On February 10th, I left my full time job at Jive Software to start a new company, Olio Apps, a software development and consulting firm, with a focus on mobile, social, and web apps. There are many challenges that go along with starting a new company – getting all of the paperwork in place, setting up systems for accounting and time tracking, getting booked up with work, and generally getting acclimated with juggling many more balls at once than an employee at a mid-size firm has to deal with. It’s been challenging, and I love it.

Along with that, my girlfriend and I have been achieving our goal of traveling slowly – living and working in one place for a month at a time. In late February we travelled to Oahu Hawaii and lived there for a month, staying with some family/friends who recently moved there, working on our laptops during the weekdays, and exploring Oahu on the nights and weekends. A month is a long time, and it’s quite a different experience than a shorter trip. It’s not quite like a vacation, since we’re still working. We’re also cooking meals, doing laundry, paying bills, visiting friends, and doing all of the other things you do over the course of a month. There is enough time to explore most of an area, and even go back and revisit favorites.

After Hawaii, we came back to Portland, travelled to Scottsdale Arizona for a few days to attend a conference (JSConf), came back to Portland for a couple weeks, and then flew to Florida for a month, where we are now. Why Florida? For one it’s where I grew up, and much of my family still resides here. Living in Portland, I don’t get much chance to see family and old friends that much, except electronically through email and Facebook, and that doesn’t always cut it. Secondly, being a native of Florida, I start to go a little nuts in the spring time in Portland, when it generally stays cold and rainy a bit longer than the rest of the country. All that has made me wonder over the past couple years – “wouldn’t it be nice to go live in Florida for a bit in the spring?” So, this year I managed to do it.

Has it been worth it? Absolutely. When I lived in Florida permanently, I lived about 45 minutes from the beach. For this trip we got a place a couple minutes from the beach. It’s quite a different experience, and we have a routine of having a nightly evening walk or run on the beach at sunset, which does wonders for decompressing from a day of work. We’ve also managed to squeeze in a lot of time with friends and family, checked out a lot of new places to eat, drink, and get coffee that didn’t exist before, and even attended a couple great concerts – Beach House in Orlando, and a reunion show for a local band I used to look up to and admire, Spiller.

We’re here for a few more days, and I’m excited to get back to Portland, be in my own space, see Portland friends, start playing music again, be closer to work colleagues, and generally enjoy all that Portland has to offer. So yeah, travel works. Energy renewed.

I have more to say, but lets not blow it all in one giant post eh? Stay tuned for the next post, “Just Ship It”, about writing, recording, and mixing a new song in one day.

January is over, which means the challenge is complete!

Over the  holidays I was inspired by the coming new year and made up a few rules to impose on myself for a month. Why? To see what I could accomplish in a month, instead of a longer term, unrealistic  resolution. It was a test of willpower and a forced break in habits. The challenge was to eat out only once a week, be vegetarian except the occasional fish, drink no alcohol, consume less sugar, stay away from coffee and drink tea instead, and stop all recreational internet surfing.

How did it go? Overall, quite well. The first week was the hardest – I’d developed a habit of going out to eat nearly all the time, and having a drink or two a few times a week. Changing that habit was tough at first. Humans develop grooves, like records, and you can go outside those grooves for a couple days, but you naturally fall back into your old way, and it was hard not to. By the second week I was more used to it, and by the third and forth it became normal.

For example – I’ve been drinking tea this past month instead of coffee. My morning routine now is to go fix myself a cup of tea, and when I arrived at work this morning, I just automatically made tea without thinking about it. Then I realized “hey! I can drink coffee! I’ll get a latte later!” but I never made it to the coffee shop. No guarantees for tomorrow.

Grades:

• Eating out once a week: B, I stuck to this for breakfast and dinner, but I made a few exceptions to go out to lunch with co-workers, and forgot to bring it a couple other times. On the eating at home front, each week we sat down and developed a meal plan, and bought all of our groceries in one shot. Gotta give my girlfriend a lot of the credit for this. It worked amazingly well, the food was never boring, and we made some amazing dishes. My cooking repertoire has expanded quite a bit, and cooking is no longer a rare event, its the default.
• No meat except fish once a week: A, I ate no beef, pork or poultry in January. We made some very tasty meals, mostly vegetarian, and a few with fish.

• no alcohol: A – This was challenging, but doable. This despite my work having a scotch tasting party. I’m used to drinking casually a couple times a week. Glad to not have this restriction anymore, but I do feel a bit less obligated to buy a drink when I go out now.
• no excess sugar: B – I don’t drink soda, but I do love desserts. I mostly stayed away, but I did have a cupcake.
• no coffee: A – Stayed off the sauce. Had a headache the first few days but then got back to normal. This was part of what made week #1 hard. But this has been great, I need less caffeine now, and I drink more tea than coffee.
• no recreational internet: B – I stayed off Facebook except to check my messages a couple times, snuck a few glances at Twitter, and mostly stayed away from the various news and tech sites I tend to frequent. Not being able to read internet news, I started to read more “offline” materials again, like books. Crazy talk. Towards the second half of the month I started checking sites I go to again, but with less frequency. It’s hard not to when you work on a computer all day.

