TITLE OF PAPER: Life Hacks, Tech Secrets of the Over-prolific Alpha Geeks URL OF PRESENTATION: _URL_of_powerpoint_presentation_ PRESENTED BY: Danny O'Brian REPRESENTING: CONFERENCE: _name_of_your_conference_here_ DATE: _date_of_your_conference_here_ LOCATION: _venue_and_room_in_venue_ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- REAL-TIME NOTES / ANNOTATIONS OF THE PAPER: {If you've contributed, add your name, e-mail & URL at the bottom} Original thoughts: Kent Beck boiled down to a half principle: "Use index cards for everything" Card reading: note to self: write presentation He wrote a lot of alpha geeks (70 of them asked, 14 questionnaires returned), asking them about their productivity tools. - code they use - screenshots - habits - anecdotes People who replied: Jamie Zawinski Nathan Torkington Brad Templeton Guido van Rossum Eric S. Raymond Anne Mitchell Morbus Iff Paul Ford Dan Egnor Edd Dumbhill Cory Doctrorow Simon Cozens Tim Bray Piers Beckley (accidental questioned, "the control") Focus not on business stuff Results People are really excited by screenshots all IM message windows and a hell of a lot of shells Why the command line? - not necessarily a question of efficiency - people who replied to me - involved on the public net What is the primary organizing app? - todo.txt (via word, BBEdit, Emacs, Notepad) - embarassed about not using a bigger system - often they've tried organizing programs Want to find and enter information fast, and willing to sacrifice almost anything Most self-described that they're great at remembering huge systems, but forget laundry and birthdays Oft references the 10 seconds rule: If you can't file it in 10 seconds, you won't do it A lot of people use Emacs because of incremental search: mozilla, panther Trust: - power users trust software as far as they hove thrown their computers in the past - have gone through a lot of upgrades and a lot of platform/app changes - unless you wrote it yourself. you still can't trust it, but you're more forgiving Another popular organizing tool: the email client Ref. Zawinski's law Corollary: every program that can read mail, ends up being used for everything else Some bits of life are too short to learn another app - Spolsky uses Excel for projects - Your HR person sends you a website design in powerpoint - Don Lancaster sees the world in PostScript The private blog: - "How many entries on livejournal are private?": 3% The private RSS feed: private script which feeds into their aggregator A taxonomy of scripts: "secret software" no use to anyone else embarrassing code often forgotten (with a lifecycle) http://simon-cozens.org/programmer/secret-software.html Universal scripts: random sig generator netscape killer ssh foo mail wrangling Syncing files - complex, personal - trust Every alpha geek backed up (but didn't do their laundry) "If you spread it widely enough, the nuke won't get it all" Boilerplates Mungers and viewers - view by time/space - Filelight on kde Not much cross-app automation - not just because unix is scripting pants - theory is that objects are fragile - monad shell from MS passes around objects instead of streams/pipes A fair bit of webscraping - html 2 rss - keeping an eye on bank accounts a lot of making public their work - blogging utilities - Raymond's "Shipper" (package, post, announce code) - making a web page "I used to think it would be dumb to give my ideas away, that I should hoard them.... Now I just blog them or otherwise tell people. Sometimes they come to naught all the same, but generally somebody tends to find the idea useful in one way or another." - Edd Dumhill email danny at spesh.com : subject lifemaps great apps: decent email search easy webscraping (prog by demo) keyboard macros for win/lin filepile for everyone (fickr might support this) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- REFERENCES: {as documents / sites are referenced add them below} test driven development, kent beck home comforts, cheryl mendelson getting things done, david allen [I'LL BE POSTING THIS ONLINE HERE http://trevor.typepad.com/blog/2004/02/oreilly_emergin.html ] [SO MAKE YOUR EMAIL OF THE FORM user (at) domain dot com or type REMOVE next to it and I'll do so before posting] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTRIBUTORS: {add your name, e-mail address and URL below} trevorolio (at) mac d.o.t com -------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTES ON / KEY TO THIS TEMPLATE: A headline (like a field in a database) will be CAPITALISED This differentiates from the text that follows A variable that you can change will be surrounded by _underscores_ Spaces in variables are also replaced with under_scores This allows people to select the whole variable with a simple double-click A tool-tip is lower case and surrounded by {curly brackets / parentheses} These supply helpful contextual information. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright shared between all the participants unless otherwise stated...