I’ve been preparing myself for 26 since just before I turned 25. I have this thing about not wanting to get old – mostly because I’ve seen how much old age sucks. None of my grandparents have / had really aged very healthfully and getting old just scares the hell out of me, but this is the first time that I’m OK with getting older. At least this year. Next year may be a different story.

This past year has been pretty great. In fact, when blowing out the candles on my cake the other day, I had a tough time coming up with something to wish for. I’m REALLY happy with where my life is right now – I have great friends, a good job, and, for the first time in my entire life, even things on the family front are in a really good place. So many times this year I’ve found myself just walking down the block, letting my mind wander, and coming to the same conclusion: there’s no where else I’d rather be right now. I LOVE living in NY, I LOVE the life I’ve created for myself. Really, anything else that comes along is just icing at this point. Sure I still have my Big Life Goals that I won’t stop going after, but when I look around and see how much I’ve done with my life so far I’ve stopped going “oh my god I’ve reached the ‘nearly 30′ point” and have turned it into “look at what I’ve done – and I’m ONLY 26.” Sure there are bad days here and there, but on the whole, it’s a great place to be.

Soon after my 25th birthday, my quarter life crisis kicked in and I quit my job at Etsy to work on Accompl.sh full-time and to sort of try to explore what life had to offer me. I ended up living off of my savings account for over 9 months (something I should really dive into in another post) and had an AMAZING time. My bank account is still recovering, but I wouldn’t trade that time for anything in the world. Between what I got to learn and the time it freed up for me to focus on other things that were important to me, those 9 months were invaluable. (And as an aside, when talking about this time off, I always have to note that the 9 months was purely coincidental and no I didn’t have a mystery baby or anything!)

I got to cross off one of my big bucket list goals this year. It’s something I’ve been dreaming of doing since I was about 13: go on a cross-country roadtrip with a friend and take tons of photos. This past May, Jimelle and I packed up our backpacks, flew out to LA, rented a car, and zig-zagged our way across the country. It only took us 9 days but I got to see SO much of this country and it was a LOT of fun.

Recently, I realized that this past year was a lot about learning what my personal priorities and goals are instead of what’s always been assumed or prescribed. I think the time off really helped that. I now know, for the most part, where I’d rather spend my time, my money, and my attention. For instance, I’d rather pay $150 for great seats to a Broadway show than buying new gadgets (crazy, I know!) In fact, I think this year has been a lot about de-cluttering my life in general. I’m far less focused on “stuff” and more on “experiences.” I’ve cleaned out my closet about every 2 months this year and have donated things that I don’t wear anymore. I’ve sold things I no longer use. It’s nice to pare down. It’s also helped me to realize that I’d rather spend more money on something that I know I’ll really enjoy and get value out of than a bunch of little nonsense that won’t add value to my life. That’s not to say I won’t buy stupid things here and there – I’m certainly guilty of that – but like I said, I’d rather have great experiences than a lot of Things.

At brunch with my friends yesterday, Jimelle asked what my goals were for 26. It’s something I’ve thought a bit about, but really, there are only 2 big ones that I could come up with: 1) travel outside of the country. It’s been way too long since I got my passport stamped. And 2) meet a really great guy. I have a few career goals in mind too, but they’re still a bit nebulous, so I won’t bother trying to articulate them. After brunch we were talking over coffee and Jimelle (who’s already 26) and I got to talking about how we have such different timelines from a lot of the people we went to high school with. So many are already married with kids, or they’re in very serious relationships / are engaged. I’m nowhere near that point. I’m so not ready for kids yet. Marriage? Maybe. But not really. Maybe in another few years. I know I definitely want that out of life – so hopefully it’s in my future!

Twenty six is a really adult year in my mind. I haven’t quite figured out why, yet, but it seems like it’s the year for growing up. I’m kind of looking forward to that, actually.

So what’s on deck for this next year? I honestly don’t know. Taking advantage of NYC – more Broadway shows, maybe a symphony, great restaurants. More time with friends. More great experiences. Continuing to have good relationships with my family. Maybe paying off a significant portion of my student loans. I want to focus on doing the things that make me happy and learning and growing as much as I can. I want a great year with amazing adventures and amazing people. A simple goal. I think this year will bring big things. We’ll see!

I recommend viewing in HD full-screen.

“Flickr costs money, which makes it less fashionable than sites that claim to offer more for nothing. But to me, Flickr is the better choice. It has never stopped being awesome.

Long may its awesomeness continue.”

Flickr has held a special place in my geeky heart since 2005. My life since the day I started college is chronicled on there and it’s always been my internet “home.” This post pretty much sums it up.

I’ve been meaning to post this for ages. I saw this on TV the day Jimelle and I arrived in LA to start out roadtrip and I sat there with my mouth gaping and completely speechless. This is, by far, one of my favorite TV moments EVER. The voices. And the emotion. And just: WOW.

