if you’re offline. Well, if I’m offline, I can’t access delicious but even if I could, I couldn’t access the sites at the end of bookmarks anyway. And for the local links, well, there’re in my personal wiki, which has a great home page with about 20 links to my favourite, most visited sites. Of course, my personal wiki home page is my most visited page.
So what does my browser have? Well, a couple of bookmarklets for gReader (adds the current page to my google rss reader), Twurl (converts the current page into a tiny url and lets me post to twitter) and delicious (for tagging and saving the current page).
GTD: My Personal Wiki
I’ve been using wikis for a long time now and have a certain way of using them. There are things as a newcomer to wikis that you always do but as you become more familiar with the collaborative, read/write web-based environments there are things you just don’t do. You start learning the don’ts when you realise a wiki is not the knowledge base but more a shopfront to knowledge. The better your shopfront, the greater access you’ll have to your knowledge, and ultimately the more use you’ll make of your wiki.
Selecting the Wiki
My personal wiki had to be small, fast and above all work offline. You’d be amazed just how many, twikis, blikis and wikis fall short of that cut. By small, I mean in both features, footprint and essential complexity. Fast is obvious. And offline means that I can enter some stuff in the same way regardless of whether I’m online or not. Given that I didn’t want to go through the hassle of installing a local web-based application on my machine I quickly honed in on TiddlyWiki - a client-side wiki. I’d used this about a year ago and was in talks with the then head of the team Jeremy Ruston about adding server-side syncing support. It appears they added it, so now we’re good to go.
Set Up
This made be laugh. To install the TiddlyWiki just right click here and save as the file (the wiki ) to your hard drive. You done. Open up the file in your browser and you’re away. TiddlyWiki is a single, self-contained HTML page that is small, fast and works offline!
Wiki Usage
The wiki is my shop front to my world, so here’s how I use it:
- I found a home for the TiddlyWiki file on my machine and made that file my home page within my browser.
- I start creating content home pages, for work, research, personal bit’s and pieces, weekly reviews, and other stuff.
- Content home pages contain links to external sites or internal links to pages that I write.
- My personal wiki content is organised more like a forest, shallow and wide and not like a mutated inheritance tree that is narrow and deep.
- TiddlyWiki allows you to refer other TiddlyWikis (keep the links relative), so I quickly pull out work from my wiki. Don’t let your wiki get wide and deep!
- I’m not a fan of stuffing attachments into wikis. Attachments are like the weights you place around on a hot-air balloon. The more put on, the more likely your wiki will remain grounded and not take you to the places you really ought to see. I prefer to keep the wiki light and link to attachments hosted elsewhere if possible.
- Backup and multiple machines. It’s possible and there is support for this. Still fiddling about with this but given the wiki is a single file. My options abound.
With my wiki in place I am a pretty happy guy. I trashed a lot text files, stickies and gtd actions and put the good stuff in my wiki. Also, with the wiki as my home page, with searc, tagging and a well-design front page, access to my current knowledge portfolio is just a click away.
Sitting back, slightly pleased with myself, I looked started seeing redundant bookmarks in my browser. Upon closer inspection, and a little thought, I’m trying to think of a good reason why I’d ever bookmark a page within my browser. Damn, time to eliminate more waste…
GTD: Inbox Zero and Weekly Reviews
This week was a bad week. Even though I’m pretty organised in my approach to dealing with large amounts of stuff, I realised this week that I was losing the battle and something needed to be done to turn things back around in my favour.
I read Dave Allen’s book, Getting Things Done (GTD), about a year ago and as he it puts, GTD is nothing more than advanced common sense. I tried out his simple folder structure but further adapted it to achieve Inbox Zero. For me, when an email arrives I apply one of six verbs to it: delete, archive, respond now (ala five sentences), delegate, defer, or deal with. The deferring requires me to do nothing an leave it in my Inbox, however, my Inbox must be cleared by the end of the day. If I cannot deal with the email by the end of the day it is escalated to a task. Then it moves into my action stack (something for a later post).
However, even with this in place I was still a slave to my Inbox last week. So I did some more research and found the answer in Merlin Mann’s talk he gave at Google just over a year ago. Switch off email and check it periodically. Simple but effective. I have now regained control of my Inbox. So now it goes something like this: 1) Turn on email client. 2) Process unread emails. 3) Turn off email client. 4) Do something else 5) Goto 1 an hour later.
Right, I think I’ve got a better handle on my Inbox but why am I doing all the stuff I do? I’m sick of guessing, so on Friday I carried out my first weekly review. I looked back at the events of the previous week and in agile retrospective like fashion stepped through what I did, identified the good, the bad and the ugly, and suggested actions to make things better. The review took about 15 minutes and was the most useful thing I did last week, in fact for the last few months.
I then went a step further and thought about what my objectives are for 2008 and held the things I did last week against these. Again, another startling revelation, my accomplishments last week, although plentiful, brought me no closer to achieving my objectives. A quick re-think and re-visit to my suggested actions for this week and now I have a much better idea of what I need to do this week and how I can realistically achieve it, whilst demonstrably working towards my now clear objectives.
I highly recommend that you take the 15 minutes out of your week and do the review. You will surprise yourself, and if you anything like me, don’t you just love surprises…
Finally, I’m on Twitter
I didn’t want to enter the world of twitter but like so many other social network traps out there its your mates that pull you in. I have been missing parties, events and recently a wedding invite for not being a member of frigging wastebook! Anyway, after a quick intro by Greg, I’m happily tweeting away over at cleveg.
Then I stumbled across Remember The Milk, another GTD powered application with the most amazing, read as simple yet powerful, set of integration services to tools you use to manage your everyday online life. Google, iPhone, Outlook, twitter…Done!
The only problem I have with RTM is the rather basic Mac Desktop Widget for managing your tasks when offline. I need something as least as good as iGTD to handle my stuff. Sigh! However, you can post tasks to RTM via twitter and use the Google integration to search and look through them, and when offline add tasks through the desktop widget. Nahh, way to complicated. Going to take a little bit more to get me off iGTD…
That said, anyone suggest some good people to follow on twitter…
July, Java and Just-In-Time - I’m all J’d out!
July was (is) just a crazy month. I launched a separate blog JavaSoup that is going to focus purely on Java. That has been very interesting because I am re-discovering Java. After a couple of years not being on the bleeding edge of Java development a lot of stuff has happened and the landscape has definitely changed quite a bit despite the language remaining pretty much the same. I’m compiling a list of topics that I will push out onto JavaSoup.
I’ve started writing for the InfoQ Java community, with my first article on Grails Gains Cloud Hosting with Morph AppSpace going out last week. I did a bit of research for the article and decided to get a better understanding of Grails. To this end, I’m going to get involved in the review of the new Grails in Action book from Manning due to hit the streets in November.
Then when I thought July was done, an explosion in the Rich Internet Application space. Be interested to hear your thoughts…