I get points for blogging this!

July 25, 2013  🌀

I feel like I’m always struggling with productivity. I don’t get the things done that I want to get done, and I’m never sure where I lost my momentum, or why, or how I can keep with it. I’ve tried a bunch of productivity tools, and most of them have failed. For a while, now, I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with The Daily Practice, which I think is great. Even though I think it’s great, I don’t always manage to keep up with it, which means it doesn’t actually do me much good.

once again trying to keep up with the tickets

July 4, 2013  🐫 🌀 🧑🏽‍💻

I maintain a bunch of published code. I probably wrote more than half of it, and I’ve been the sole maintainer for years on most of the rest. I inherited a lot of bug reports, I get new bug reports, and I get feature requests. I used to try to respond to everything immediately, or at least within a few days.

Template Toolkit 2: still making me crazy

July 3, 2013  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

Template Toolkit 2, aka TT2, has long been a thorn in my side. Once upon a time, I really liked it, but the more I used it, the more it frustrated me. In almost every case, my real frustrations stem from the following set of facts:

Notes from YAPC in Austin

July 1, 2013  🐫

I’m posting this much later than I started writing it. I thought I’d get back to it and fill in details, but that basically didn’t happen. So it goes.

print-ing to UDP sockets: not so good

June 28, 2013  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

We’ve been rolling out more and more metrics at work using Graphite and StatsD. I am in heaven. I’m not very good at doing data analysis, but fortunately there are some very, very obvious things I can pick out from our current visualizations, and I’m finding all kinds of things to improve based on these.

the 2013 Perl QA Hackathon in Lancaster

April 15, 2013  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

I got home from Lancaster, this morning. I’d been there for the sixth annual Perl QA Hackathon. As usual, it was a success and made me feel pretty productive. Here’s an account of most of the things I did:

money into code: Perl 5 code bounties

February 25, 2013  🐫

If there’s money earmarked to be spent improving Perl 5, one seemingly obvious thing to do is to try to use it to directly to improve perl. In other words, the mission is to “turn money into code.” The most successful expression of this strategy, I think, has been in Nick and Dave’s grants. On the other hand, it’s an expression that succeeded because of very specific and felicitous circumstances. Dave and Nick were both well-established, trusted participants in perl’s development, known as experts and conscientious workers. They were given, by and large, free rein to pick the topics on which they would work. The foundation trusted them to pick things of value, though with a means for TPF to call shenanigans if needed. That trust has been well-placed, in my opinion.