One of the things that is nice about being on your own is that you really don’t have to worry that much about when you blog. Sure, blogging is probably less harmful than smoking and people take smoke breaks during the day, but then again there’s not usually a corporate policy about what cigarettes you can smoke.
So one of the things I need to unlearn this week is blogging at certain times. I think it’d be more interesting and more natural to just blog short entries when things come up. I guess that leads to Lesson 4: You have to unlearn some structure.
Also I just got the Step into Xcode book as recommended by Wolf. It’s pretty good so far but its got a scary looking math equation on page 11 for linear regression. It gets clearly illustrated on the next page that it helps you fit a line to a series of data points like the quarterly sales of a company, but kind of funny since most professional programming books don’t really have that much math in it. All that being said, I think this is a great book so far for showing you the ins and outs of Xcode and I’ll probably be sharing it with the local Mac Programming group this coming Thursday.
Even though this week is mostly about getting out WebnoteHappy, I don’t think you can really neglect the development of your skills. (Maybe Lesson 5: Keep improving your skills even when you’re on your own or when you have to pay for it. For example, I paid for my entire trip to WWDC last year.)
OK, so maybe I’m extreme… like when I read Refactoring by Martin Fowler – not exactly a spy novel – on a vacation in Florida. But I love this stuff! I also subscribe to the “kaizen” principle – you improve a little bit each day and over the long run you’ve outrun the pack.
Weird thing that happened today: I got a free sample of Degree for Men: “For men who take risks, it won’t let you down” with my copy of Step into Xcode. I wonder what Amazon is trying to tell me. Is there some sort of correlation between Xcode developers and stinkiness? Or is it the risk taking aspect? :)
Oh interesting – on the back it says “You’re a risk-taker. You don’t follow footsteps. You blaze trails.” Since when did marketing sound like a fortune cookie? Here’s a stab at the fortune cookie for WebnoteHappy: “You use the web all the time. You hate to lose good links. You want to find that cool web site right away.” Note to self – work on marketing skills. (Lesson 6: The Life isn’t just about programming.)
I have the book too, and that is a scary math equation. When I was a comp sci major in college we were part of the math program so we did a lot of code based on math problems. For the most part I was neutral on this approach. I would have rather worked on more real world problems, but I was good at math so it didn’t hold me back. For the kids who were already having trouble in math however it was a slap in the face.
I’m a few chapters in and am enjoying the book as well. There are a lot of little things I’m picking up that should help make my time doing Cocoa (as limited as it can be some weeks) more productive.
[…] I realized this morning, with all this GTD stuff, I’ve been expecting myself to change very quickly, and for the world to suddenly become a happy shiny place, all because I’m not just letting papers (and emails) pile up all over the place, willy-nilly. I don’t really need to turn my life around on a dime to be happy with my own progress. A little change for the better every day is just as admirable, and probably much more sustainable. And as Luis points out: […] you improve a little bit each day and over the long run you’ve outrun the pack. […]
My free sample of degree came with a copy of “Defensive Design for the Web,” so maybe it’s developers in general, and not just Xcode. :P