The last 7 days certainly have been packed with activity. Last week we had some production fire drills at work which resulted in a lot of hard work, 20 hour days, and general chaos-induced stress. To top it all off the end of the week also brought news that funding for my project has changed and come April my position is being eliminated.
This somewhat bittersweet news. Obviously being laid off is never a great thing, but in this case it may actually end up being the a good thing for me long term. Of late I’ve been rather frustrated with the speed and direction of my group so I guess this is the kick in the ass I needed to do something about it and find a position where I can exercise my passion for technology in a more direct fashion, and perhaps have a more direct impact on bringing about the coming technological singularity.
That being said - if you, my reader need a technologically passionate problem solver let me know!
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
I’ve been so busy and productive of late that sadly Futurist Now has suffered from it - barely a post a week on average. Aside from the normal work stuff I’ve been slammed with tons and tons of development work on Traskpro. I’m becoming extremely proud of Traskpro - it’s becoming a very robust solution and I’m all but running my life out of it now.
What makes Traskpro so great? What do I do with it?
- Manage projects at work
- Keep track of all the little details
- Brainstorm ideas
- Create shopping lists
- Plan maintenance projects around my condo
- Capture ideas for creative photography
- Track car maintenance needs
- Know who has borrowed one of my DVD’s
- List my goals the next 1, 2, 5 and 10 years
- Maintain a list of expenses for reimbursement
Amazing ehh - give it a whirl or check out the Traskpro blog - you can do all these things and more! With Traskpro’s flexible design you can track almost any kind of information - all for free!
Now what would a big Traskpro advert like this be without a few power user tips? Traskpro uses the URL to determine what tag you are viewing - this means that you can bookmark frequently used tags for quick access. I am able to use this feature by setting my internet home page to my “work” tag at work, my “personal” tag at home, and the high priority view on my iPhone - whenever I open a browser I immediately see a highly contextual view of tasks related to my current environment.
Further to URL bookmarking when setting a sort preference the sort preference is added to the next page view URL. This allows you to bookmark not only a specific tag, but also to make it so whenever visiting the bookmark the sorting options can be left intact - useful for power users looking to really take control of a large list of tasks.
I’m again experimenting with adding my Twitter stream to Futurist Now. People detested the old post style integration so this time I’m trying a live feed view in the sidebar. Leave a comment if you love it or hate it.
I can configure the number of tweets to display - how many do readers find useful? If I just put a single one it shows real-time context without visually overpowering the main content column. On the other hand more gives a better context of what I’m doing, but adds a huge block of text to the sidebar.
I sit here on the couch on this first glorious day of 2008, TNG blaring in the background, and Traskpro coding and MySQL queries swirling between my brain and laptop in the foreground. Taking a cue from my beloved father I’ve got a 6 shot Hazelnut latte slowly working its ay into my system.
What do I have planned for the rest of my day off? More of the same. Bliss!
Friday, December 28, 2007
During the last couple of days I’ve been toying with Traskpro development tasks while I’ve been home ill. Until today I didn’t actually implement any new functionality, but rather spent my time re-factoring ‘old’ code from the 0.1 and 0.2 versions. Re-factoring is a low strain on my brain and a great task for idly doing while drifting in and out of sickly sleep - once I got the new architectures and designs on paper implementation of the new pattern happened on a feature by feature basis.
Most notably I took a lot of hacky if loops to select SQL queries and moved them into a net-new function which builds the queries based in inputs so the code is both easier to read and easier to maintain long term. I also moved a lot of in-line functionality to within functions which has made long term maintainability and new feature development a breeze.
Not only does this re-factoring provide more readable code, but having everything generalized into functions made adding a few new features a breeze. For instance I just added a capture feature to Traskpro for capturing more than one task (and tag array) at once. This makes capturing action items in a meeting brain dead simple and removes the need for a round trip to the server between each individual addition. Because of the functions for adding/editings tasks, or adding tags to tasks this new feature was developed in a far more efficient fashion - rather than building from scratch I could re-use code.
Simple stuff I know, but not developing for a living really does give me appreciation for elegant, maintainable, and readable code.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Funny how getting my car detailed can kick my auto-passion into high gear. Tuesday evening I picked up my A6 from Mirrorworks from having a full detail and some paint work done. It’s shiny and like-new again - I’m swooning all over my precious car again!
Aside from the car life has been good. Traskpro has his a solid and stable 0.9 (and graduated from alpha to beta) and is rocking my task list right and left. I even have acquired a few other heavy users which is oddly gratifying. I’ve still got 31 remaining features/tweaks to make, but those can happen gradually over the next few weeks as I continue to ramp up on JavaScript.
Also in the world of good things Scott came over last night. He hadn’t experienced a proper viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End so we did dinner and a showing of that. As silly and overly-Disney as the film is I really do enjoy watching it. I really do hope that big budget swashbucklers never die - they are just so much fun to experience.
Right - back to work now. I have to finish up a ton of stuff today and tomorrow to be ready to take off a few days to be home for Christmas!
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
The dev bug has bitten me again and I’m playing with code. This time it was prompted by a few missing features in Backpack and the brilliant idea to roll my own life management solution. Thus Traskpro (Task Tracking Pro) was born. Unlike most of my development stings in the last 5 years I actually sat down and did a little planning before I dived into it this time.
I have spent the last couple of days analyzing and designing my user scenarios and figuring out exactly how best to implement a task tracking solution so that it’s as flexible as possible and requires the fewest number of actions to operate. The Traskpro specification is now complete for version 0.1 and I started to dive into coding tonight. Having spent my first few days planning is making a huge difference - coding is easier this way and I suspect the end result will be a lot cleaner.
I’ve started my development with MAMP (PHP/MySQL on the Mac), but am toying with switching over to Ruby on Rails at some point. For now I’d rather stick to a language I’m more comfortable with given that I have a big learning curve ahead for SQL which I haven’t touched in ages.
More to come - I need to get a few more of my classes built out and then get to bed. I have two more days of ‘day job’ ahead before the much needed weekend arrives.