amix.dk blog

Google I/O 2013 - Cognitive Science and Design

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:40:47 GMT

Great talk!

Interview about Todoist

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:11:28 GMT

There's a small interview (about 20min):

Favorite Web Tool | Todoist.com – an Interview with Founder Amir Salihefendic

Thanks Jason!

Macklemore - Vipassana

Fri, 10 May 2013 15:25:55 GMT

Yesterday, forget it
Tomorrow is, nada
The present is, right here, through the breath, watch it
Atheist Jesus piece, hangin' on a cross
We sit and discuss God on lawn chairs
About how we got here,
What it is, what it isn't, shit
Fate versus faith, scrimmagin' with coincidence
Leave out the market and hold up on the business end
Focus on the genuine, with everything else, you can shed the skin

You are Not a Lottery Ticket - Peter Thiel

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:16:29 GMT

Worth a watch:

Twitter, Disqus comments and over 1 million uniques!

Sat, 04 May 2013 23:13:52 GMT

Some smaller updates:

I have introduced Disqus comments to this blog, hope you guys will use it
I have re-created a Twitter account. You should follow me here

It's not something I follow that closely, but my blog has been read by more than 1 million unique people since its introduction! I plan to spend some more time blogging here in the upcoming time and I hope you stay tuned! Thanks for the support!

Boss vs. Leader

Sat, 04 May 2013 22:59:43 GMT

Messaging at Scale at Instagram

Sat, 04 May 2013 22:58:25 GMT

As activity accelerated from just a few thousand activities per day to hundreds of millions, Instagram needed a reliable, scalable messaging infrastructure to distribute work and messages.

Has a lot of great insights and scaling strategies you might use. Recommended watching:

Simplicity Matters by Rich Hickey

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:10:44 GMT

Great and insightful talk by the Clojure creator:

Good enough is good enough!

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 07:48:02 GMT

Our culture's default assumption is that everybody should always be striving for perfection -- settling for anything less is seen as a regrettable compromise. This is wrong in most software development situations: focus instead on keeping the software simple, just "good enough", launch it early, and iteratively improve, enhance, and re-factor it. This is how software success is achieved!

An amazing talk by Alex Martelli, the "Über Tech Lead" for Google. It is from this year's PyCon 2013, it has nothing to do with Python tho'!

How to become more productive by using 2 computers

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 08:04:20 GMT

I have a simple and neat productivity tip I want to share.

One of the things I noticed I do a lot (especially when presented with hard problems) is to procrastinate by opening my email, opening Hacker News or something similar. I think it's a fairly common thing for most people. The problem with this is that it's very unproductive: because the mind gets distracted, looses focus and needs to do constant context switching.

It's also ruins Flow, a state you want to be in:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.

There's a lot of scientific research on the matter that concludes that multi-tasking and constant context switching is really bad for your productivity.

“Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

Back to the tip! It's really simple:

I have a work computer where I do work and productive things. Unproductive things are blocked on this computer.
I have another computer (an iPad) where I do unproductive work, such as check Hacker News, Facebook etc.
I process emails 3 times a day (after I am done with the emails, I block Gmail).

I have found out that this improves my productivity greatly. You should try it out :-)

Home office

I also recently setup a pretty awesome home office (I don't work here all the days of the week, but the days I work here it's amazing):