4 shot cappuccino - starting this week off with a kick! (at Ozo Coffee)
Great live session from @Mackelmore and Ryan Lewis at @Spotify NYC
(Source: Spotify)
Eldorado Canyon State Park hiking last weekend with Whitney
Another week, another pound!
I got pretty big in college. An unlimited, free cafeteria and a dual degree Computer Science and Information Assurance program don’t result in weight loss. It’s almost two years later and I haven’t lost any of it. I have been pretty busy, what with getting married and worrying about making a career, however life will always be busy, so it’s just something I need to figure out how to fix.
Getting a framework that works for me
Two months ago I started the WeightWatchers for men online program and I’m already down 10 pounds. That’s 1.25 pounds lost a week, so I’m on a pretty good path.
Controlling what I eat hasn’t been the challenge. I actually prefer fruits and vegetables to lots of breaded and fried things, so eating better hasn’t been difficult. I’ve tried apps on my iPhone that help me count calories, but I always thought it tedious to track every single little thing, even things that were supposedly good for me, like fruit and vegatables. WeightWatchers doesn’t count calories, instead counting point values that they assign to foods. All raw fruits and vegetables are 0 points, so anytime I’m hungry but I’m low on points for the day, I grab some fruit or a vegetable and don’t worry about it hurting my daily stats. It’s been really enjoyable and I haven’t felt hungry at all.
Scheduling has been tough
For me the challenge has been fitting in exercise. I work full time, work on side projects on my own time, and always enjoy spending time relaxing with my wife, so I’ve frequently gotten to the end of the day only to realize that I haven’t exercised at all. String a few of those kinds of days together and a lost week goes by. For me, planning has been the key. Every night before I go to bed I write down an exact schedule on my iPhone, detailing everything I need to get done. It usually looks something like this:
7 am wake up
8 - 5 work
5 - 6 work on side projects
6 - 6:45 exercise
6:45 - 7 make dinner
7 - 7:30 dinner
8 - 10 relax together
I’ve been doing this for a few weeks and it’s worked out pretty well.
Getting everything done
In order to stay productive and get all of the little things I need to get done done, I’ve also been using the Pomodoro technique quite a bit. Basically, I’ll set a timer for about 30 minutes or so, work during the timer, and at the end of the timer do something that I either want to do or need to get done. It serves as a reward for working hard for those 30 minutes, forces me to work harder since I know I only have 30 minutes, and reduces the worry that I’m not making progress on work by doing something I want to or need to get done.
Work out anywhere, anytime
Another tool that’s been useful for me over the last few weeks is an iPhone app called Teemo. I’ve tried a ton of fitness apps for my iPhone and Teemo is by far the best one for me. It provides quick, bodyweight only exercises that can be done at anytime and in the home. An exercise or two from Teemo is usually one of the things I do after a good 30 minute working session.
rrhoover:
I recently wrote about email-first startups and the benefits of building and launching a product on this medium. The post generated a lot of discussion as others contributed their opinions and examples of startups founded with this approach.
As a follow-up, I’d like to explore SMS….
My Interests
There are a lot of things to get excited about in today’s ever connected and quickly advancing world. Technology is cooler than ever, providing tons of life altering capabilities that no one thought imaginable. But to me, there are two things that I’m most excited about: building technology to improve in-person social interactions and bringing technology to developing countries.
The things that interest me are a direct reflection of my life experience and what I care about. One of the most important things to me is family and close friends. Building close relationships that truly improve your experience is crucial and challenging. Technology, especially with the advent of the smartphone, has been (rightly) accused of detracting from true interpersonal connections. It is true that you can now find people with similar interests all over the world from the comfort of your couch, but the ability to really connect with the people sitting across from you at the table has been minimized by the never-ending and advertisement-backed system of apps and DVRs.
