Ryan Bright

How I Use Asana

2013-03-11T01:00:00-04:00

I've used many todo lists and project management applications throughout the years, but a clear winner has emerged for organizing all the lists in my life. From designing software at Harvest to managing my grocery list, Asana provides a perfect blend of ease, flexibility, and mobility for "life management". I'd like to share some of the ways I use Asana in my life and hopefully inspire some ways that you can use it in yours.

For Harvest

At Harvest, we develop an internal tool called Kaizen for project management. While Kaizen fulfills the team's requirements and allows more customization than off-the-shelf solutions, it falls short in a few areas that are important in my workflow.

Rather than manually copying information from Kaizen to Asana, I use Zapier to automatically create Asana tasks from Kaizen emails. Whenever I'm assigned to a new task in Kaizen, Zapier fetches the subject and body of the email and uses them to construct a new task in Asana. An added bonus is that a notification email contains a link to the original ticket, so it's easy to reference discussions and close tickets once they're done.

Tasks can be automatically created with Zapier.

While I use Asana for Harvest, I also use it with Harvest. Last year, I helped develop the Harvest Platform - a JavaScript platform that allows third-party developers to quickly add time tracking functionality to their applications by leveraging Harvest.

To illustrate the capability of the platform, we developed a Chrome extension for use with Basecamp and Trello. The extension works well, but it depends on the layout of the target application to properly augment timers onto the interface. Thus, our ultimate goal is to make it easy for developers to integrate timers directly into their applications. Native integration leads to a more seamless, customizable experience within each application without us having to curate a lot of different profiles.

That said, Asana is an integral part of my workflow that has not yet taken the plunge. So, I may have customized my extension.

Time can be tracked for any task.

This addition allows all "metawork" to be done without leaving Asana. I ♥ that.

For Coursework

Alongside my work at Harvest, I'm taking courses through Coursera and General Assembly to refresh knowledge of old material and build knowledge of topics that interest me. To stay on top of lectures, quizzes, and homework assignments, I leverage a handful of features from Asana.

Coursework can be filtered to only show homework assignments.

Projects. Each course has its own project, so I can filter tasks for a particular course.
Tags. Tasks represent lectures or homework, so using those tags lets me show homework for all courses. I can also add an additional filter to show homework for a single course.
Due Dates. Homework has a hard deadline. Lectures should be watched before the following week's set is released.
Subtasks. Many assignments are comprised of multiple tasks. To avoid cluttering my workspace, these can be represented as subtasks.
Priority Headings. To balance my workload, I loosely organize upcoming tasks by day.

For Side Projects

Occasionally, I work on side projects with friends. Asana makes it easy to invite a user to a project as a guest instead of granting access to the entire workspace. This lets me keep my side projects in a single workspace without having to grant my friends access to all of my personal projects.

Each task or subtask can be assigned to a single team member. This encourages teams to break tasks into chunks small enough for a single person and also makes it easy to visualize who is doing what.

Sometimes, side projects get abandoned.

For Every Day

Asana has many powerful features for project management, but it's also great for organizing everyday tasks. Have errands to run? Calls to make? A grocery list? Throw it all in a workspace or project instead of using a separate application. The Asana iPhone and Android applications make it trivial to access lists on the go. If you're really crazy, you might even leverage Asana Mobile's fast updating to divide and conquer your grocery list with another user. I may or may not be guilty of this.

Asana can be used like any other todo list.

Creating New Tasks

The Asana UI is fluid for entering and viewing tasks, but I don't always want to do a full context switch from my work to create new tasks. As a former Remember the Milk user, I miss the powerful input syntax that allowed me to describe a task's characteristics with a simple string of text. So, I made a tool to mimic it. It's rough around the edges but really gets the job done when paired with Alfred.

Moving Forward

The team at Asana has created a versatile product that continues to evolve in new and exciting ways. I was an early adopter, switched to something else, and came back to a more polished application just six months later. If you haven't already, check out the Asana Guide to learn about many other features that I didn't discuss.

My favorite feature of Asana is its flexibility. It provides lightweight constructs that can be oriented in ways that fit nicely into many workflows.