Overall I’ve started a few good habits – especially the meal planning bit. Cutting back on things you normally do makes space for new kinds of experiences to happen.

A challenge

It’s the season for resolutions and fresh starts, so in that spirit, one of the first things I’m doing is a “cleanse” of my own design for the month of January. I’m actually calling this cleanse a “challenge” since that sounds more fun and I enjoy challenges. This challenge isn’t forever. No new years resolution of “from now on, I’ll never _____ again!” because that’s unrealistic and doomed to fail. This is a rational one month challenge that any person with self control ought to be able to achieve.

The challenge includes

• No eating out (more than once a week)
• No meat (fish is allowed once a week)
• No excess sugar
• No alcohol
• No coffee
• No recreational internet

I got this idea from an article I read online called the “Argon Challenge“, where a guy who goes by the name of Argon takes an even more extreme approach than what I outline here, eliminating many other things I have not listed. He’s been doing it for years, and each year he adds another element to his challenge. This is my first year, so I’m starting from a different place. I’ll call it the Becker Challenge.

Feel free to play along. My girlfriend has decided to do most of this along with me, which makes things easier, as we’ll both be helping to motivate the other and cook meals together. She’s foregoing the recreational internet challenge, as she actually has to use Facebook and Twitter as part of her job. This is comforting, since if something actually important happens to scroll past Facebook she can be my liaison to the social web through which I can communicate for the month.

To go into a bit more detail:

No eating out

My girlfriend and I have become a little shall we say, “dependent” on restaurants, food carts, and drive throughs for about 80% of our dietary needs. One could argue this is primarily my influence, being the lazier of the two in the kitchen, but she loves to try new places and eat out, so it’s a perfect storm. This is a) expensive, and b) not so healthy. Food at restaurants is generally very rich and fatty, to maximize the deliciousness, which is understandable. I want to challenge myself  to pay better attention to what I eat and take more responsibility for being healthy. There’s no better way to do this than making your own food. It’s a skill I obtained as a teenager working as a food prep in the kitchens of various restaurants, but slowly neglected over time since leaving the food service industry. I hope to regain and hone my chef skills this month and add a few new recipes to my limited repertoire. My girlfriend’s pro kitchen skills will ease the transition a bit, but doing this the entire month might get a bit extreme, so we’ll have one restaurant outing a week as a reward for our cook-at-home / eat-healthy efforts.

No meat

I once challenged myself to be vegetarian, in order to eat healthier, and also just to see if I had the willpower. Turns out I do. I lasted a year. Eventually I gave in to my cravings for chicken and fish, and then the flood gates opened and I was back to eating burgers, steak, bacon, and anything else from the animal kingdom that found its way on to my plate. I am most definitely an omnivore, but that year taught me a few things. A) If you’re only eating vegetables, you’re going to eat ALL your vegetables, because you need sustenance and a feeling of “fullness”, and anything on your plate that counts as food will be eaten in order to get closer to that aim. B) Vegetarian dishes can be way more colorful, creative, spicy, and delicious than your typical meat and potatoes dish. To be vegetarian is to buck the status quo, and force yourself to think outside the box. That alone is worth doing for a month, to force yourself to think different.

No excess sugar

Refined sugar makes things taste sweeter, and provides a quick energy and mood boost. The problem is it provides an equally fast energy and mood crash. I’m not much of a sugar addict now. I don’t drink soda, but I love chocolate, such as an occasional cafe mocha or chocolate chip cookie. I’m stepping off the sweets train for the month. This should help level out my moods and allow me to sleep better.

No alcohol

I live in Portland Oregon, which has a thousand awesome drinking establishments, which I quite enjoy. I don’t drink to excess on any particular night, typically having a max of two drinks, but I estimate I’ve had at least one drink per day for probably 75% of last year. I don’t have a highly addictive personality, and I don’t drink at home alone, only socially with friends, or sharing a couple glasses of wine with my girlfriend. I don’t think I have an alcohol problem. But I’m curious to see what happens. If I eliminate it for a month, will I crave it? Will I not miss it at all? Sometimes you don’t know if you’ve become dependent on something until its gone.

