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Want to increase your productivity? Just take your time

nicolas@wealsodocookies.com — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:17:14 +0000

As a freelance, or small business, especially in the world of web development, the amount of work done in a day/week is deeply linked to your productivity. It’s easy to say: just do it! but it’s often hard to get started.

Productivity tools?

I’ve tried so many tools supposed to increase my productivity that I could make a love/hate list of every single service or notebook available out there. But for the past year, I’ve limited my tool set to Remember the milk when I’m out, and the excellent emergent task planner as a paper pen tool, which I always have with me.

When I need to make sure that I spend enough time on a daunting task, I use a kitchen timer for a fake Pormodoro style.

I didn’t want to make a review of my tools, but here we go I couldn’t avoid it…

Take your time to be productive. Really?

I know it sounds crazy, but whatever the tools, methodologies, trends you use, now or in the future, there are 3 very important steps that you can’t avoid taking.

And unfortunately many people do, usually the kind of people that would inflict you with the Hoo, just do it! kind of answer when you talk about ways of improving your day to day task management.

Step1: Take your time to plan and review

This one is so important!

Every Sunday, I take 30 minutes to plan my week in terms of objectives, appointments, meetings and tasks.You also need to take some time every month to plan the ‘big picture’. There is a chance that your final (almost inconceivable) objective can be broken into small chunks of work that you can over several months.

I also take my time to review what I’ve done the past week, what I’ve missed, what I need to follow up. It makes your day to day work real!

On a daily basis, first thing in the morning, take your time to plan your day. That way you start your day with a fresh mind. The good news is that it actually takes less than 5 minutes to select the tasks from your to-do list / calendar.

On a daily basis as well, as a last thing in the afternoon, take your time for a mini review, tidy your desk and make a list of the remaining things for the following day. Again, this only takes 5 minutes.

Planning is the key to success, but also key to a healthy life. You’ll feel less stressed if you know what tomorrow is made of.Reviewing is the key to motivation. By doing weekly and monthly reviews you’ll acknowledge what needs to be done next and you’ll be proud of what you achieved.

Step 2: Take your time to breathe

Sounds zen hu! But actually it’s the second step to your success.

Before starting the Pomodoro timer, or before clicking start on the Pivotal Tracker or Trello card, just take your time, breath!The end of the world is planned for the end of 2012 anyway :)

Take your time to close all the non necessary tabs in your browser, stop your notifications, just keep what’s needed to be 10% focused on the next task.

Now that it’s done, take a deep breath in and pause for 30 seconds. Think about the way you’re going to tackle this task. How do you want to start, what do you want to achieve, visualise all this.

Now you’re ready, press the start button and do stuff!

I know it sounds super cheesy, but it really works! It puts your mind in the right direction and prevents you from losing focus too quickly.

Step3: Take time for yourself

You can’t spend your day jumping from one task to another, or even work on the same task for 8 hours. This is ridiculous and counter-productive!So take some time for yourself today.

Take your time to exercise, it will sharpen your mind and help you to get in the zone more quickly.
Take your time to enjoy social networks, RSS … and stop using them as an procrastination tool.
Take your time to drink this glass of water sitting on your desk.
Take your time to enjoy your lunch.
Take your time to enjoy the fact that you’ve achieved a lot today.
Take your time to enjoy your small step, they will lead to your big picture.

So?

I know most of these ideas sound really cheesy, a copy-paste from a bad American self-help book, but the fact is that they work. They worked for me, for us as a team, and for many other people.

So, did I gave you the urge to try?

Cleaning parameters from string url in Ruby

nicolas@wealsodocookies.com — Thu, 10 May 2012 05:28:54 +0000

Today I had to make sure that a url wasn’t containing a certain parameter, and if it was I needed to clean it form the params

Let’s assume a resource like

* RESOURCE  * url

When saving that resource I need to make sure that the a param ‘user_ref’ is not present from the url. This param can or cannot have values.

So we start with a simple test

require 'spec_helper'describe Resource do  describe 'cleaning user_ref param' do     before do         @empty_param = FactoryGirl.create(:resource, :url => "http://google.com?param1=1&clickref=&param3")        @full_param      = FactoryGirl.create(:resource, :url => "http://google.com?param1=1&clickref=remove-me&param3")        @clean_url        = FactoryGirl.create(:resource, :url => "http://google.com?param1=1")     end    it "should remove empty click ref params and keep other params" do       @empty_param.url.should eql("http://google.com?param1=1&param3")    end    it "should remove full click ref params and keep other params" do       @full_param.url.should eql("http://google.com?param1=1&param3")    end    it "should still save url without click ref params and keep other params" do       @clean_url.url.should eql("http://google.com?param1=1")    end  endend

After testing different Regexps (and I have to admin I’m not a master of them, so maybe the solution is somewhere else), I finally found Addressable Gem and everything became easy again.

