Test your plans by reducing time

I couldn’t find any better phrase that describes the approach I’ve learned in the last year. It’s a simple piece of advice: Test your plans by reducing time.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the amount of our free time is stable and we’ll also be able to spend the same number of hours on things in the future.

Sooner or later, you’ll need to put most of your effort and attention in a specific direction. Eventually, you’ll push every insignificant activity in the background, and you may struggle to find even minutes to deal with the rest of your stuff. Starting of studies, new relationship, new job, starting a family – they are only examples of events that can change your priority. If you want to stick to your routines, you need to change the approach to performing tasks.

Read more →

Stop using specialized vocabulary

Each professional group has own specialized vocabulary. It consists of words often related to tools, technologies or processes. They make everyday communication smooth and effective. Yet, this way of communication is appropriate only for specific environments.

Read more →

Write code for people

The first draft of this article was about the code-style. I wanted to show you why it is important and why we should care about it. But the longer I thought, the stronger conviction I gained, that the code-style – whatever it means – is only a way to achieve a much more important goal.

I’m a big advocate of well-quality code. Besides good architecture, I pay attention to style – consistent spacing and indentation, coherent naming convention and other rules that make the code visually better. But how to convince someone, who never took care of style before, that is it a good thing?

Read more →