http://rock.hymasfamily.org/blog Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:12:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In my post on how to care, I committed to start blogging more regularly, rather than sporadically. I began last week by spending an hour on my commute each day doing writing and research for the post I published Saturday. On Sunday I took a break from the entire internet. ... http://rock.hymasfamily.org/blog/2010/03/08/commitments/ Since starting at Fog Creek, I've been learning about Mercurial from day one, since I'm working on Kiln. It was a big change from my work at Microsoft, where we used a VCS that was much closer to the Subversion model than the Mercurial model. One of my areas of ... http://rock.hymasfamily.org/blog/2010/03/06/mercurial-will-make-you-a-better-developer/ Earlier this month, Merlin Mann wrote about one principle that is more important than we typically acknowledge: First, care. He begins by discussing the common challenge of staying focused on the important stuff. Staying focused is the easy thing, he reminds us: just do one thing at a time. Of ... http://rock.hymasfamily.org/blog/2010/02/25/how-to-care/ I first read the posts at 6Changes.com just before Christmas. At the time, I was preparing for the yearly planning that my wife and I do each January. I already wanted to make some changes in my own life, and 6changes.com was like a small revelation. It convinced me to ... http://rock.hymasfamily.org/blog/2010/02/19/6-changes-in-action/ Well, I'm now at Fog Creek. I love it here. The benefits they mention in their recruiting materials are all real and all great. I love the food, I love the snacks, I love the flexibility, I love the views of New York and the Hudson. More important than that, I ... http://rock.hymasfamily.org/blog/2009/10/19/fog-creek-software-inc/ In my last post I mentioned that I was doing some practice with the binary search algorithm. I wanted to approach it with a slightly different mindset and see what kind of an algorithm that led to. So I decided to think of it as a walk. I would go ... http://rock.hymasfamily.org/blog/2009/05/01/whimsical-walk/ So for the last couple of weeks I've been practicing the binary search algorithm, as laid out by Dave Thomas here. I've done both iterative and recursive variations in C++ and then in C. I love the value of katas for learning new languages and features. I know both C++ ... http://rock.hymasfamily.org/blog/2009/04/24/practicing-binary-search/ Uncle Bob's tweet from a few weeks opened my eyes to the value of practice in honing my development skills, and led me to read a lot more about practicing and code katas. One of the things I love about having a kata, like the prime factors kata, is that ... http://rock.hymasfamily.org/blog/2009/04/09/practicing-prime-factors/ One of my biggest frustrations with the Windows Mobile task application is that it synchronizes your completed tasks. After a while, this greatly outnumbers your active tasks, making the task app really slow. So I periodically move my completed tasks to a separate task folder (I like to have them ... http://rock.hymasfamily.org/blog/2008/03/31/speed-up-tasks-on-your-windows-mobile-smartphone/ Jeff Atwood recently discussed The Dark Side of Extensions, and advocated taking the five most useful popular extensions to Firefox and integrating them into the product as features. Before the Firefox team decides to go do that, it might be useful for them to step back and consider what they ... http://rock.hymasfamily.org/blog/2008/03/21/platforms-vs-solutions/