Matthew Lang

The complete story of cycling legend Eddy Merckx. Who can say no to that?

... a Blog Readership. Hats off to Dan Shipper for a great post on blogging. Definitely today's required reading.

... is coming fast and freelancing is on the rise as a result. Interesting.

So the real business opportunities are in enterprise solutions we’re told but no one is building for enterprise. Why is that you ask? Well the title gives it away, it’s not sexy.

— Of Cours People Aren't Building for the Enterprise, It's not Sexy by Curtis McHale

Of course no-one finds the enterprise sexy, exciting, cutting edge or anything like that. Also the vast sums of money needed to build enterprise products is also a road block. Attracting new developers and businesses to build enterprise products is quite a challenge. I've always wondered what a ERP product built using Rails would perform like.

Anyone need an ERP product built using Rails? I've got the time, if you have the money.

... with Nicholas Bate.

Essential reading for today. Make sure to set aside some time for this. And Happy Birthday Patrick!

Golf ... more golf ... and even more golf. Ryder Cup weekend begins today and me and my oldest son are going to be glued to the television cheering on Rory, Graeme and the rest of the European team.

These Bombtrack bikes are fantastic. Especially love the curve on the seat tube.

via PEDAL Consumption

One thing that has continually bugged me about the Journalong journal entry screen is the social widgets that I put on there. They serve no other purpose than to inform the user about how popular Journalong is within each social network. When you are about to write your daily journal entry, the last thing you want to see is the tweet count for Journalong.

I also believe it's a pointless measure of success and amounts to nothing more than a popularity poll. I'd like to think that the customers Journalong is attracting, base their decision to subscribe on getting value from a plain text journal they can write to from anywhere.

So last night I removed the social widgets from Journalong and it's already looking like a much nicer place now.

I wants one of these ...

29" wheels and a double chain ring at the front. Ticks all my boxes.

via shedfire

... The Big Paper Exercise with Mike Vardy.It's amazing how often the lo-fi techniques that require just pencil and paper are so much easier to do than their digital counterparts.Definitely giving this a go over the weekend.

Firefighting. I've been doing this for most of the last three weeks. It's the onslaught of unforeseen tasks and issues that take you away from the work you had planned to do. It's the ad-hoc requests and "emergency" problems that try to rob you of a productive day.There's nothing less motivating than firefighting most of your time at work and gradually seeing those deadlines slip again and again and again. Thing is, too much firefighting can be averted in most scenarios. Here's a few tips which I found quite good. It's mostly common sense, but I sometimes lack this human trait!

• Identify the source of your firefighting - First of all make sure you know where all your firefighting issues are coming from. The most important step. More likely it's a single person or organisation than a random number of people or organisations.
• Filter all incoming fires - Make sure to route all firefighting issues to the right person. As a developer, I'm often mistaken as the "go to guy" for a particular project or software. In reality, these issues should first go to someone else first, before they come to me.
• Schedule time for firefighting issues - Once the issues have come in, block off some time later on in the day or week for dealing with these issues. It should be a maximum of two hours per day. Spending too much time on firefighting issues is counter-productive and a real motivation killer. Believe me, I've been there.
• Think about a long term solution - Firefighting should be a short term phase. You shouldn't allow this to be come part of your daily work. When resolving issues of this natrue, ask yourself "could this happen again?". If the issue probably will, then think about a long term solution that will stop the issue continually coming back to you.

Most firefighting work is work that we can put off for a later part of the day or week.​ Don't let your day go to pot with putting out fires.

I wish I read this list by Michael Wade last week when I was at my wits end with an issue at work. I probably shouldn't have sent the email, but I did anyway. As soon as I read point three, I knew I shouldn't have sent that email.

3. Are you so upset that you shouldn't be near a computer? Don't e-mail when angry.*

Twitter's third party app lockdown continues with the removal of Twitter Triggers from IFTTT. I think the only way for Twitter to go from here is downwards. With it's focus on advertising, Twitter in my eyes is just another Facebook.

via The Verge

I wish I had a local spot like this for some leisurely cycling.

via FGGT

So, far its been good; most apps I use are web apps. I spend 70% of my time in a terminal, and 30% of my time in a web browser. Honestly its the perfect computer for me right now. So, I’m waving goodbye to the ecosystem Mr. Jobs built, and moving to the world of linux full time.

