Hugo Estrada's House of Wonder

Since December, I have made monthly goals where I list things that I want to learn about, personal projects, and personal habits that I want to do. At some point I will talk about the whole project, but for right now I am going to write about my February goals.

February started well, but I got sick with some nasty cold that lasted about two weeks. This slowed down mainly the projects. As I was getting better, I was able to reach my goals of learning sessions on PIC micro controller tutorials, a refresher python tutorial, work more on a rails tutorial, and learning more about QGIS. Not included in my goals, were tutorials that I finished on log4Net, Redis and Mongo. I also got a lot of math reviewing done. I found one of the best books on statistics that I have found, and I have been reviewing the subject.

I also enhanced a personal Pomodoro application that I made. It now gives me a sound and visual cue that time has ran out.

So even though I felt that the month was wasted, I actually was able to learn a lot, so I consider the month a success, especially taking into account the long-term illness.

I find it amazing that it took me this long to figure this one out, but here it is: if one is developing on Visual Studio, bypassing the F5 and just testing directly on the site will knock between 1 second to or 5 per test. This is especially useful if it is very apparent whether the change has worked or not by testing the functionality.

It doesn't seem like a lot, but those 5 seconds build up after repeated iterations. Also, those 5 seconds can be enough to break your concentration on what are you looking for, meaning that the true time lost could be greater is we take into account the seconds needed to refocus on the task.

By testing it this way, we only incurred the time penalty of starting the debugger when we actually need to step through the code or to debug per se.

So when the change will work or not, avoid the debugger: build and test, build and test.

Normally for technical work I just use redmine to keep track of working tasks, and I use mGSD for administrative stuff or for writing agenda outlines or reminders to send emails. And that works most of the time.

Now I am currently having to manage a big amount of issues because there were changes in the working environment recently. So now I find that I have too many issues to handle on redmine. What to do?

Ah, mGSD (the app formerly known as MonkeyGTD) to the rescue.

I have copied the titles of the issues into my mGSD copy. mGSD is a Getting Things Done (Registered Trademark) app that I have been using for about 3 years now. It is based on tiddly wiki, a client-side javascript powered wiki. It is really good. It fits into GTD methodology very well.

So now instead of having to look and keep track of several projects on redmine, I can see everything that I need to do at a glance on my mGSD.