Do you use Asana? How are you using it?

Trimming Distractions with Zapier

2013-03-08T00:00:00-05:00

I'm always looking for ways to streamline my workflow, reduce clutter, and eliminate distractions. I've been effective in this quest throughout recent years, but I find myself paying more attention to email than is preferable. There are plenty of messages that can wait until the end of the day. However, others demand a more immediate response. Perhaps there's a pull request that needs my review or a new issue that's been assigned to me in Kaizen or Zendesk. Many of these can also wait, but wouldn't it be great to address them without introducing the unnecessary distractions that accompany the routine checking of email?

Enter Zapier.

Zapier allows me to seamlessly integrate the services I use in ways that make sense within my workflow. Specifically, it responds to events in one service by triggering actions in another.

Here are a few events that concern me day-to-day that commonly lead to checking email more frequently:

Someone mentions me in a GitHub Issue or Pull Request
Someone makes a comment in a Kaizen thread to which I'm subscribed
Someone assigns me to a Zendesk ticket

Rather than requiring me to check email, I'd like to be notified of these events in one or more of the following ways:

Send me a HipChat notification
Send me a message on Google Talk
Add a new task to my Asana inbox

With these simple sets of events and responses, it becomes more feasible to check email just one or two times per day while still staying on top of everything important. It also allows me to be more mindful of priorities and effectively separate various concerns throughout my day.

Prioritized Reading with Leaf

2013-03-07T00:00:00-05:00

Throughout the past year, I've consistently found myself falling behind on current news. I still blame Google for killing PostRank and making it more of a pain to sift through my 100+ feeds in Google Reader, but I haven't lost hope just yet. I've tried Fever as an alternative, but it just didn't meet my needs.

Yesterday, I came across Leaf and have been quite pleased. While it doesn't provide automated post ranking and filtering like PostRank did, it allows me to use the Google Reader feeds I already have instead of creating a separate collection. The kicker is that I'm able to hide feeds that can wait until the weekend and only show the most important feeds right now. I'm currently using it to stay in the loop with Harvest blogs, Ruby and Rails upgrades, developer blogs for products with which I integrate, and a handful of other sites.

I still miss PostRank, but this seems to be the next best thing to keep me abreast of the latest and greatest without wasting a lot of time.

How do you stay informed while remaining productive?

Four Weeks at Harvest

2012-04-22T01:00:00-04:00

It's hard to believe that I've been at Harvest for a month, but time flies when life is good. Looking back on my first four weeks has provided me with some insights about why my experience has been so enjoyable. I want to share a few of them as a pat on the back to my teammates and also as inspiration for other companies. Happy employees are productive employees!

Communication

Your first day at a new job can be intimidating, and working on a remote team adds an extra twist. As you plod across your apartment toward the "office", a flurry of questions invades your mind.

"How do I talk to the team if it's 1,000 miles away?"

"How do I figure out what to do?"

"Is my hygiene going downhill?"

"Oh god, why did I think working remotely was a good idea!?"

Good communication can make most of these fears obsolete, and it can even encourage you to bathe daily! Harvest cares about communication, and that helped ease into my first day.

We use Co-op for keeping in touch. Co-op enables meaningful communication with teammates, but it also provides the team with a place for informal discussion. On any given day, our Co-op stream is chock full of amusing links and animated GIFs. It's where we go to unwind.

In addition to being Twitter for business, Co-op also prevents me from interrupting my coworkers. Whenever you track time in Harvest, Co-op broadcasts the activity to let everyone know what you're doing without anyone having to ask.
We use HipChat for chatting. Co-op serves its purpose wonderfully, but we also need a place for focused discussion. HipChat is great for 1-on-1 chats, and it also lets us create rooms for each project to avoid interrupting the rest of the team. If others wants to join a conversation late, HipChat saves the chat history for each room.
We use Skype for video conferencing and pair programming. Since much of the Harvest team works remotely, we need a way to discuss concepts without a lot of typing. Skype lets us quickly discuss ongoing projects, and it also helps supplement the loss of face time. The Screen Sharing feature also lets us collaborate on troublesome code without wasting a lot of time.

