Productivity on traviscj/blog

Naming is hard (so don't)

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 02:31:43 +0000

A lot of times I just want to record something. This should be one of those things computers are good at. Turns out this is a bit harder than it seems: many editors make you name a file to save it.

One easy-sounding way to record something is:

open up a text editor
mash the keyboard until the thought is out of your head and into the text editor
(hard part starts) what do we name that file?
where do we put that file?
do we remember to save that file, given the difficulty of (3) & (4)?

I think picking names too early is at best a minor annoyance, and at worst a pretty major distraction.

_useful

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I often create a directory/file called _useful/_useful.org/_useful.txt. I have one in my Dropbox, for example, that contains:

My apartment lease
My car/motorcycle insurance details
A textfile with my vehicle plate numbers/VINs/insurance policy numbers.

At work, I have one with

the top visited links for logs/metrics/admin interfaces for the services I work with most
a list of links of “typical” or “exemplar” things
- links to our internal tool views for typical payments, merchants, etc
- typical size (in bytes) of various protobuf messages we use a lot, size of 1M messages, #messages in 1MB/GB
common coding idioms, like several variants of @RunWith that we use in various cases in our test code.
useful commands for doing stuff (curl/SQL/plain old shell)

Plain text is great for all the reasons it usually is. But it’s especially useful here (see what I did there?) because the file loads much faster than Google Docs or wiki pages, it’s grep-able, it’s trivial to copy to a new machine, there’s no fuss about futzing with the document to get it to format properly, and soforth.

don't poll

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago, I wrote down a list of clever life rules in my day-to-day notebook. One of them was “don’t poll”. To say a bit more about it, don’t spent time waiting for things to finish and checking them constantly.

A more concrete example: I find myself running terminal commands that take ~5 minutes, and then wasting ~5 minutes watching them. This is pretty stupid. So what I have started doing instead is run something like

$ some_long_command
[ ... scroll scroll scroll ... ]
[ ... waiting for it to finish ... ]
[ ... give up ... ]
terminal-notifier -message "some_long_command done"
[ ... go do something else ... ]

Then, later I see a notification:

Spaces setup

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

My workflow is probably pretty specific, but I figured I’d document it for people looking for ideas on how to set it up. This one seems to work pretty well for me.

. Terminal: for running stuff on my and other computers. . Textmate: writing mathematics, programming code, etc . Mathematica, MATLAB, and Papers . Mail and Adium . Firefox, Chrome, Safari . iTunes and VLC

I have this arranged in a 3×2 grid, such that Textmate is top center. From there I can navigate to terminal, math programs, and Firefox directly(control-{left,right,down}). It takes two navigations to get to communication programs and entertainment, which is good for concentration while working.