File under: Effing Adorable.
Also file under: Only $5.50?! Immediate buy.

My wall just got 3000 times cuter.

Overall, the results were really cool and a lot of fun to analyze. There are some basic limitations of this survey, which are discussed toward the bottom of this post. But the sheer amount of data here is cool.

Which is totally nuts, when you think about it. Right now I should be totally stressed out and panicky. I don’t have a “real job.” I don’t have any sort of income. I’m living on a very specific budget. Despite that, between living expenses and expenses for Accompl.sh, I’m still pretty quickly emptying out my savings account.

When I left Etsy I said I was giving myself until March to get my act together. It’s March and, well, my act still isn’t together, but for the first time everything seems like it’s starting to come together. My development skills are the best they’ve ever been, I have a super clear picture of where I want to take Accompl.sh in the future, my relationships with friends and family have never been stronger, and my health is in a much better place and still improving.

I find myself working from 10 or 11AM straight through until 3 or 5AM and I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing. It’s the most amazing feeling in the world.

Apparently money can’t buy happiness. But having enough money to sustain being able to do what I love for the last 5 months has made me so incredibly happy and fulfilled. I don’t have a yacht or a penthouse or even a new iPad, but I wouldn’t trade these last 5 months for ANYTHING and I’m going to do everything possible to make sure that I can buy this kind of happiness for the rest of my life.

Lately I’ve found myself experimenting a lot more with what I’ve been building – trying to develop more efficiently, building things that aren’t necessarily needed but are nifty and challenge me to try stuff that’s outside of the usual features and functions.

I’ve been having so much fun just seeing if I can actually implement a lot of the random ideas I have. They’ve taken a few hours out of my afternoon, but by the end I am so ridiculously happy with actually building something that I didn’t think I could.

A sharable image that's auto-generated using GD Library

It starts out simple: Let me put some text on background and save that as an image. That grows into “OK, I need to deal with multi-line text.” Which turns into “Crap, what about long words?” And, finally, “Oh, you know, I should probably put a logo on these! How do I put an image on an image?”

Each time I get a little better at it and it’s slightly less frustrating.

I think I’ve finally reached a point where I can have an idea and just set about building it instead of being intimated by whether I can actually do it. It’s an amazing feeling.

Coding is actually fun for me now. Maybe it’s that I’m coding something I really care about. Maybe it’s that I need to up my game and try to build things that are more complicated, but for the first time I feel completely literate – like I’m just waving my hands over the keyboard and the code comes out without having to think about it.

So that got me thinking: Where does the Accompl.sh codebase stand right now?
I ran sloccount to find out:

Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
php: 33801 (99.25%)
xml: 159 (0.47%)
python: 95 (0.28%)

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 34,055
Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 1,097,568
(average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

34,000 lines of code.

I found an old sloccount output from the end of October 2011. According to that I’ve written about 10,000 lines of code since I left Etsy. That’s not even counting all of the terrible and redundant code that I’ve deleted in the last few months. Even discounting the few libraries I have on the server (to hook up to things like AWS and SendGrid plus some JS/jQuery things), it means I’ve written about 30,000 lines of code over the last 2-ish years.

Granted, I have no idea how this compares to other web apps, and the number of lines of code != a great app, product, etc, but those 30,000 lines of code have finally gotten me to a place where I feel like I actually may know what I’m doing. Maybe.

(P.S. Want a sneak peek at another one of my experiments? Check out the visual list page.)

1. Figure out what matters.

An obvious first step, but an important one. If you don’t know (or aren’t told, as the case may be) what’s important to you, it’s pretty impossible to focus on it. These days there are a few things that matter to me:

1. Growing Accompl.sh (70%)
2. Cooking more / Eating better (15%)
3. Growth / Learning (15%)

Knowing what you want to and need to focus on helps to filter out all of the noise and distractions. Assigning a weight to a certain bucket in your ‘what matters’ list helps to eliminate the need for a lot of time-consuming decision-making.

2. Figure out what’s hogging your attention

There are two ways to attack this one: Become extremely self-aware or use an app that does it for you. A combination of both is most effective.

Start paying attention to how you spend your time. How many times a day do you check Twitter? How many days a week do you find yourself sucked into the 8-11PM TV shows? How many times did you check Facebook before your morning coffee? I’ve been using RescueTime for a while now and though I don’t actually check on my stats very often, two things are working in my favor: 1) I know I’m being tracked so I’ll tend to be on my most-focused behavior and 2) When I DO check my stats, I can see where my huge time-sinks are.

3. Kill those things.

Get them out of your life. Or at least minimize their potential for distracting you. Notifications / status icons are a gateway drug. You THINK you can just check one or two, but before you know it an hour has gone by and what have you accomplished? Nada.
Some things to consider killing:

• Growl notifications – I turned these off during college and never looked back.
• Twitter notifications – You know – the ones that make the icon in your menu bar turn blue whenever there are unread tweets? Disable that now.
• Alert Sounds – My exception to this rule is the “first IM received” notification in Adium. You’ll especially want to kill things like the sign-on/sign-off alert in your IM client.
• Your TV – If you have one: unplug it from the wall. It makes it a lot more difficult to just casually flip it on for a show and get caught up from 8-11PM.