Getting Things Done

That's why we're here, right? While individuals are responsible for their own productivity, Harvest has taken some steps to help.

We mentor our newcomers. Rather than being cast into a sea of code without a map, I had a great mentor to help me learn the ropes and great documentation to help me get to work. Not only did this reduce my "new job" anxiety, it also reduced the time it took for me to become productive.
We work together. I work with some very talented people, but we don't think in terms of rockstars and ninjas. There's too much work for one person to manage alone, and that means it's beneficial to make each person as productive as possible. Everyone is very helpful, and that made life as the new guy much easier.
We use GitHub like GitHub uses GitHub. Have you ever sat through a code review meeting while some guy defends his code like a politician on trial? It's extremely unproductive, and the work usually doesn't receive a fair review.

Each time a Harvest developer wants to make a change, he or she creates a new branch with Git and submits a pull request on GitHub when it's ready to go. This allows the change to receive thoughtful review in a manner that doesn't waste anyone's time.

It's probably not intentional, but we also have some other similiarities with how GitHub works.
We aren't agile. At least not in the traditional sense. We don't have SCRUM planning. We don't vote on story points. We don't track velocity. Instead, we plan our work one week at a time and use iDoneThis to review our progress every Friday. To keep track of work that needs to be done, we built a simple project management system. Oh yeah, and we also use this time-tracking product called Harvest.

Expression

Companies are made of people, and Harvest goes to great lengths to give itself a pulse.

We have an amazing support team. Seriously, these guys are awesome. They really know our products, and they work to ensure that every customer has a great experience when an issue arises.
We have many blogs. Each blog shows a different side of Harvest. The Harvest Blog is where we share information about products, productivity tips, and other things useful to our customers. Tech Time is a new blog for our developer following, and we also use it to share nerdier things internally. The Harvest Watercooler is an informal blog where you'll find stuff about the team itself. We like to share our ideas.

Life

Again, companies are made of people. People have thoughts and feelings. They also have lives outside of work that can directly influence their lives at work, so there's value in encouraging improvement in both worlds.

We have goals. Not only do we have a vision for our products; we have a vision for our people. Every few months, we come up with a set of goals for each individual to accomplish. While many are related to improving our products, many are self-improvement goals. For example, three of my goals are to run more, write more, and read more things that don't involve technology. In a few months, I'll review my progress and figure out where I can improve.
We have fun. Along with our fun discussions and animated GIFs, the NYC team has group lunches, Friday basketball games, and is currently undefeated in a dodgeball league of other tech companies. We're looking at you, 10gen and Etsy. I was fortunate enough to spend a few days in New York and experience all of these things.

The first month was a good one, and I'm looking forward to what lies ahead. Every first experience should be as enjoyable as mine has been, and I hope others will find inspiration in the philosophy Harvest has taken on enabling its people to do great work.

Eliminating Distractions and Getting Stuff Done

2012-03-18T09:12:19-04:00

The iPad 3 is here! If you were lucky enough to snag one of these cool, new gadgets last week, you're now viewing your email, news, ebooks, and videos on a high-resolution retina display. Consumption never looked so good!

But there's one feature Tim Cook didn't share during the keynote. Yes, that's right. You've just adopted a shiny, new form of distraction. Congratulations!

Full disclosure: I own a MacBook Pro, iPad 2, and iPhone 4S. I'm among you.

Thursday's release served as a gentle reminder that it is far too easy to connect to the outside world these days. I won't argue against the usefulness of mobile devices, but I will share a few tips that have worked well when trying to clear my mental runways of debris.

Information Addiction

As mentioned, it's just too easy to access information these days. Anyone else miss the Dewey Decimal System? No? Okay, here are a few information dieting tips.

Schedule times for checking email. You've seen this one before, and that's because it works. When you've designated times for checking email, it's not as important that you know what's in your inbox. Scheduling also lets you address more volume without the overhead of switching back-and-forth between work and email.

