December 20, 2010

No managers, no meetings: Why working from home is so much more productive

Posted in Behaviour at 23:09 by graham

Jason Fried at a TEDx event, 17minute video.

The key concepts:

Ask people where they go to “get work done”, where they are at their most productive: They almost never say ‘the office’. Or if they do, it’s before or after hours.

Work is like sleep, it proceeds in cycles. You have to go through the light-sleep / light-work cycles to get to the meaty stuff. Every time you get woken up / interrupted, you start from scratch.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 13, 2010

lintswitch: Automatically run pylint / jslint on your code

Posted in Software at 22:28 by graham

lintswitch is a small Bash script that connects:

  1. incron which watches your files
  2. pylint, pep8 and jslint, warn you about possible problems in your code.
  3. zentiy, notify-send, and imagemagick, which display the lint result.

Your code is constantly being watched and linted, in the background, without interrupting your workflow, unless there is an error in your code.

Installing it is easy:

git clone git://github.com/grahamking/lintswitch.git
cd lintswitch
./install.sh

It’s on github here: lintswitch at github. Let me know if it’s useful to you.

The story

There’s a story here, about Unix, and software development.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 10, 2010

GNU Screen basics quick reference

Posted in Strategy at 07:06 by graham

Screen is a terminal multiplexer. In simple language, screen allows you to ssh into a machine and open several sessions at once, and leave them running. If you work on remote machines, you need screen.

Install it

sudo apt-get install screen

Configure it

The .screenrc file in your home directory configures screen. Use this to get you started:

Read the rest of this entry »