Rule 4: Warm Up To Get Into Flow State Sooner
February 25, 2021
How do I get into flow state sooner so that I can make meaningful progress more quickly? By warming up.
Read about it!How do I get into flow state sooner so that I can make meaningful progress more quickly? By warming up.
Read about it!How can you take advantage of *very* small blocks of time? By dedicating them to your shallowest work.
Read about it!Rule 2 for taking advantage of small blocks of time — slice your work smaller to shift the meaning of "meaningful progress."
Read about it!My first rule for maximizing productivity in small blocks of time — dedicate time to a specific goal. And schedule it on my calendar, before that hour gets taken.
Read about it!As a maker with a manager's schedule, I need to figure out how to make meaningful progress in small blocks of time. I've got a few rules to help me.
Read about it!Has discipline been a muscle this whole time and I just figured it out?
Read about it!2020. Yikes! Ouch. Woof. What a year. It was awful at times — but some good things still came out of it.
Read about it!The self-evaluation I gave myself this quarter included some of the nicest words I've ever said about myself.
Read about it!In my head I created a distinction between long content and short content. I think the distinction is really there, but I don't think it warrants separate communication channels.
Read about it!Today I'm thinking about lowering the bar for content creation by embracing smallness. Often when I want to create something it becomes *huge* in my mind, and I don't deliver it because I lose interest before achieving the grandiosity.
Read about it!I recently replaced my kitchen faucet. The project reminded me of working with legacy code.
Read about it!Standing on the shoulders of giants makes it possible to generate social sharing images with very little code.
Read about it!Mmmmmmmmmm, sandwiches. Mmmmmmmmmmm, froyo. Not only are they both delicious, but they can both help you communicate better.
Read about it!It's taken me many years as a developer to become comfortable with the speed at which I work. I'm slow! Recently my friend Nicole helped me understand more about why I work slowly.
Read about it!I built a URL expander with Netlify functions, and connected my browser to it with a custom search engine. It saves me about 1 minute per day and now it feels like my search bar is a CLI.
Read about it!I'd read that working with variables in Cypress tests was tricky, but I dismissed it as an edge case I didn't need to know about. Then I needed to store a variable in a test and hilarity ensued.
Read about it!2019, am I right? It was a year! It occurred after 2018! And before 2020! And a bunch of things happened!
Read about it!Is becoming a tech lead just like having children? Absolutely not! But I found at least one parallel.
Read about it!Most refactoring resources are about specific actions in your code. This article aims to provide more general guidance for undergoing THE BIG REFACTOR.
Read about it!I recently built some workshops. It was a lot of work, but it was fun and I learned some things!
Read about it!2018 happened. There were some lows. But there were a lot of highs!
Read about it!We recently finalized the speakers and sessions for Cream City Code 2018. We received a great number of submissions this year, and after reviewing them all, I've put together 5 tips for writing your next conference submission.
Read about it!In the last couple years, I've given over 20 talks at local meetups and code camps, and conferences throughout the Midwest. Here are 10 tips for preparing talks.
Read about it!Rejection feels bad. Sometimes I forget how to deal with it. Here are some of the strategies I keep forgetting.
Read about it!2017 was awesome! I hit the speaker circuit hard. I'm hoping for a great 2018 as well!
Read about it!What can we learn about testing from a Russian playwright that's been dead for over 100 years?
Read about it!I wanted to speak more in 2017. Looks like I'm getting my wish!
Read about it!When unit testing your ES2015 code, you'll probably want to mock dependencies. My team had been tolerating some test-induced damage to our code, in order to allow mocking of ES2015 module exports. But recently we discovered a feature of ES2015 modules that allowed us eliminate the test-induced damage.
Read about it!2016 was a ...year that happened. At a personal level, I had a great 2016.
Read about it!The project I'm currently working on requires a spreadsheet to be imported into the database. SSIS seemed like the logical solution to this. Then the honeymoon ended, and I found out SSIS was stealing my money and slowly poisoning me. Here are some other things SSIS does wrong!
Read about it!October was a crazy month! Aside from being peak soccer season for my kids, I had two speaking engagements, and helped organize a conference.
Read about it!Some advice and resources to help someone get started with TDD.
Read about it!A coworker recently asked me to send some good resources for introducing a team to TDD. I thought the internet was a good place to put it.
Read about it!I got to present a variation of my static site generator talk at Chicago Coder Conference this year. Here are the slides!
Read about it!Setting up a React project proved to be a challenge for me the first time I tried to learn it. It went a little better the second time around.
Read about it!I am in the market for a new MV* framework in Javascript. I'm not totally sold on Angular 2 or React, but I think Ember looks neat.
Read about it!I recently presented at MKE Web Pros, about static site generators. I put together some slides and notes.
Read about it!