If you find that you truly need to communicate with someone more frequently, email probably isn't the best medium for that communication.
Disable notifications and schedule a single time for social media. Unless you're in social media marketing, you probably spend too much time using social media. Rather than giving it up completely, just set aside a time for it after work. Oh, and be sure to disable all email and mobile notifications. You don't need to know about Sally's friend request until later.
Read articles once per day. I love to read, but reading articles typically doesn't help me with what I'm working on right now. To solve this, I schedule time after work to filter through my feeds in Google Reader and read a few that catch my attention. I also allocate more time on Sundays for reading the articles that I didn't get to during the week. This gives me just enough time to lose interest in things that I shouldn't have wanted to read in the first place.
Consume and produce on different devices. This won't work if you only have one device, but I've found it to be very effective in my own workflow. When I'm using my MacBook, I'm producing. When I'm using my iPad, I'm consuming. By separating concerns for each of my devices, my mind knows what it should be doing when using each of them.

Organization and Planning

Yes, even organization can be distracting. If you embrace any of the productivity pr0n that has come out of the previous decade, you might have a tendency to spend too much time planning. Rather than feeding you a spoonful of GTD, here are a few ways I combat the desire to structure my life when I'm trying to get stuff done.

Have a todo list with an adequate level of specificity. If you have a line item that reads "build the iOS application", you're basically a pilot trying to fly from New York to Los Angeles without any directions. Break down your tasks until you're comfortable tackling each one individually.
Add new items quickly and review them later. It's inevitable that you'll think of something else you need to do during the day, but that doesn't mean it should distract you from what you're doing right now. I'm in a constant tug-of-war between workflow and distracting ideas, so I built a small tool that I use with Alfred to capture those ideas for reviewing later in the day. Note: this tool will only work if you use Asana, but you can probably find or make something similar for whatever you use to manage your list.
Review todos nightly. Since I hopefully got something done during the day, I need to reflect it in my todo list. I've also got some junk that accumulated from adding new tasks with Alfred, and I need to prioritize those tasks for completion. I save this for the end of my day to make it easier to transition into tomorrow with a good idea of what needs to get done.

Mobile Devices

There should be a modern version of "Paddidle" where the objective is to yell a word each time you see someone texting and driving. The world has become obsessed with the freedom of mobility, and it's often to the detriment of productivity. Here are a few ways to be truly free.

Disable notifications. If you don't need to know it immediately, turn it off. If you're debating whether you need to know it immediately, turn if off. If you truly think you need to know it immediately, there's still a good chance you should turn it off.
Move distracting applications from the home screen. If you don't need to know it immediately, it shouldn't be in your face immediately.

Here's a screenshot of my iPhone home screen:

No email, Facebook, or Twitter

These applications are the bare essentials for daily use of my phone. They're the applications I almost always want to use when I'm opening my phone, and they don't feed me unnecessary distractions. If I want to check email during a scheduled time, it's just one swipe away. By the way, check out Sparrow for iPhone if you're looking for an awesome iOS mail application.
Stow your phone when you're working. If your job involves a lot of communication, this probably doesn't apply to you. However, my work as a software developer rarely relies on my phone use, so I tuck my iPhone away except for select times during the day when I want to respond to text messages and phone calls.

The Trusty Desktop

Most of us still do the bulk of our work at a desktop or laptop computer, and these feature just as many distractions as any of our other devices. Here are a few things I do to ensure focus when I'm working.

Be selective about notifications. Note the absence of the word "disable". There are a handful of times when you really want to be notified about an event. For instance, I always append a call to growlnotify to long-running scripts so that I can see when they complete without constantly referencing my terminal window. However, I disable notifications for email, instant messages, and anything else that doesn't benefit my workflow.
Use away messages to communicate. If I'm working, I use an away message to let other parties know that I'll respond within the next 30 minutes. This allots me enough time to complete a Pomodoro while also communicating my availability to the outside world.
Clear the desktop and dock. I prefer an icon-free desktop with very few icons in my dock. To be precise, Finder and Google Chrome are the only two icons in my dock, and I only keep them around so that my girlfriend isn't totally confused when she uses my laptop. In my experience, products like Alfred, Quicksilver, and Launchy allow faster access to applications and files without having to hunt around for them on the desktop or dock.