— Thanks Mr Jobs, but it seems I can use my Linux laptop now by Hyper Geometric

It's hard not to argue that Apple products are great. I particularly like my iPad and tomorrow I'll pick up my new iPhone. As for my main development machine at home though, I've started looking at using Ubuntu on an old PC. So far, I've only installed the minimum development tools I'll need. I'll be able to give a more fuller review on using Linux. Stay tuned!

Absolutely fantastic animation. I would love to see this expanded further into a series.

via DBSW

Every year we miss the seasons moving from Summer to Fall in Canada and the changing colours in the trees.

On the wishlist today, to put back the summer vacation in exchange for a couple of weeks away in September/October next year.

How many times have you heard these or words to this effect?​

Keep both plates spinning​

It's really just another way of saying multi-tasking.When you do hear colleagues say this, remind them you're not a circus entertainer or even the love child of Andrew Van Buren. Plate spinning, multi-tasking​ or whatever you want to call it, is a productivity killer. Instead of focusing on one thing, you're given only a small amount of your attention to each task you are working on. What happens when you do this? Yeah, those plates will fall eventually. Trust me.

Instead, give each task your undivided attention and focus. Batch your work into related tasks and tackle them one at a time.​After all, multi-tasking is a myth and I'm not a circus entertainer.

Today's XKCD is amazing.

Enjoy.

Lifehacker has all the resources you'll need for using Markdown.

There's hundreds of apps out there that are prepared to lock in your data. But why sacrifice access to your data? Look at moving away from these apps that lock in your data and start using plain old text files for your to do lists, logging, writing and blogging.

Plain text and Markdown is much more flexible and you can use a wider range of tools to manage all your Markdown documents. Add a cloud storage service like Dropbox and you can have your files with you everywhere you go!

​I have a love hate relationship with email.I love having a medium that allows me to communicate effectively with others all over the world. Being able to send some thoughts to a family member in Canada, or thanking your mentor for that little motivational book they sent you in the post. Yip, it's hard to beat email as a form of communication.

Until of course you get to your desk at work at 9am on a Monday morning and the deluge of email in your inbox makes you regret that you didn't just phone in sick that day. Yes there are ways of dealing with your email on a daily basis that let you work smarter and more effectively by implementing filters and such, but that doesn't stop people sending email to you.You see, when you work in a team, department or in a small company, email is often that go to tool that let's one person tell everyone else about something. That's great, but when email becomes the standard form of communication for ideas, discussions and projects, that's when you're going to wish you never opened that your inbox again.

From my experience, I have found that email in the work place is an invasive form of communication that tries to grab your attention from the pressing, but productive work that you are doing. It aims to break your concentration. When you have processed that 'urgent' email, you then need to reset your focus and get back to what you were working before you were interrupted. Personally I can do without that kind of distraction.

So what's the solution? Well it's easy. Non-invasive forms of communication that let you see with others want you to see without distracting them from their work. Project and task management, customer relationship management, and intranets are all greats ways of communicating with others in your company without interrupting what they are working on. They let your team see the information they need to see and they can act upon that information in their own time.

And don't be under the impression that the digital world is the only place you can communicate.

The daily stand up is a great way of communicating with your team and shouldn't be thought as being for developers only. Anyone in a team, should consider the daily stand up where you want a status update from the previous day and to quickly plan what's going to happen today.

Kanban boards are another great trick I learned to use from my days working in an agile development team. An overview of the work in progress is a great way for everyone to see what's going on. It also increases verbal communication over work rather than team members continually pinging emails back and forward.

As a rule, email should be the last form of communication in any team, department or small company. There are so many other ways of communicating that are more productive and will also let your colleagues get their work done.

So next time you want to update the team on a project or want to discuss idea, find an alternative to the evil that is email.

I’m blogging today because computer nerds know how to make software, they tend to get exploited by people who don’t, and it is ruining America for everyone. Our economy is completely dependent on computers at this point, and I am astonished that so many of our “leaders” still haven’t figured out how to use Microsoft Outlook.

How many times have you come across managers who claim to be great at what they do, but lack even the most basic skills with a computer? Unfortunately I've come across this scenario more times than I would like. In today's world you need to learn work with more than people.

— The Programmer and the MBA by GusBook

I still want to go back here and watch the sun rise and set on the canyon. I only got to see the canyon during the middle of the day. Nevertheless, it is a breath taking place to see, no matter what time of day it is.

via Mme Scherzo

I just know my mate Mark would love this girl's style.

via FGGT