EDIT: Theo Cushion sent me a better cleaner solution via email, please check the bottom of the post

In the Resource model I have

class Resource < ActiveRecord::Base....before_save :clean_clickref....protecteddef clean_clickref  if self.url      require 'addressable/uri'      uri = Addressable::URI.parse(self.url)      params = uri.query_values      if params        uri.query_values = params.except('clickref')        self.url = uri.to_s      end    end  endend

EDIT: This is Theo Cushion’s solution, using the url setter. Way nicer, and we don’t need the :before_save

class Resource < ActiveRecord::Base  ....  def url=(value)    require 'addressable/uri'    result = if value.is_a? String      uri = Addressable::URI.parse value      uri.query_values = uri.query_values.except( 'clickref' ) if uri.query_values      uri.to_s    else      nil    end    write_attribute :url, result  end  ....end

This is easy enough and readable enough and make the tests pass, time for the next feature!

BritRuby, British Ruby Conference

nicolas@wealsodocookies.com — Wed, 09 May 2012 05:22:56 +0000

I don’t know (yet) who’s behind it, neither what it will include, but it’s always good to have a Ruby conference in Britain.

Looks like it’s gonna be next year in Manchester. Wait and see!

You can sign up for more info on their BritRuby page.

Bristol IT Megameet on Saturday 19th of May, we'll be talking about Ruby

nicolas@wealsodocookies.com — Thu, 03 May 2012 14:11:24 +0000

All of the major IT & Developer community groups in and around Bristol are coming together for an event at the UWE. Essentially the event is one big meet up, open to the public. Each group will be doing a presentation on themselves, what they are about, and what they offer the local community. Several groups will be putting on a technical presentation in their chosen area. How-to workshops will be running alongside the main presentations. The event concludes with 5 minute lightning talks on a variety of subjects.

Being one of the Bristol Ruby User Group organiser, I’ll give a talk about Ruby on Rails.

Talks are limited to 20 minutes and I would love to do a “Create a blog in 20 minutes” kind of talk, but I’m hesitating at the moment. As most of the attendance will be new to Rails, I might just do a presentation of the Rails goodness, with good old slides.

Will we see you there? Don’t forget to register as entries are closing this Saturday.

Rails 3 CSV upload and tested with Capybara

nicolas@wealsodocookies.com — Thu, 03 May 2012 08:18:41 +0000

I was writting yesterday about how to write and test a CSV export in Rails 3.

Now let see the other side of the scope, where we would like to import a CSV file that will change our data structure.

Let says we have

Author  * email  * first_name  * last_name  * bio

We want to create a CSV updload that will update a couple email - first_name/last_name/bio.

Well, let’s write our acceptance test first

  require 'acceptance/acceptance_helper'  feature "Uploading a CSV file" do    background do      @post = FactoryGirl.create(:author,                                  :email => "nicolas@wealsodocookies.com",                                 :first_name => "nicholas",                                 :last_name => "Alpi",                                 :bio => "")    end    scenario "update the couple id-first_name/last_name/bio" do      require 'csv'      visit new_upload_url      file_path = Rails.root + "spec/fixtures/upload.csv"      attach_file('file', file_path)      click_button "Upload"      @post.reload      @post.email.should equal("nicolas@wealsodocookies.com")      @post.first_name.should equal("nicolas")      @post.email.should equal("Alpi")      @post.email.should equal("Sincerely believes sheep will dominate the world one day.")    end    scenario "File missing on upload" do      visit new_upload_url      click_button "Upload"      page.should have_content('File Missing')    end  end

Create a file in your spec/fixtures/upload.csv containing

Email, First Name, Last Name, Bionicolas@wealsodocookies.com, nicolas, Alpi, Sincerely believes sheep will dominate the world one day.

And we now have a simple test simulating the CSV upload. What’s next is the easy part, we can do to our upload method in Author controller

  def upload        require 'csv'    if params[:file].blank?      flash[:notice] = "File missing"      redirect_to upload_path    else      file = params[:file].read      CSV.parse(file, headers: true, header_converters: :symbol).each do |row|          email, first_name, last_name, bio = row[0], row[1], row[2], row[3]          Author.update_all("first_name = '#{first_name}', last_name = '#{last_name}', bio = '#{bio}'", "email = '#{email}'")      end      redirect_to new_upload_url, :notice => "Upload successful"    end  end

And voila, we should have our test passing now.

