Productivity Articles

It is not very often that I am blown away by software to an (tech)emotional level. Today I was blown away. I honestly believe Pivotal Tracker could change the way I view product development from now on.

It is like someone reached inside my dreams and then made a tracking system based on it. I have even pitched this same type of idea to a business partners before: ticket items based on value-added to the business. Finally, a tracking system that works how I think.

10 Reasons I am Blown Away By Pivotal Tracker

1. Creates charts of time line / deadline against amount of work yet to accomplish.
   
   
   
   Look at how huge this is.. if your manager wants to hit the deadline, he/she has to remove "points", or feature requests and slide them to a new release. There is only so much you can get done in a given time period, and Pivotal Tracker makes that clear.
2. Centered around value-added to the business. Amount of value added in a iteration (week) is the velocity.
   
   • Each new feature is assigned a point value depending on how difficult it is to implement.
   • Project's velocity is based on how many points you accomplish in an iteration (week).
     
   • Chores and bugs are viewed as necessary overhead, but do not add value to the business so they do not contribute to a project's velocity.
3. There is only so much you can get done in a week, realistically. Pivotal Tracker knows this and pushes new items to the backlog, showing management a good idea of what is realistic.
   
4. Team strength adjusts the amount of points able to accomplish in a given week.
   
   Here the client was able to accomplish 9 points in a given week typically. Upon adding me, they adjusted team strength to 175%, allowing for 16 points worth of features to be shown in the weekly cycle. All features above 16 are scheduled for following weeks.
5. The server is polled periodically, allowing you to see changes your team makes without reloading the page.
6. Sortable, drag and drop prioritization of tickets.
7. Clicking, "start" shows that you are working on a particular bug, avoiding team overlap.
8. Make your project private or public.
9. Customizable view-panes and clone existing view panes.
10. Comment and attach files to tickets (stories).

I've always wanted a tracking system that demonstrates the value that I am adding to the business when adding features. Pivotal Tracker does this for me. its feature set is just enough to add to your experience with the tool and not over-complicate things.

Go use it now.

Imagine how many user accounts you have. If you use Firefox to save your login information, go to preferences -> security -> show passwords... You will see a glimpse of how many user accounts you have on the internet - I have well over 200 accounts. With your personal accounts, usually a person has a set of a few passwords and probably won't have a hard time getting in. However, the companies we work for have a healthy set of logins as well, and are most likely poorly documented.

Document Company Passwords!

Please, take some time this week to document the passwords on behalf of your company. Show them this article, get some time in to do this. This is a simple thing that can really smooth things out for all of us. It is also a great thing to document is the contact for each system. Hosting accounts, routers, web accounts, email, etc should all be documented. It is a silly thing to waste time fetching passwords when you want to get something accomplished.

Open Id

On the note of user accounts, there is a system called Open ID that many of you either know of or are using. Open ID lets you tie your identity to a domain, allowing you to use your one user account across multiple websites. As of May 1st, 2008 myopenid.com reported that 13196 websites support the Open ID protocol. This means that if you have an open id account you no longer have to register with each of the 13,000+ websites.

Open ID is a ways from becoming a ubiquitous platform, but it certainly can help slim down that user account list. Until then, we are left in a sea of accounts and passwords where documentation is our best navigation.

First, I want to preface this article by saying that this is not just another big list of every web development tool on the internet. This is a list of tools that I rely on for my job as a web developer and I use these tools every day!

This arsenal of web development tools was gathered from my computer at work (Windows XP) and is a little more current than my previous post on tools to get the job done.

I hope you've found something useful in this arsenal of web development tools. It is amazing that I need so many tools, but everything has its place. Most of these tools are free, and now looking at them in retrospect I should probably go through and donate to each tool's author. They have made a serious impact on my ability to get things done.

Bloglines (RSS Reader) is my window to the world. Six months ago, I grabbed all of Jonathan Snook's feeds from his public bloglines account. That gave me about 19,000 articles to read. In 6 months time, I read all the new articles as well as a backlog of 8,000 articles. I am now down to 11,000 articles. It feels like for the last 6 months I have ate way too much brain food each day. My mind gets full of information and I slow down when producing.

This information addiction manafests itself in on my delicious account. Here you can see a result of this maddness. In a few months time of normal every-day use of delicious I have over 550 bookmarks in my account. 550 is a lot of bookmarks to accumulate in a short period of time.

So now it is time to slow down the intake of information and focus on producing. I hope to have a lot of great work accomplished in the next few months.

While reading blogs and technical articles - I noticed a pattern that had developed over time. I start at the bottom of the articles and read up to the top. After skimming the document, I read back down again and read the parts I care most about more thoroughly.

Why do I start at the bottom?

I get to see the final product, first! Rather than wasting time on something I don't care about, I read the final product (conclusion) which determines how important the article is to me. Then, I read up and scan all the keywords, headings and interesting content. When I read back down again I know what I'm looking for and skip through the parts I don't care about.

I am convinced this reading pattern allows me to read and skim through more articles in a shorter time period while soaking up the things I really care about.

I've been asked how I read so much and I think I finally figured out part of the reason why. Have you ever caught yourself reading from bottom to top?

Here are five of my favorite Windows XP Productivity tips. If you are reading via RSS, visit this page to view the screencast.

Screencast Notes

1. Quick Launch on Double Layer Taskbar

1. Right Click on Start Button -> Properties
2. Taskbar tab -> Check Show Quick Launch
3. Right Click Taskbar -> Unlock and move taskbar items

2. Taskbar Shortcuts Group

• Right Click Taskbar -> Toolbars -> New Toolbar -> Choose Folder with Shortcuts in it

3. Taskbar Shuffle

4. Tabbed Windows Explorer [QT Tab]

5. Texter

If you would like me to make more of these screencasts let me know.

Try renaming your instant messaging contact list by full name and trade. It's simple, but very helpful to remember names and roles. For instance, "(CakePHP) Full Name" for my CakePHP friends. This has been especially helpful in a corporate environment. Instead of john390, you see their full name and what they do. Try it out!

Customize Google Firefox extension lets you do some great things to change how Google works. I am using it to remove the ads from Google search results and add Google Sense to the homepage. It works great, I have been wanting something like this for quite a while!

Note on June, 23, 2008: I now use Firefox Extension, "Delicious Bookmarks" in tandum with the below

Do your bookmarks look like this?

I came up with a way of organizing my overgrown bookmark list. First, I create category folders on my "Bookmarks Toolbar Folder" (Firefox). Then I move the bookmarks into a category and name them something that I can remember.

That looks better! Then, I added one more layer of categories.

Ahhh... I can breathe again! Nice and organized bookmarks!

A newer version of this article has been written title, "Arsenal of Web Development Tools".

People often ask me, "What program are you using to do that?" So here is a list of all of the tools I have on my work computer.

Whew, *wipes sweat off forehead*, that is my entire list of applications I use to get the job done. I hope you discover something in here that will make your day more productive and smooth!

Photo is Stefan Didak's Home Office

This office is amazing. Although it looks like overkill, adding more monitor real estate can drastically increase productivity.

• More information up at one time.
• Lower the amount of times that you minimize and expand windows.
• Multitasking is much easier.

Apple didn't think it was a good idea to be minimizing and expanding windows all day either. This is why they developed expose.

Expose allows you to see all of your windows laid in front of you so you can choose the appropriate one. This is so much better than searching through your taskbar to find the right window.

Overall, it solved some inefficiencies and frustrations when I switch to duel monitors in 2001. It is a great investment I will never go back to one monitor. Unless, of course I have a Mac laptop.