These are just a few of the methods I use to make myself more productive each day. I hope that you're able to apply some of them in your own pursuit of clarity and productivity. Remember: follow them incrementally and with patience. It takes time to develop new habits.

What do you do to make yourself more productive?

Self-Awareness through Measurement

2011-07-07T12:49:27-04:00

Over the past few days, I've developed an addiction with the self-tracking movement and have begun brainstorming various metrics that I'd like to start monitoring at a more granular level. These brainstorm sessions have generated an exceptionally long list, so I'm limiting myself for now until I'm able to optimize my methods.

Since analysis is only as effective as the tools that are used to perform it, I've spent some time researching some good ones for the job(s) at hand. Here's what I've come up with so far:

DailyBurn provides a great set of tools for planning and tracking your workouts, meals, and overall health. I've added all of my favorite exercises to reflect my typical workout routines so that I can easily log my progress after I leave the gym each day. I've also been logging every serving of food that I eat to help me conquer the dreadful eating habits that I picked up during college. As an added bonus, DailyBurn sends me periodic emails to let me know which nutrients are lacking in my diet along with a long list of foods I can eat to supplement those nutrients. I highly recommend this one for anyone that wants to get into shape.
Sleep Cycle is an innovative alarm clock that uses the iPhone's accelerometer to determine what phase of sleep you're in throughout the night and wake you up when you're going to be least groggy. I've been able to crudely estimate the number of hours I'm in bed each night (not many), but this tool allows me to measure the quality of sleep that I'm getting so that I fully understand the reasoning behind my morning coffee rush. This one's probably going to be difficult unless you're sleeping solo or in a King-sized bed, so it may not be for everyone.

Sleep graph from July 5-6
Wakoopa provides insights into how you spend your time on your computer. It runs silently in the background of Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows and tracks the amount of time you actively use the various applications on your machine. At the end of each day, the website generates a usage report that allows you to visualize which categories you spend the most time on throughout the day. While I've become quite aware of my habits since I started using Wakoopa in 2007, it's always helpful to know that I could spend a little less time using Adium. :)

Usage breakdown for the week of June 20
Using pen and paper allows me to make quick notes about my workflow (and lack thereof) when I'm at the office. Each time I get distracted by wonderful web goodies, I note the times that I lost and regained focus. Each time someone wanders into my cubicle to ask me a question, I note their times of arrival and departure. Hour long meetings? Noted. At the end of each day, I enter all of these times into Google Calendar so I can visualize my work day and better estimate my level of productivity. Today, I was only shooting 51.08% and really fell off the wagon after lunch. I'm hoping that continued analysis can help me determine my prime productivity hours throughout the day and also allow me to accurately measure and increase my capacity for SCRUM planning.

These tools work great on their own, but I'm currently working on a more centralized solution that will leverage the APIs of each service to display the information that I'm most interested in. Additionally, I plan to build a few simple tools to assist me in recording and displaying various metrics that are more difficult to automate.

Next up on my self-tracking list:

How strong is the correlation between my mood, diet, exercise, and sleep quality?
How do my blood pressure and heart rate change as my diet changes?
How does listening to music affect my overall productivity at work?

Stay tuned!

Blogging with Jekyll and Git

2011-06-26T11:09:04-04:00

In recent years, social media like Twitter and Facebook have allowed me to communicate my ideas in small, palatable bites of information. This format was revolutionary (no pun intended) for the conflicts in Egypt and Iran, and it's allowed me to bitch about traffic and my university with stunning efficiency. Though, there are still times when I'd like to convey a longer or more complex message to the handful of people that might stumble upon my web presence. While Tumblr has served as a happy medium for some, I don't feel that we've fully eluded the need for traditional, robust blogging platforms like WordPress and TypePad.

But I don't want to use WordPress. I may dabble in the art of spewing my thoughts and opinions on the Internet, but let's face it -- I'm a programmer. For me to write paragraphs of content that may never be read by another human being, my platform needs to be covered in peanut butter to hide the fact that I'm generating content written in human-readable language. Enter Jekyll.

