A couple of weeks ago, my good friend and team lazer partner, Mike (mrb) proposed that once I was done launching in January we should do a couple days of side by side programming on the big client project he has been working on. There’s been a lot of talk about Pair Programming in the Ruby and Rails community lately (here and here) and I can say honestly up until now, I didn’t really ‘get it’. Sure, it helps to have someone check your code but isn’t that just cutting each developers productivity in half? I couldn’t really understand how two programmers working on the same thing at the same time could produce more work then two programmers working separately. I was looking at the wrong equation.

What I thought:

1 nerd working alone = ~1000 lines of code a day
2 nerds each working alone = ~2000 lines of a code a day

2 nerds working together = ~1000 lines of code a day

What I left out:

Quality.

Sure, two programmers working separately can produce a lot more work product if work product is measured in shear volume. However, what I discovered, is the code we produced working together was cleaner, faster, and more acurate then what we could have produced in the same time apart.

When we decided to go for it we set out some initial goals: What did Mike want to achieve in two days?

• Speeding up some slow actions
• Fixing some broken pieces
• Cleaning up some repetitive code

It seemed reasonable. I came up with a plan of action:

• Get a tour of the codebase
• Find a good place to start
• Branch the codebase
• Add test coverage
• Tear things apart

And so it was coded.

In two days we managed to add a small but solid test suite to the linchpin actions, reduce the controller time in most places by 400%, and delete a ton of code. It felt really good. By doing this as a Pairing session instead of just me grabbing code and working on it alone we both gained a ton. It was the small pieces of this experience that I didn’t think initially about that made me realize how powerful pairing can be.

Lack of Distractions/Extreme Focus – Because we were sharing a single computer and both staring at the same piece of code all of the common things that would derail a work session (Email, AIM, Twitter, etc) werent even available. After the first day we stepped back and realized that besides the break for lunch and some coffee/water breaks, we worked the entire day.

Code Correction/No Shortcuts – Having someone look over your shoulder provides not only the constant spell check (something I need) but also forces you out of the habit of shortcuts or cutting corners. A physical manifestation of your conscience, your partner wont (or at least shouldn’t) allow you to write the crappy code to just ‘get it done’. In this way, after all was said and done, not only did I feel extremely productive, but I felt like I wrote great code.

Social Hacking/Learning – Working from home for the past little while and then jumping into this made me realize that constant human contact for me is a requirement. It puts me in a better mood as well as keeps me focused. I also enjoyed the give and take of this relationship.

In an ideal world, I suppose your Pair partner in coding is a rough equivilient of a Detective’s partner. They back you up when there’s heat; They make sure you’re not taking cuts under the table; They keep you on your toes.

Well, something like that.

P.S. This week I hope to post some of the better refactoring patterns/examples discovered in our sessions.

I took his advice a step further. Rolling on the idea of an ‘Image’ of a basic Rails project with its own repository, on top of setting the svn:ignore properties for log/ and tmp/ I also installed a couple things I use in almost every project:

1. acts_as_authenticated
2. ar_fixtures
3. Capistrano rake and deploy tasks

I also generated an authenticated controller/model and added an initial user to my migration, so I’m all set to login. Before importing my ‘basicauth’ Rails image to subversion, I created my svn best practices directories (branches/ tags/ trunk/) and put the rails code into trunk.

After importing, I’m all set to start as many rails projects as I want. Why not use bash scripting to make it even easier.

#!/bin/bash
echo 'Creating new rails app'
cd ~/Sites/
echo 'Creating repository'
svn copy svn+ssh://myuser@myrepos.com/svn/rails/basicauth svn+ssh:/myuser@myrepos.com/svn/rails/$1
echo 'Checking out code'
svn co svn+ssh://myuser@myrepos.com/svn/rails/$1/trunk $1
cd $1
mate .

If I save this, chmod +x it, and copy it to /usr/local/bin/ – Now all I have to do to start a new rails app is:

myrails anewapp

It will copy the repository, checkout the code, and even open it in TextMate.

My new favorite pastime is discussing personal productivity systems, and thinking about thier implmentation. This is obviously spurred on by my recent reading of Getting Things Done, but further feuled by discussions with my new friend Evan (via college buddy Nate) who thinks more about this stuff than I do.

I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone has some sort of system that they use to keep track of thier day to day tasks. Pain and frustration comes when this system doesn’t really work. Theres also a big range of how conscious people are of their systems. If you’re very aware that what you’re doing is keeping track of important personal data instead of just jotting a note or downloading a file or putting an item in your calendar. Giving recoginition to the act of ‘organization’ makes a profound difference in the way we remember and later track this action. In this way being cognizant of your system is the first step to making it more powerful.

The most important part about ‘systems’ is that there is no one true path or implementation. GTD is great but it’s not for everyone.

I sat down for lunch a couple of weeks ago with Eric Smith, one of my best freinds from High School, and instead of doing the general catch up, we spent most of our time discussing our personal systems. His was almost completely homegrown, and I found many of the aspects of it extremely interesting. I’m not going to go into details (Eric asked me not to), but it involved a system of rewards and keeping track of time in the past tense. This is a great example of how your personal system should aim most to solving your own personal frustrations. For Eric, a lot of frustrations stemmed from not using his time effectivley, procrastinating, and loosing track of how much money he spends on a daily basis. As it should, the system he created is an attempt to solve those problems.