No coffee

There’s no question with this one. I have a coffee dependency. In the last few years I’ve gone from drinking 0-1 cups of coffee a day to 3-4, refilling at breakfast a few times, or getting a late afternoon latte. Many of these being outings to Portland’s numerous amazing coffee shops. I can’t get enough of that delicious espresso. Like sugar, coffee gives us an energy boost and corresponding crash. I’m not going to strictly cut out caffeine though, just minimize it. I’m allowing myself 1-2 cups of black tea a day. This is to ease off the caffeine, without causing headaches. I’ll need to drink twice as much tea to get the same effect as a cup of coffee. This too should help the sleep cycle.

No recreational internet

This one is huge. I have a slight internet addiction. As a software engineer, I work on the internet every day, and I need it to search for solutions to issues and questions that come up, but in between those times, I’ve allowed myself quite a bit of free reign to read interesting articles, blog posts, friend’s updates on Facebook and Twitter, and other things that aren’t really contributing to my productivity. It’s become my substitute for TV, which I don’t watch, but this is just as bad as channel surfing. It is a muscle memory reflex I do without thinking whenever I start getting bored. I love Hacker News, and there’s tons of good information on there, but there comes a time when you need to stop consuming and start producing. The internet is a two-way communication medium, so this month I’m focusing on trying to produce more and consume less. After this month I’ll resume reading blogs and social networking sites, and hopefully find a more healthy balance.

That about wraps it up. I’m already experiencing the positive benefits of this challenge. We made our own breakfast today, planned our meals and shopped for groceries for the week. Normally I would have then hopped on the internet and read a bunch of blogs and news sites. Instead of surfing the internet, I freed up the time in order to write this blog post. I’ll update as we go along, and announce a few other things happening soon as well.

Updates

• Fix thread safety issue.
• JSMin compatibility fix for Ruby 1.9.1 – Fixnum#ord
• Rails >= 2.3 test compatibility
• Rails 3 deprecations – change RAILS_ROOT to Rails.root, change RAILS_ENV to Rails.env, move tasks to lib dir

Sammy is a tiny, client-side JavaScript framework, created by the obviously brilliant Aaron Quint, built on jQuery, and inspired by the server-side Ruby framework Sinatra. It’s the minimalist’s framework for RIAs. You know, those uber rich internet applications. Single page, no refresh apps. Like Gmail. Except without all those kilobytes you may or may not ever need. Sammy is 7kb, minified. And gzipped? You won’t even know you downloaded it.

Watch the preso for more…

If you want to learn more about Sammy, check out Aaron’s blog post which has a nice introduction and screencast.

In this presentation, I first gave an overview of Test Driven Development for those front-end JS developers who might not have heard of it yet (!) and then the difference of TDD vs. Behavior Driven Development.

I then walked through some tools:

• Screw.Unit, a nice BDD framework for JS that is quite similar to RSpec in Ruby land.

• Blue Ridge, a plugin for rails that integrates Screw-Unit with Rhino and Env.js and some rake tasks to create a command-line driven headless (no-browser == fast) testing workflow.

• JS Test Driver, a project that mounts one or more browsers as slaves, and a command-line tool which notifies all the listening browsers to run tests and aggregates the results. Very cool!

In the actual presentation I even did some live coding examples of Blue Ridge and JS Test Driver, and they worked perfectly. Here are the slides from the talk:

So what should you do? What are your options? A) Ignore the problem and build the new feature on top of the existing badly written code. Watch things get even worse. B) Try to quickly fix the badly written code in-place so you can get on with it. Trigger cascading test failures, and palm your face. C) Start over and rewrite the entire project, get fired for being 6 months late on your estimate. None of these sound any good!

I think I may have found a solution that works for me, especially with Rails.

Start a fresh Rails project. Boom! It’s fresh and clean. Now you have room to work. The beauty of Rails is how quick it is to get started. Choose the aspect of the project you want to work on. Got some legacy code thats bugging you? TDD/BDD it from scratch, the Right Way. The idiomatic, Rails Way. Once you get it to the point where it’s working correctly and passing all tests, you can merge the new code into the main project, replacing the older, ugly, what-were-they-thinking legacy code that was getting in the way.

Now you can work in a clean environment and just focus on the problem at hand. This allows you to make progress quickly, and get rid of the old crap without having to completely start from scratch.

• Rails 2.2 compatibility fixes
• Packages generated on demand in production mode. Running the asset:packager:build_all rake task no longer necessary.
• Now compatible with Git, and any other revision control system since revision numbers are no longer used.
• No more mucking with internal Rails functions, which means:
  • Return to use of query-string timestamps. Greatly simplifies things.
  • Multiple asset-hosts supported
  • Filenames with ”.”’s in them, such as “jquery-x.x.x” are supported.

Get the latest at http://github.com/sbecker/asset_packager

Thanks to the many forkers for ideas and solutions.