Jekyll is a static site generator that allows me to build my blog using the tools that are already a part of my daily workflow -- MacVim, Git, and Ruby. All markup, styling, and extensions are written using my own tools, so I can be sure that the only spaghetti code being generated on my pages will be something that I have written myself. Additionally, I'm able to manage the content on my blog by tossing it all into a Git repository that can be pushed to my server. There's nothing quite like "git reset --hard" to crumple a sheet of digital paper, eh?

Many people have written about how to migrate from WordPress to Jekyll, so I won't bother trying to oust these great tutorials. However, if you'd like to integrate Git into your Jekyll workflow, I've provided a simple shell script to help you get started. The script is executed each time a push is made to the remote repository.

Note: I'm assuming that you've installed the Jekyll gem on your server along with all of its dependencies. Additionally, you might want to setup Gitolite to simplify management of your repositories.

  #!/bin/sh
  # File: $HOME/repositories/ryanbright.me.git/hooks/post-receive
  GIT_REPO=$HOME/repositories/ryanbright.me.git
  TMP=/tmp/ryanbright.me
  PUBLIC_HTML=/srv/www/ryanbright.me/public_html

  rbenv rehash
  rm -Rf $TMP
  git clone $GIT_REPO $TMP
  cd $TMP
  bundle install
  jekyll --no-auto $TMP $PUBLIC_HTML
  chmod -R 755 $PUBLIC_HTML/*
  cd $PUBLIC_HTML
  rm -Rf $TMP

  exit

I'm looking forward to digging more into Jekyll throughout the coming weeks, but I'm happy to have my blog up and running for now -- WordPress free. If you're in the market for a lightweight, customizable blogging system, give Jekyll a try!

Update: I changed the post-receive script to use rbenv.

Algorithms Revisited: Fibonacci Sequence

2010-08-15T21:58:13-04:00

With another school semester on the horizon, I've been reviewing old course material to refresh my memory. Since a lot of this material is useful when devising algorithms, I'm going to spend the next few weeks revisiting some of the more interesting concepts. First up is the Fibonacci sequence. This is the sequence F(n) = F(n-2) + F(n-1) where F(0) = 0 and F(1) = 1.

If we wish to determine a given Fibonacci number n, there are several approaches we can take. The approaches I'll cover here involve recursion, iteration, Binet's formula, and matrix form. Each of the following examples assumes that the algorithm is handling a positive integer, and all were validated with Ruby 1.8.7.

Recursion

def F(n)
  return n if [0, 1].include?(n)
  F(n - 2) + F(n - 1)
end

This naive solution uses recursion to calculate the value of a Fibonacci number and runs in exponential time. While the solution is viable for small values of n, the algorithm's lack of memory will cause the execution to take significantly longer for larger values.

Example: Find the fifth Fibonacci number.

As you can see, there is a lot of redundancy in this algorithm because we do not store each Fibonacci number as it is calculated. This deficiency can be alleviated by using an iterative approach to hold the value of each Fibonacci number as long as it is needed by a subsequent calculation.

Iteration

def F(n)
  return n if [0, 1].include?(n)
  f = [0, 1]
  (n - 1).times { f[0], f[1] = f[1], f[0] + f[1] }
  f[1]
end

As mentioned before, this approach will only store a Fibonacci number for as long as it is required by a subsequent calculation. Since a Fibonacci number is the sum of the two Fibonacci numbers before it, these are the only two values that we need to remember. Using this approach allows us to efficiently determine a Fibonacci number in linear time while optimizing memory usage.

Example: Find the fifth Fibonacci number.

Binet's Formula

PHI = (1 + Math.sqrt(5)) / 2

def F(n)
  ((PHI ** n - (-1 / PHI) ** n) / Math.sqrt(5)).to_i
end

Depending on the desired accuracy level, a Fibonacci number can be approximated in constant time using Binet's formula. The formula provides exact values of F(n) for "reasonable" values of n, but the tests I conducted using my Ruby scripts for Binet's formula and iteration show a deviation at n = 72. Since a linear algorithm executing to n = 72 in linear time will execute in approximately the same time as an algorithm in constant time on modern hardware, there's little benefit to using Binet's formula for solving this problem.