4. Get Stuff Done

Now that all of the distractions are out of the way: get to work! You’ll be amazed at how much more time you have in your day now. Maybe you’ll use it to get more work done, maybe you’ll finally get to go out to dinner with those friends you’ve been ignoring for the last few months, or maybe you’ll find a new project. The options are endless! Enjoy it!

Rinse and Repeat

Keeping your time in check is an ongoing process. Every couple of months (or couple of weeks if you feel yourself slipping), stop and take an audit of your time again. If you have something like RescueTime running, you can just check in on your stats and adjust as needed.

Don’t forget to have fun

Productivity is great, but balance is better. Don’t forget to build in time for play. Not everything you do needs to fit into your ‘what matters’ buckets. Sometimes you just have to turn off your brain. Burnout is a much bigger problem than losing a few hours to a movie or aimlessly poking around Facebook. Don’t forget to have a social life. Don’t forget to water your plants. Don’t forget to have fun. Most importantly: Don’t burn out.

I’d love to hear how you manage your distractions or what you’re doing with your new-found extra time. Leave your tips/updates in the comments! ↓

Earlier this year when I was at my aunt’s house in Connecticut she made some fresh orange & carrot juice for breakfast with a juicer. I thought it was pretty much the best thing since sliced bread and started to research juicers online. I’m not a fan of single-purpose appliances and I was also trying to REDUCE the amount of stuff in my life, not add to it, so I put it on the wishlist and carried on.

Fast forward a few more months and a series of unrelated tweets from unrelated friends got me thinking about the juicer again. Combine that with the fact that the only fruits and veggies that are out nowadays are gross things like kale and beets and I started to reconsider my original stance on the single-purpose appliances.

I remembered a $100 amex giftcard that I’d gotten a few years ago that I kept tucked in the back of my wallet because I couldn’t think of anything fun to get with it. BINGO! I found a $99 Breville juicer (this one) on Amazon and in a few clicks (yay Prime!) it was on its way to my door.

In anticipation of its arrival I hopped on FreshDirect and ordered basically one of everything from their produce section. OK. I exaggerate. But let’s just say that my fridge currently looks like I held up a farmer’s market. Apples, oranges, grapefruits, lemons, kale, celery, cucumbers, beets (yes, beets!), ginger, carrots, and who knows what else are now filling every which crevice of my fridge. Not a bad deal, actually. I’d rather have that stuff filling my fridge than a whole bunch of soda and prefab food.

The juicer arrived yesterday and I immediately set it up and started chopping up my fruits and veggies.

First up? A juice that I get from the Green Pirate truck during the summer – I think they call it their Pink Lemonade. I actually didn’t think to look up the ingredients in advance, so it turns out that I missed a few, but it was still pretty delicious!

This one had: 2 apples, 1 lemon, about 1″ of ginger and 1 small beet. (yes! BEETS!)

Fast forward about 30 mins and I went a bit overboard, making 2 other juices, at least. My kitchen looked like a war zone. There was pulp everywhere! I haven’t quite mastered my timing with getting the fruit/veggies in with the plunger quickly after and I wanted to try ALL THE COMBINATIONS!

The final product (not counting the amount of juice I drank while trying them):

From left to right:

• Juice 2: (henceforth dubbed: delicious pea soup) 2 apples, 1 lemon, ~1″ ginger, 2 stalks of celery, 1 stalk of kale (wasn’t sure how strong it would be). I think the pink color comes from the leftover beets at the bottom of my pitcher. Not going to lie, Juice 2 kind of looked like poop when it first came out of the juicer, but it tasted DELICIOUS. It’s all separated in this photo and looks much more pleasant!
• Juice 1: attempt at the green pirate truck pink lemonade (I forgot the cucumber! and used a lemon instead of a lime)
• Juice 3: 1 apple, 1 orange, 4 stalks celery, a bunch of kale, 1 cucumber, a bunch of baby carrots, 1 lemon, ~1″ ginger. This one was a former coworker’s recipe (Hi Jenny!) and it originally tasted a bit too vegetable-y for my taste. The original recipe called for half a lemon but I added the 2nd half in and was able to drink it. It produced about 3x the amount of juice as the previous 2 so I think I’ll be drinking this one for a while.

So that’s the first bit of my juice adventure. I swear I used oranges in something else so maybe there’s another juice that I drank down without even realizing. I’ve read and heard that these juices don’t keep well so perhaps by the time you’ve read this I’ll have finished them ALL and will be on to my next attempt! Leigha may be coming over this weekend for a juicing extravaganza. I get the feeling there’s a lot of juice in my future…