My frustrations mainly stem out of a large number of different priorities and projects and the inability to keep track of all of the things I need to do (my next actions) at once. Moreover, I get very overwhelmed when looking at all my items at once – feeling like there is just too much to do. I’m attempting to solve these things first, by organizing all my items by multiple classifications (Projects, Context, Tags) and then having a way to view only a section (a Project, a Context) at once. So far its helping out a lot.

What are your frustrations? Does your system solve them (or at least help)?

photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/stawarz/230259023/

In System Preferences > Date & Time (also accessible by clicking on the clock in your menu bar and selecting ‘Open Date & Time . . .’)

Under the ‘Clock’ Tab, Check ‘Announce the Time’ and select your interval.

Now you’ll have a friendly reminder that time is flying.

GTD is a lot about time and how you spend it. Merlin Mann suggests a bunch of different electronic timers to help you enforce the 2-minute rule.

I’m not that disciplined . . . yet. I’m slowly killing my bad habits of wasting time and getting lost in the noise of email, AIM, and my feed reader. One of my biggest issues is that I easily loose track of time. Even though there’s a clock glaring in the upper right of my screen, I often don’t take my eyes off of whatever I’m doing for long enough to notice that I’m a couple minutes late for a call, or I should have been out the door 10 minutes ago.

Having this friendly reminder every half-an-hour, not only reminds me of what I need to be doing, but lets me break up time into useful chunks. When I’m told, “It is now twelve thirty”, I can say to myself, OK, I’m going to spend the next 30 minutes wrapping this up, and then I’m going to move on to another task.

I can’t wait until Leopard and the upcoming speech improvements. That should make this even less annoying and more useful.

The feeling of being ‘disorganized’ is overwhelming. The moment you realize you forgot to make an important call or respond to an important email or worse – completely flaked on someone – can be devastating. “Am I stupid?” you think.

No, you’re just a mess.

“I already knew that.”

The problem is, for most people, including myself we’ve tried to ‘get organized’ and though it feels good for a day or two, we just fall back to our evil ways. Personally, the biggest challenge I face, isn’t remembering things, but that I get easily frustrated. I’ll work to a point where I feel so overwhelmed by the stresses of my projects that I hit a wall and loose all focus. It was a big step for me just to realize that was my problem. When I was living in Waltham, I spent a lot of time feeling ‘lost’ or unable to take another step in completing a simple project.

I want(ed) to overcome. I had been poking around the net for productivity tips and found some great resources. In particular, 43folders and Lifehacker had tons of information. Both seemed to focus on some kind of ancient mystical philosophy known only as GTD. Some more research, corrected my previous inclinations. GTD is actually a book, Getting Things Done, that formed a cult, written by David Allen. After a lot more reading, I decided to cough up the 15$ and give it a whirl.

Off the bat, I was really drawn to the potential results. A life with less stress and more productivity? Who wouldn’t want that? I had a bit of trouble getting through part 1 of the book, which to me, was pretty emblematic of my general gripes against self help books. Particularly, it spent a lot of time talking about how great ‘this system’ was and how much it could ‘change your life’. Somehow, I kept myself from being too skeptical and got through the whole book.

Now its a matter of implementation. After this first read (I plan to read through part 2 and 3 again) I’ve come away with a good amount of ideas. It’s ridiculous to think that any one system can work for everybody. On the other hand, GTD presents some very powerful ideas for how to think about how you handle work. When incorporated and filtered into your own personal workflow, you can see a great improvement in productivity.

I think the biggest lesson I’ve taken away so far is about creating lists. I’ve always created todo lists, on paper and digitally. In trying to ‘get organized’ I would always be rethinking how I store these items, when really my problem was with what I stored. A todo item should reflect a Next action – something that you can physically do and check off your list. This means you cant just write (or type) ‘Finish new RadioTail website’, instead it should be broken down into actual things that can be done to accomplish this goal (‘Add copyright to footer’,’upload new version of template’,etc.). The problem is when you look at your list and see ‘Finish . . .’ the task seems overwhelming, and you just put the list aside. Merlin Mann has a much better and more informative post on this subject.

The point is to create a system that you can trust to keep track of all your items and you can review regularly. Most importantly, when you review your lists, you should immediately know what needs to be done next. I still haven’t finalized my system yet. It’s in the process. More on that in a little bit.

LifeDev had a really great post about not posting. As he sees it – the trick is letting your ideas sit for a little while, simmer in their juices, and not only will they come out easier when trying to type them up, but they’ll be better developed and tastier.

I had been doing a version of this for a while – but this post helped me turn it into a system I can actually use. Before, I had kept a list of “TO BLOG” in my master to-do list, but it was only a list of titles or quick one-line ideas. Though this was great for keeping track of the things I was thinking about, it had the major fault of being reviewed a lot without any action taken. I would pull up the list, look it over, think “Thats a good idea, but I dont have time to write that post now”, and then hide the list. I was good at adding to it, but it seemed impossible to get things off of it.

With the little LifeDev push, I turned this list into a text file and added notes to all the different posts. These notes could be a quote, a link/URL, or just an idea or piece of text. I also split the posts into two categories, Articles and Quick. Articles are longer posts that need longer periods of marination and general thinkery. Quick are posts like this one, which is just a quick reaction or link-log or something that wont take much time to write.

Now when I pull up “BLOG Notes.txt”, I look it over and either post something quick or add some notes to an upcoming article.

Back to marinating.