Tested CSV export using Rails 3

nicolas@wealsodocookies.com — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:36:00 +0000

Right, let say that we have some models with this structure

Post  * Title  * Body  * Created_at  * :authorAuthor  * First_name  * Last_name  * Email

And our client wants to be able to download a CSV file containing all Posts information, with it’s author data.

First, let’s start by creating the Post model spec, which would be something like:

require 'spec_helper'describe Post do  ...  Describe "exporting a post .to_csv" do         before do         @author = [create author]        @post    = [create post or factory, with author]     end         subject { @post.to_csv }          its(:length) { should equal(7) }     [:title, :body, :created_at, :author_id].each do |field|       it { should include @post[field] }     end     [:first_name, :last_name, :email].each do |field|       it { should include @author[field] }     end  end  ...

Right that should gives us enough to start coding now. Let’s go to the Post model

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base  ...  def to_csv    csv = []    csv += [:title, :body, :created_at].map { |f| self[f] }    csv += [:first_name, :last_name, :email].map { |f| self.author[f] }  endend

This should makes our previous test pass. Now it’s time to export the CSV in the browser.

First, let’s write some acceptance tests that will look like:

require 'acceptance/acceptance_helper'feature "Downloading a post CSV export" do  background do    @post = FactoryGirl.create(:post_with_author)  end  scenario "Downloading CSV file" do    require 'csv'    visit export_to_csv_posts_path    csv = CSV.parse(page.text)    csv.first.should == ["Title", "Body", "Created_at", "First name","Last Name", "Email"]    post_line = CSV.parse(@post.to_csv.join(',')).first    csv.should include post_line  endend

Easy enough, we are using Capybara page.text to receive the content of the page and parsing it using the same CSV parser as in our controller, and we are testing that we have our Headers in place, and that our post line exist.

Now let’s create our export_to_csv method in the Post controller

  class PostsController < ApplicationController      ...    def export_to_csv      require 'csv'      @posts = Post.includes(:author)      csv = CSV.generate(:force_quotes => true) do |line|        line <<["Title", "Body", "Created_at", "First name","Last Name", "Email"]        line << @posts.map { |post| post.to_csv }.flatten      end      send_data csv,          :type => 'text/csv; charset=iso-8859-1; header=present',          :disposition => "attachment; filename=post-#{Time.now.strftime('%d-%m-%y--%H-%M')}.csv"      end  end

And that should make our acceptance test pass as well, and you now have an easy and expandable CSV generation.

Vim engraved reference card

nicolas@wealsodocookies.com — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:37:11 +0000

I love VIM, it’s on my opinion the best text editor available out there, and the community around it is awesome. So awesome that someone went to the extend of creating a wood engraved VIM card.

If you want to buy it, it’s available on Etsy for 20$ here.

I’m sure that would make a nice addition into the office.

Yank Ring, a super easy vim Yank Register

nicolas@wealsodocookies.com — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:09:53 +0000

It’s a secret for no one, I love VIM. But one of the most annoying moment is when you copy a line somewhere (yy) then you delete a line somewhere else (dd) and finally you want to paste the previously yanked line somewhere else. Well, we’ve all been there haven’t we?

Where is the problem?

The problem is that when you either yank or delete a line/char/multiple lines, vim copy what you’ve just done in a global register, and overrides the previous content.

One of the solution is to use “ (double quotes) to set your register before doing the overriding action.

For example

"ayy

Will copy your line in you register a

and

"ap

Will paste the content of the a register

But let’s be fair, we all make mistakes, and there are times when you forget to yank your stuff in a specific register, and this is where the problem occurs, because you usually end up in a serie of undo to retrieve your text back.

Yank Ring as a solution

While helping a friend today who is starting with Vim, it was pretty clear that the register wasn’t a good solution, and we found Yank Rink.

It’s a pretty cool solution that will allocate different registers to your copy/delete operation, so every time you copy/delete something, it’s won’t override the previous one.

You can then use Ctrl-P to swap between the allocated registers, making finding the right one a breeze.

Finally it offers you :YRShow and YRSearch to respectively show and search the content of you registers.

So if you’re stuck in a yank hell, I would definitively recommend looking at this plugin Yank Rink.

