vine - an experiment in producing

0.wtf-is-this-thing.md

Every couple months I get this nagging feeling that I am not producing anything. I think this largely correlates with my output at the day-job -- but it starts to bleed into my personal time stuff. And that sucks.

So time to try a new experiment.

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Pomodoros for personal time stuff. 25 minutes of work, 5 minutes of reflection. Two a day Monday through Friday, with the weekend to catch up - 10 a week or I fail.

Each pomodoro is also tagged to an associated project/objective. I have to do at least one pomodoro for each objective every week or I fail.

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I'm calling this experiment Vine -- because a vine is a "chain" of tomatoes. Man, I am awesome at naming things.

For now, I will log my Vines in this gist.

1.tag-descriptions.md

#writing - creating content for my personal blog (posts, book reviews, talks)

#androidtdd - potential ebook venture for doing TDD in android, with an associated blog for generating traffic

#learnsomething - online classes from e.g. Coursera, Udacity, CodeSchool (screencasts do not count!)

#moraleapp - development of my daily team mood tracking application

#minimalistcards - potential paper-goods venture centered around minimalist greeting cards

#tvqueue - app to track what tv show episodes I have left to watch

2012-09-17-weekly-vine.md

Progress: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● | ✓

Tag Pool: #writing #androidtdd #moraleapp #learnsomething #minimalisticcards | ✓

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Wednesday | 8:05-8:30 PM | #writing

• wrote about the vine experiment
• brainstormed what tags I wanted to include in my list (1 2)
• defined what example activities fit into each tag

Wednesday | 8:46-9:11 PM | #androidtdd

• started figuring out what I want to put on the book signup page
• sketched out the layout for the page (screenshot)
• wrote content for "Why do TDD in Android" and "Why this book"
• spent about 10minutes getting the site running locally again - but should be better next time

Thursday | 10:05-10:30 PM | #writing

• wrote an overdue book review for Learned Helplessness
• didn't feel like doing anything after getting home late from a meetup, but glad I cranked out at least one item today
• will be interesting to see what kind of traffic I get on the back of Move Your Feet's success
• UPDATE: 12 first-day views for Learned Helplessness vs 1 first-day view for previous writeup <snark>12x increase! pro blogger status!</snark>

Friday | 9:58-10:23 PM | #moraleapp

• Need to get weekly digest cleaned up since it's going out to new users on Monday
• Started fixing a bug related to clicking the team link and a possible 404 if you aren't logged in
• Changed the link to redirect to login if not signed in, but need to get devise redirecting back to correct page
• Spent a while trying various incantations of stored_location_for, session[:return_to] and redirect_to(:back) - nothing working yet

Friday | 10:27-10:52 PM | #moraleapp

• Got redirect after login working, was using request.url instead of request.fullpath when stashing the last page in the session - closes that bug
• Changed the authorization filter to always redirect back if we sent them to the login page, should be handy in the future
• Add the route and controller action for the "View in browser" link for the weekly digest
• Hoping I can reuse the mail template in the browser ::crosses fingers::
• letter_opener is making links related to file:// which is a pain, might need to investigate this further - a 30 second glance at the source didn't reveal anything helpful

Friday | 11:02-11:27 PM | #moraleapp

• Fixed problem with file:// URLs - had nothing to do with letter_opener, I was justing using a named path instead of a named URL
• Deployed to production and tested that it worked w.r.t proper host
• Hack up a route to render the weekly digest mailer in the browser, but I'm not super branch with it so I shove it onto a branch for the moment
• The current implementation has two issues: it isn't a snapshot like the email, any manager can see any other manager's reports (breaks anonymous trust)
• A better approach maybe to store off the email contents in the DB, with a hash and check the hash from the email URL - probably also need to store the manager it was sent to and verify that is the logged in user
• Other thoughts: man this user scheme is getting to be a bit of a pain in my ass...
• Filed issues for stupid looking NaN data that I'll want to fix before Monday

Saturday | 5:40-6:05 PM | #learnsomething

• I keep bookmarking and looking at classes related to data analysis and statistics, so time to start doing one
• Picked Princeton's Statistics One class on Coursera
• Watched intro video, most of the videos are broken into <25 min chunks so that should be doable in this format
• Excited to learn some R
• Going to try doing videos at 1.5x speed and see how it works

Sunday | 9:23-9:48 PM | #minimalistcards

• Downloaded fonts suggested by Tony for new design
• Laid out canvas and started doing typesetting...if you can call it that :)

Sunday | 9:51-10:16 PM | #minimalistcards

• Laid out 2x1 for all the fonts as 5.5"x8.5" sheets
• Settled on Gothic Light and Proxima Nova Condensed Light for print samples
• Seems like lighter sans fonts look best to - will get Tony's thoughts on Monday

Sunday | 10:32-10:57 PM | #moraleapp

• Fix bug related to displaying NaN and nil in the weekly digest email
• Need to revisit and clean up this code, but since the weekly digest is going out in a few hours, this will have to do for now
• OT: getting to 10 was a pain in the ass with a shorter week

2012-09-24-weekly-vine.md

Progress: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● | ✓

Tag Pool: #writing #tvqueue #moraleapp #learnsomething #minimalistcards | ✓

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Monday | 6:30-9:00 PM | #minimalistcards (Didn't track this as closely as I was at Indy Startup Lab)

• Talked with Tony about card samples, decided on a smaller font
• Going to try a League Gothic and Helvetica Neue print as well
• Reviewed notes from printer regarding costs

Monday | 6:30-9:00 PM | #moraleapp (Didn't track this as closely as I was at Indy Startup Lab)

• Fixed wording related to feedback from beta user on signup process
• Tweaked daily email to use larger clicks and explicitly say "click a link"
• Added additional organization stats to God view and made minor style changes

