A shiny penny can distract me and totally derail my productivity for tens of minutes. Shiny pennies come most commonly in the form of a tweet.
I take a lot of steps to reduce the shiny pennies I’m exposed to.
- I set my IM clients to not beep and flash and explode on every new message.
- Email clients are forbidden from actively notifying me of new messages (I use Gmail anyway, so really it’s a factor of not installing those popup email notification things)
- Twhirl, my current twitter client of choice, only notifies me on direct messages or replies, not Every. Single. Tweet.
- I tend to put my phone on vibrate when coding.
After making that list I already forgot why I was writing this blog post, I had to go and look at FireFox to remember.
Even with all those measures, I am still going to get distracted by things, especially since I work from home. It’s important that I am able to get back on topic just as easily as I get distracted. When I get distracted, I tend to forget everything I was working on. After I clear the distraction, I switch back to visual studio and it’s like looking at a blank wall. I generally have no idea what I was working on.
There are a few things I do to combat this. Firstly, I keep a sheet of paper next to my mouse that I use to write down what I’m currently doing at quasi-regular intervals. Nothing high level, just enough to jog my memory as to what I’m working on. “Add Submit Button to UI”, “Create IFoo Interface”, no details, just something I can glance over, find out where I am, and I can check off as I work. It’s not a list of what I need to do, it’s a list of what I’m doing.
Second, I installed TabMixPlus. It allows you to mark a tab as “Protected” so that you can’t close it, you can also lock a tab so that it can’t navigate away from a URL. I just installed it, but I intend to protect and lock the tab of the current ticket/story/bug/whatever I’m working on, so I can always have that point of reference in addition to my little page.
I’m going to get distracted, that’s a given, but having a set of techniques to let me get back to work as quickly as possible helps alleviate some of the productivity drain.
I was looking about and I realized that I needed to update with another “What do you do?” meme entry since now I do something fundamentally and completely different.
I work at JMT Systems Consulting as a System Analyst. I never really understood that title. What system am I analyzing? Why am I analyzing it? Do I write analysis reports for a living? Turns out I do not.
First, what JMT Systems, does. Our primary product right now is a software/hardware package that allows municipalities (read: cities and county governments) to perform warehouse management tasks with handheld wireless scanners (think the Wal-Mart price guns the managers have). Our product is well liked by the customers, and I feel really happy about the health of the business in general.
I ended up bringing a lot of new stuff with me to JMT Systems, and I was a little scared about that. A lot of software shops are set in their ways and view change suspiciously and actively resist it. Our team is so willing to listen and consider alternate possibilities, I really do love it. I think part of that however is the fact that I wasn’t bringing new things for the sake of change, but simply because I was aware of some newer practices and tools which I knew developers love once exposed. When confronted with new technologies and techniques, they were … (Dare I say it?) Agile.
One of our core products, Falcon Mobile Server, sits on top of this huge piece of ERM software that city and county governments run to basically manage… everything: warehousing, work orders, permitting, etc. We provide mobile interfaces on little hand-held Windows machines with barcoding and all kinds of fancy stuff. The core interface from our product to the application was showing its age, so that’s my current project: refactoring that into a lean mean extensible beast of a gateway. This paves the way for further upgrades and revisions to the Falcon product to support the latest versions of the ERM software. More supported versions = More supported customers.
We have several other projects going on, some of which are less public. I’m really enjoying working here, it’s proving to be quite challening, which is something I’m all about.
Things have changed considerably since last we really talked. Come on. Pull up a seat. Get cozy and let’s dish.
Firstly, I moved! I live in Ellensburg, Washington now. It’s amazingly beautiful here. I’m smitten.
Secondly, I have a new job. I work at JMT Systems Consulting. My title is “Systems Analyst”, but it turns out I’ll be wearing many hats. Good thing I have a big head (size 7-3/4 for those interested). It’s been a great experience. It’s a really great environment with really great people and I’m really happy to be here. Really.
I have some more posts coming up. So much new stuff! Document-Based Databases are poking my brain in all the right places. Map/Reduce is delicious. Oh and look at this Unit Testing Pattern which straight up wins the “Best Name for a Design Pattern Ever” award: ObjectMother.
Now that’s a mother of a pattern right there.