Today is the first day of the rest of my digital life. I quit Twitter on Sunday evening after reflecting on some of the pros/cons:
In an M Night Shyamalan twist this means the only social network I’m on these days is LinkedIn where I’ve commandeered the im-matt-surabian short link.
Last night I purchased the shockingly available domain name weirdoldtricks.com at the urging of my good friend Tyler Kellen from Going Slowly.
- At the beginning of this year Matt Gagne, Adam Jarret, and I finally decided to follow through with our idea to record a podcast together; it’s called Rubber Ducking and we try to record twice a month. We started out by making sure everyone was setup to properly record vocals and did a few riff sessions to determine the overall tone and content. Given that we’re three loudmouths from New England, this was the easy part.
- At the end of 2014 I switched to Arch Linux from OS X. I’d though about making the switch before, and for the first time everything lined up to make it so. All of the programs I used on a daily basis would run fine or had solid alternatives available. I had to give up a few programs I only used occasionally, and for the most part they haven’t been missed.
- Just as with my 10 Commandments of Working From Home post, I wrote this as a way to explore my thoughts and hold myself accountable. I don’t know if anything here will resonate with anyone else. I plan to do a retrospective on this post at a later time and evaluate how I’m doing. Those interested but unfamiliar with the concept of the maker’s and manager’s schedule, should checkout Paul Graham’s post on the topic:Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
- Pass The Tinfoil I grew up using Apple computers, and even though my chosen career path has thoroughly exposed me to Windows and Linux, my daily driver has always been some form of mac. But for the last several years as their mobile devices have taken over; I’ve become disenchanted. Personally, I don’t much care for the cellphone or tablet form factor and am not a user of iOS. As a result I feel I’m drifting further and further from Apple’s target market.
- There is a dirty little secret waiting to be discovered by anyone with a great idea: Deployment. Regardless of how amazing your functional prototype is it doesn’t amount to anything if it can’t be deployed and successfully scaled. It’s not difficult these days to find some entrepreneurial type who has a great idea and only needs “a programmer to build it for them” (for a flat fee of course) and they’ll take it from there.
- ##The Problem Recently I was talking with my good friend Adam Jarret about some bugs he was running into with Google Maps while attempting to load the JavaScript API in a project that used RequireJS. The script responsible for loading the Google Maps API does so by making calls to several other scripts, all of which must be loaded before the Google Maps API can be used. If you’re using Google Maps in your project you’re probably familiar with this URL:
- Building web apps is totally awesome, especially when they work great in our multiscreen world. But behind the scenes to all kinds of amazing consistent functionality is a developer banging their head against the wall trying to figure out how to test things across all these different mobile devices locally, because the simulators aren’t always good enough and pushing code for every little tweak and test is ridiculous. That used to be me banging my head against the wall trying to solve this problem.
- I’ve got the power Though technically it’s on loan from the sun. My wife and I used to live in a small cabin on a farm at the edge of the woods a little more than a quarter of a mile from the road. We had a dedicated power line running from the street to the house and lots of trees along the road and driveway. More than once while we were living there, large trees came down and knocked out our power.
- It has been almost two years since I wrote myself 10 commandments for working from home; I think it’s time for a retrospective. #1: Google Voice Number A dedicated work line is something I’m still a very firm believer in. But because the development team I’m a part of is “hyper-communicative” (we’re in a chat all day and frequently working collaboratively on GoTo Meeting or via Google Hangouts) I don’t use the actual “phone” very much.