The new FreelanceAround.com has been released

nicolas@wealsodocookies.com — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:02:02 +0000

Yesterday, we released a new version of FreelanceAround. The first version was an attempt of MVP to see if freelancers were interested in meeting each other during working hours. Our answer is that, yes people are interested, but our product wasn’t the right answer!

What’s new in this version?

Well, first of all we’ve made a massive redesign on the application. The first version had been coded in less than 5 working days, so the design had been neglected.

Now the homepage shows you a nice map, where you can see the upcoming “get-togethers”. On the right hand-side, there is a list of freelancers who have visited the page recently, as well as a “Create a get-together” call-to-action.

The second big change is that we removed the ability to check in.

In the V1, users were invited to check in to let people know where they were at a certain point in time, with the hope that someone might join them to work in the same cafe. The truth is, it would be a nice addition when we reach a critical mass, but at the moment, it doesn’t fit the role as we don’t have enough users engaging with the site.

So we’ve decided to create what we call “Get-togethers”, which are mini informal meetups. You just say where and when you’re going to work outside and people will be able to express their interest via the FreelanceAround website.

This is the page to set up a get-together:

And this is the page where you can show your interest for a get-together:

No excuses now if you feel lonely in your home office!

You can now setup as many get-togethers as you want for free. To do so, just head to FreelanceAround.

We’ve got plenty of improvements to do next year, but I would love to see if people use this get-together feature first.

We hope that you like the app / concept, and that you’ll let us know it in the comments or even better give it a try and set up a get-together!

As a developer, I start to really like Unity desktop, light review

nicolas@wealsodocookies.com — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:03:34 +0000

Last week I wrote a post about installing and configuring Openbox on Ubuntu. As I said, I’ve been playing around with window managers for quite a while now, and Unity, wasn’t to my taste. But I recently installed Ubuntu 11.10, and here are my thoughts.

Forget what I was saying, Unity is really good

Ho boy, what a change since 10.04, where Unity was half baked, slow as hell and full of bugs. Today, even if there are some remaining glitches, it became more mature, focused on the user experience of the computer, and I have to admit I start to like it.

It’s packed with features that makes my development life a lot easier (I’ll detail the ones I really like just after). I’m not sure that my mum would notice them, but as a dev, I can tell you that they came with something really interesting.

So I admit I was wrong. Unity is good, and it’s now replacing my Openbox setup on my machine. Let me explain why.

The Mac user test

Note: this is not a full review, I’m only talking about the changes that I noticed and that I’m going to use everyday. If you’re looking for a full Ubuntu 11.10 review, I’m sure Google will help you.

Yesterday was Bristol Hack Night. A friend of mine, Theo, was there. He usually likes to wind me up on the Linux vs Mac os flame war. And I’m a good client.

But yesterday was a bit different, I boot up the computer, and the first thing he noticed was the login screen:

Ho, that’s a nice login screen!

This is the new LighDM login screen, and it does look really nice.

So after this positive note I continued to show him the latest improvements made on Unity, that are going to make our developers life easier.

The first one is the new Alt-Tab feature, which include screenshots of applications, grouped by type from all the virtual desktops. With 3 terminals open for instance, it looks like that (ALT-TAB + down key)

Second improvement is on the Unity Dash itself. It is a lot quicker than before and typing the first letters of the app’s name + pressing enter starts the app immediately.

Lenses on the dash are accessible with the ALT key, and give you access respectively to Applications, Files, Music and Supports filters (see on the right).

Compiz grid system (look in compiz manager) gives you a pseudo tiling function. Not as good as Pytyles but good enough to be noticed.

The Ubuntu branded software centre got a revamp and now looks lush. It also has got a sync option, which lets you sync your apps between different computers.

The Ubuntu One integration is now slick and fast, and gives 5GB for free.

I use it to store my important files like configs, fonts and docs. So I know that if I reinstall the computer, they will all be in the same place.

Downside/Regressions?

There are some downsides on the customization side of Unity. From what I understood it’s because of the gnome-shell integration/GTK3, the amount of themes compatible is not big for the moment, but I’m sure this is something that will be corrected over time.

Conclusion

Those features, plus a massive performance improvement completely sold me on Unity. I’ve been using it for a week now, and it works really well on my 13” laptop screen or on my big widescreen monitor.

I found the new ALT-TAB and grouping search very useful, and helping me a lot on daily basis.

If you add things like multi arch system, online accounts setup, the easy setting menu, you have a very powerful setup.

What about you, do you like the new Unity?