Matrix

require 'matrix'

M = Matrix[[0, 1], [1, 1]]

def F(n)
  return n if [0, 1].include?(n)
  lower_right(M ** (n - 1))
end

def lower_right(matrix)
  matrix[matrix.row_size - 1, matrix.column_size - 1]
end

Update: After reading a few of the comments on Reddit, I decided to add the matrix form solution to the list of approaches for this problem. The Wikipedia article contains a better explanation of the theory than I could ever provide, so I'll just explain how the above algorithm works.

This algorithm will execute in linear time, providing us with an efficient and accurate method for calculating Fibonacci numbers.

I hope my tutorial for finding any number of the Fibonacci sequence has been helpful! I'm looking forward to diving into more topics in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more algorithmic goodness!

Buildycrunken #1: Hocus Focus

2009-11-05T16:54:21-05:00

Just as Newton and Leibniz contributed separately to the development of differential and integral calculus, the brilliant minds at Collexion began planning their first Jelly not long before I expressed the need for one in my recent article. Buildycrunken will cater to software developers, writers, artists, students, and anyone else that desires to spend his or her late nights surrounded by creative, entertaining individuals. The first event will start at 9:00pm on November 6 and last until 9:00am the following morning, posing a challenge to those passionate about their work to gauge the limits of that passion with sleep deprivation and unhealthy quantities of caffeine. For those interested in attending, the madness will begin at Third Street Stuff at 9:00pm on November 6. I hope to see you there!

I'd Like Some Jelly with my Coworking

2009-10-30T22:51:57-04:00

Since I started working at Awesome Inc. in June, I've fallen in love with the concept of creative individuals coming together within a single coworking space to share ideas and collaborate on projects. Our particular environment contains a coworking space, art studio, engineering workshop, and dance studio, and each component provides a unique contribution to the space's creative vibe. However, this style of workspace has its pitfalls, as many creative, independent professionals are reluctant to invest the money required to experience working in such an environment. While not founded for this particular purpose, Jelly provides an intermediate solution to those professionals wishing to transcend the boundaries of home offices and coffee shops without shelling out the fee associated with most coworking environments.

What is Jelly?

From the Jelly website:

Jelly is a casual working event. It's taken place in over a hundred cities where people have come together (in a person's home, a coffee shop, or an office) to work for the day. We provide chairs and sofas, wireless internet, and interesting people to talk to, collaborate with, and bounce ideas off of.

You bring a laptop (or whatever you need to get your work done) and a friendly disposition.

We see a lot of designers, developers, and internet types, but we've also had musicians, cooks, sound designers, tea sommeliers, product designers, photographers, writers, and more.

Some of us are entrepreneurs or freelancers. Others work in an office most of the time, but work at Jelly for fresh ideas and a change of pace.

No matter what you do or what you create, you're welcome to come to Jelly and share your talent and learn from others.

Companies such as Amazon, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, and IBM have had longstanding presences in Lexington, and the city also has the students and faculty of the University of Kentucky at its disposal. However, a majority of the city's innovators are sprinkled among these institutions with few opportunities to collaborate and share ideas. Coworking spaces like Awesome Inc. and Collexion provide outlets for their target audiences, but what about individuals in other niches or those that don't want to pay? Coffee shops and libraries are open environments, but this openness permits saturation by those that have no interest in collaborating.

Hosting a biweekly Jelly would be a unique method for facilitating a more cohesive Lexington while also bringing individuals together for at least one common purpose - collaboration. Such an effort has the potential to lead to even greater innovations for our community, and it could be an initial step toward the greater unification of our city's most brilliant minds.

For more thoughts on the pursuit of office avoidance, Geekpreneur has an interesting article discussing alternatives to cafes and coworking.

