Many of the projects I’ve been working on aren’t terribly serious. Failcount couldn’t exactly be said to be the most important endeavour mankind has undertaken. If it’s used heavily within a group, I suppose it could have a worthwhile purpose, to see when people are overly stressed, but that’s kind of incidental. This last week, [...]
Ages ago I registered urbanpaganism.info, and set up a basic wiki for a community I’d set up for people who practice Paganism in urban environments and were fed up the usual hippy clap-trap advice like ‘grow plants in a window box’ and ‘visit the countryside’ when it came to experiencing Paganism in the city. It [...]
It’s been nearly five months since I confessed my dirty little secret and I thought it might be worth looking back to see how things worked out. The first thing to note is that while I did finish my project management system, I never ever use it. I think that Craig was right – judging [...]
For me, the problem with using test-driven or behaviour-driven development while working on my own projects is that these projects are largely learning exercises. I’m not working for a client, and I don’t have a fixed specification to work to. If I think something is too hard for me to do right now, I can [...]
It seems like more than just a month since I wrote about Failcount. I very quickly realised that it had some serious flaws and suspended new sign-ups. Since then, I’ve rewritten it from scratch – creating an entirely new git repo and copying across hardly anything from the original version. In some ways, this new [...]
It’s been three week since I wrote an application in a day, and I’ve been chipping away at it since to get it to a properly usable state for many people. I think I’ve spent around one full day’s worth of work on this, spread out into little chunks while doing other things. I carried [...]
Each evening I post to Twitter ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, today has been X productive and Y% fail’. It’s a simple daily ritual which allows me to quantify both how much I’ve got done and how frustrating it was doing it. At some point I plan to write a script to log [...]
This week I wrote a simple, but fully functional, Rails application in my spare time of one day. This included time spent writing tests and deploying it using Phusion Passenger and Capistrano. The application itself is an, uhh, internal one for use by people at my day job. I call it ‘failcount’, and it tracks [...]
A couple of progress updates on things I’ve written about previously. First up, my ‘MacBook Mini’ is coming along excellently. I’ve been using it at work and to write some short stories, the battery life is brilliant and the keyboard is nearly as good as the one I use with my iMac. I’ve got speaker/headphone [...]
I really, really hoped that Apple would announce a ‘MacBook Mini’ – a Mac OS X netbook – at the MacWorld conference this month. They didn’t, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I already own the first-generation netbook, Asus’ Eee PC 701, which I installed Ubuntu on before I’d even got [...]