Tuesday | 9:30-9:55 PM | #writing

• Started writing post about the horrible UX of those stupid touchscreen coke fountains
• Need to wrap-up, edit, link, image it

Tuesday | 9:59-10:24 PM | #writing

• Finished post, read it here

Wednesday | 6:20-6:45 PM | #learnsomething

• Stats 1 - Lesson 1a
• Covered randomized experiments and how they can be used to make strong claims about causality
• Two examples were covered: the Salk Polio vaccine trials and Working memory training
• The Polio trial was a textbook double blind study that successfully eradicated polio
• The Working memory training suffered from confounds - there was a poor control group - that could cause the results to be invalid
• It was also not double blind and the experimenters wanted it to work; the results have not been independently confirmed yet
• One-liner: Randomized experiments allow for predictions and explanations, but only when the correct conditions are met (truly independent variables, no confounds, and representative/random sampling)

Wednesday | 9:05-9:30 PM | #indysa

• Finished archiving the old ALT.NET meetings on the IndySA site
• View it here: http://indysa.org/archives.html

Wednesday | 9:30-9:55 PM | #indysa

• Updated the jekyll-mailer app to use the correct SMTP credentials (thanks Shane!)
• Using any of the Heroku addons caused the emails to hit the spam filter

Thursday | 9:30-9:55 PM | #tvqueue

• After searching existing solutions, I guess I'll have to write my own, sigh
• Trakt.tv API seems okay

Friday | 9:20-9:45 PM | #tvqueue

• figured out schema
• barebones rails app
• fighting with bootstrap-sass...again...

Friday | 9:46-10:11 PM | #tvqueue

• migrations and activerecord models

Friday | 10:13-10:38 PM | #tvqueue

• Finished models, started working on queue index

Friday | 10:50-11:15 PM | #tvqueue

• Toggle watched status on queue working with ajax

Sunday | 9:17-9:42 PM | #tvqueue

• start hooking up to trakt.tv API

Sunday | 9:45-10:10 PM | #tvqueue

• hook up add show form to trakt.tv search API

2012-10-01-weekly-vine.md

Progress: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● | ✓

Tag Pool: #writing #tvqueue #moraleapp #learnsomething #minimalistcards | ✓

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Monday | 6:30-9:00 PM | #moraleapp (Indy Startup Lab)

• Improved header for login in users
• Add more help content
• Improved popover helper method

Tuesday | 9:30-9:55 PM | #writing

• Wrote review for Short History of Nearly Everything
• wanted to get more done, but got distracted and ran out of time

Wednesday | 9:55-10:20 PM | #minimalistcards

• Narrowed options to League Gothic and Proxima Nova Light
• Recreated image file with 300 DPI canvas for better printing
• Can not figure out if I am actually saving a pdf at the right size though, will consult someone

Wednesday | 10:25-10:40 PM | #minimalistcards

• Figured out the exported PDF was only 72 dpi
• Talked to CTC about options
• Talked to KMS about contacting other print shop for price comparison

Thursday | 9:22-9:47 PM | #moraleapp

• Fixed a bug related to clicking out of office
• Fixed a bug where clicking out of office, then a mood would throw HTTP500 instead of flashing error
• Finished help contents for team overview and team mood rows
• Deploying while I write these notes :-) yah!

Thursday | 9:50-10:07 PM | #learnsomething

• Stats 1 - Lesson 1b
• An observation study has no manipulated variable, therefore we cannot make claims about causality
• Instead we find patterns of correlations
• Quasi-independent variables seems like true independent variables but are, for example, not randomized
• Observational studies do have utility, just not the strength of randomized experiments
• Note: watching at 1.25x speed seemed to sync better

Saturday | 5:55-6:20 PM | #tvqueue

• Added RSpec - hooray!
• Created ShowTracker class to add episodes to queue when a new show is added
• Wrote it using TDD - hooray!
• It works - hooray!

Saturday | 6:28-6:53 PM | #tvqueue

• Started wrapping more API methods
• none of the gems seem to work how I want, so continuing with Nestful
• Getting weird syntax errors relating to string interpolation I think

Saturday | 6:55-7:20 PM | #tvqueue

• all_aired_episodes working properly
• Moved API to env var
• Pseudo-coded how I want the cron tasks / adding show to user to work (screenshot)
• When a new show is added, I'll fetch all aired episodes - and add those episodes to users unwatched list
• The daily cron will just update existing show episodes, adding to unwatched list if new episode has aired

Saturday | ??:??-12:06 AM | #tvqueue

• Fetch all episodes when show is created is working
• Adding a show adds all aired episodes as unwatched

2012-10-08-weekly-vine.md

Progress: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● | ✓

Tag Pool: #writing #tvqueue #moraleapp #learnsomething #minimalistcards | ✗

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Monday | 6:30-9:00 PM | #tvqueue (Indy Startup Lab)

• Restyled login form
• Fixed bug related to air_date = 0
• Fixed broken tests
• Picked new name - QueueRunner
• Registered domain

Tuesday | 10:30-11:30 PM | #tvqueue

• Redid login form, the dropdowns are too cute
• screenshot

Tuesday | 9:00-11:00 PM | #tvqueue

• Finished styling registration, forgot password forms
• Changed Add Show form to reflect new style
• Add checkbox for adding all episodes when adding show
• Fix bug where duplicate episodes could be added to user
• Add spinner when adding show (slow since we have to hit the trakt API)
• Not super happy with the spinner look atm
• I am sucking at doing pomodoros this week, I'm drifting back into untracked blocks

Saturday | #tvqueue

• Added Show list
• Pushed to heroku
• Site is live

Sunday | 5:00pm-5:30pm | #writing

• Wrote book review for Better
• Read it here