As a result of the apps I purged in the previous blog post, my screen time is down 34% from the previous week, for an average of 56 minutes per day. I consider this a win!
I'm currently reading Deep Work, a book about how we are constantly surrounded by distractions in a world that still (or perhaps more so) values the productivity that results from focused work and provides some tips on how to deal with it. I've long been interested in overhauling my schedule and how I work, part of which involves purging my phone of useless apps. Here's how I decided what to remove.
Some random thoughts I had this evening that I both want to record for later and to share with the world.
After the first full day of wearing the Apple Watch, some observations from my experience.
I just won an Apple Watch (Series 4) from a contest at Cherwell Software, but I don't use an iPhone as my primary phone. This blog post is the first in what will be a series of blog posts about how effectively I can use an Apple Watch with or in spite of my Android Phone.
Oracle and Google have been battling in court for years over whether Google's reimplementation of the Java APIs in Android constitutes copyright infringement. Pivotal to understanding the situation is determining what, exactly, is an API. In this article, I describe what an API is, why it can't be copyrighted, and why Oracle is completely unfounded in their suit against Google.
How often do you want to set some state inside a function, but ensure you unset it before you leave? What happens if you try to short-circuit with a return statement or if an Exception occurs inside the function? What happens to your state (context)? Is it still stable or have you just created an insidious bug?
There's a little-known variant of Murphy's Law that says "Whenever a server goes down that absolutely needs to be brought back online immediately, it's inevitably the one that's accessible only via serial console and its only text editor is ed."
This morning, I listened to a recent episode of Hanselminutes, "Developing Designers with Catt Small". During their discussion, Scott mentions that "Internet Explorer will die" and "Safari is holding the web back," which means it will become more obvious than ever that many enterprise applications have stagnated. On the surface, this seems counterintuitive, but I think there are a few (easily changeable) cultural reasons this is the case.
After a year and a half of (slowly) developing my PHP MVC framework pails, complete with its plugin architecture, CMS framework, authentication system, and eventual plans to embrace the composer ecosystem, I'm excited by some of the new things from the .NET community.
Well, it got to be about that time when I started to miss podcasting. More accurately, I started to miss rambling aimlessly about topic that I knew something about that listeners would listen to. I don't know if anyone has started to miss the podcast, but I feel it's time to revisit the format and give it a bit of a refresh.
I just got home from the first real pitch of the Picturebooth Social Wall to fellow entrepreneurs and folks familiar with investment-type situations. The response was very positive and we got a lot of good feedback.
This is the first release of Pails CMS 1.0. It's not necessarily the most full-featured, but it's definitely a CMS and it's definitely pretty cool. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Since the downsizing and restructuring of Synapse Software, I'm sure many readers are wondering what the next chapter in my life will be. Will I get a day job? Will I start going on a lecture circuit? Will I focus on my side projects? Will I ever do another startup?
Well, I used to write for the company at http://synapsesoftware.com/blog. Since the company's gone in a new direction, I'll be writing here instead. The podcast will probably stay on the company's site for now since that's a little harder to move.