5 Resources for Refining Your Programming Skills

2009-10-29T10:19:36-04:00

As a software developer, I often find that it’s easy to become immersed in my current projects without ever stopping to sharpen the tools in my developer toolbox. Learning to approach problems through a variety of methods is a valuable skill in developing elegant, efficient solutions. I’ve compiled a short list of websites featuring problem sets, competitions, and unique solution requirements to act as a resource for those programmers looking to get a little more out of their code. I hope it’s useful!

1. Code Chef

CodeChef holds monthly competitions in both India and the United States, and each consists of 6-8 problems of varying difficulty levels. These contests encourage participants to write elegant code by placing restrictions on the execution time and source code file size for each problem. Due to the restriction on execution time, most participants use compiled languages for their solutions. However, solutions from a wide range of languages are accepted.

Languages: Many

2. Code Golf

Code Golf offers a unique approach to solving puzzles, as its objective is to generate solutions in the least number of keystrokes. This criteria challenges programmers to develop efficient solutions and requires that they develop both their problem-solving abilities and programming knowledge.

Languages: Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby

3. Facebook Engineering Puzzles

The crew at Facebook has quite a few interesting puzzles to help satisfy your appetite. In fact, they've cleverly labeled the difficulties as hors d'oeuvre, snack, meal, and buffet to suppress your hunger as you develop your solutions. There's also a Facebook application that allows you to show off your progress on your profile!

Languages: C/C++, Java, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Haskell, Erlang, OCaml

4. Project Euler

Project Euler presents a series of mathematical and computer programming puzzles with varying difficulty levels. To allow more developers to participate, the problems are designed in a "chain" style so that easier puzzles will introduce concepts that are useful in harder ones.

Languages: Any

5. UVa Online Judge

The UVa Online Judge website features a robust set of problems along with periodic contests to gauge the skill level of participants.

Languages: Varies by Contest

The Fun Theory

2009-10-23T23:55:12-04:00

The innovative engineers of Volkswagen recently launched a project designed to tackle societal issues by developing entertaining products that alter human behavior. The Fun Theory has already developed approaches for countering the issues of obesity, waste disposal, and glass recycling, and I'm eagerly anticipating their next product release. Furthermore, I'd love to see some similar projects pop up here in Lexington!

TechStars 2009 Recap

2009-08-16T22:01:00-04:00

As fate would have it, I've found myself without quality air conditioning on a day when such an amenity is quite necessary. Gazing around the coffee house currently sheltering me from heat-induced migraines and an endless battle with perspiration, I've become quite fascinated with each of the faces illuminated by laptop screens and smart phones. Essentially the entire customer base is bridged to the outside world by a technological medium, and each of us is vigorously using our respective bridge for some unique (or not so unique) purpose. While some may consider this accessibility a plague to humanity, those of us that cradle our electronic devices like newborn children have learned to appreciate the possibilities presented by the rapid advancements in technology seen through recent years. In order to keep the innovation flowing, it's imperative that brilliant, new ideas be nurtured and given the opportunity to flourish. Last week, the Awesome Inc. team traveled to Boulder, Colorado to learn more about an organization that is doing just that.

From the TechStars website:

TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund. Each year we run a summer-long program in Boulder, Colorado and Cambridge, Massachusetts. We’re very selective - each year hundreds of companies apply to the program and we only take about ten per city. These companies get up to $18,000 in seed funding, a summer of intensive top-notch mentorship, and the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the summer.

In summary, TechStars accepts twenty companies out of roughly five-hundred applicants and provides those companies with seed funding and mentorship during a three-month summer bootcamp. After an intensive preparation, each company pitches its idea to investors and venture capitalists in an attempt to raise the funding necessary to make its aspirations a reality. In past years, the organization has aided projects like IntenseDebate, Socialthing!, Brightkite, and Gyminee obtain the knowledge and resources necessary to take their projects to the level that they are at today. We had the pleasure of sitting through this year's pitch day to see some of the up-and-coming projects designed to take the world by storm. Here is the list of companies that presented.

Out of those ideas presented, my favorites were Next Big Sound, Take Comics, Spry, and ReTel, but I find each of the ten to be highly useful to its targeted audience. I hope to see each of these projects thrive within the next few years and pave the way for future innovations. Keep doing what you're doing, TechStars! The world needs more organizations like you!