However, technology does allow us to be more efficient in sharing who we are with the people we care about. After going on a trip, it’s easier to share pictures and moments with all of your friends and family. When needing a hand moving to a new place, it’s simple to message your entire family or group of friends. However these same applications not only distract us from having meaningful in-person interactions, but continually condition us to behave in a way that makes advertisers on smartphones and TVs more money. My biggest pet peeve is seeing a group of people out at a restaurant or a concert together, and each of them is on their smartphone ignoring the people around them. I think that technology can have a place in helping to re-enforce the positive relationship building practices that so many of us have forgotten about, it’s simply up to someone to build something to make it happen.
The other thing that interests me a great deal is revolutionizing the way people in developing countries live and work by introducing technology that they’ve never heard of or seen before. Building software and hardware that fits their unique needs and goals, can tear down long standing physical barriers. The power of the internet can help local farmers reach customers overseas that are willing to pay much more than anyone locally. It can help children dying of easily cured diseases get funding for their simple, life-saving procedures (see watsi.org). Technology can even prepare the next generation of leaders with the latest and greatest strategies from around the world in helping their country grow.
So those are the things that get me excited about technology. If those are the things that interest you as well, then we should talk.
You should also follow me on twitter.
Recent Nerdy News
Lots of cool stuff has been happening and if you’ve been too busy or you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll provide a little summary of the things I think have been the coolest:
Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, lifts the Apollo F-1 engines off of the ocean floor When man first travelled to the moon, NASA’s engineers had no way of retrieving the engines that shot its astronauts out of the earth’s atmosphere and then fell back to Earth and landed in the ocean. So for almost 60 years, a key component of the mission to the moon that inspired a generation has been sitting on the ocean’s floor. Jeff Bezos, the Founder and CEO of Amazon, was one of those kids motivated by the Apollo missions, and made it his mission to get those engines back. This week, he did it! Follow the link for pictures!
Webflow launches a preview of their responsive design layout tool For a while now responsive design has been a big buzz word and a goal for a lot of designers and developers - code once and any device size can interact and see your website perfectly. This work has mainly been done by hand up until Webflow came along. They’re a startup that has the goal of allowing anyone to design a responsive website visually, and get all of the HTML and CSS to host their responsive website anywhere. It’s pretty cool!
Gel that stops intense bleeding instantly Joe Landolina, an NYU student, came up with a gel that instantly stops any amount of bleeding. This new gel has tons of applications, but Joe has his sights on military applications first.
Backbone 1.0 was released One of the favorite front-end Javascript libraries of developers nowadays, Backbone, has announced its 1.0 version! It’s a really powerful library and it’s awesome to see it reach some stage of maturity.
Superhero.js is released Superhero.js is a collection of resources for Javascript developers looking to read up on the latest and greatest practices for building large Javascript applications. It’s a pretty entertaining website in and of itself, so check it out and learn a thing or two.
Git Is Simpler Than You Think
nfarina:
It was about one year ago that we switched to Git. Previously, we used Subversion, through the Mac app Versions, which (rightly) holds an Apple Design Award.
I made the executive decision to leave our comfy world of Versions because it seemed clear that Git was winning the Internet. There was much grumbling from my teammates, who were busy enough doing actual work thank you very much.
But I pressed forward. We signed up for accounts on Github. We learned how to type 'git push' and 'git pull'. We became more confident. Git is just like any other source control system! But it wasn’t long before one of our devs called me over to look at a…situation.
Read More
My recent open source contributions (or github is awesome)
I love open source projects and I love github. The github platform for easily and efficiently working in a distributed group in an asynchronous manner is second to none. Lately I’ve found myself submitting more pull requests than I’ve ever done and I’ve found the experience really awesome.
The thing I’ve liked most about using pull requests is that I’m free to mess up. When contributing to an open source project that other people look at, I’m afraid of looking stupid to everyone else, especially if my code is immediately merged into the codebase. I don’t want to be the guy that breaks the application for everyone else. Pull requests give me a safety net for people to review my contribution, give me feedback, and give me a chance to make corrections or improvements. I’m eager to get feedback because it most likely means I’ll learn something that I didn’t know and I’ll be a better developer because of it. And worst case scenario - my code breaks everything - it was just as much the fault of the pull request reviewer as it was mine (which is no excuse to make the same mistake twice though), which allows me to not stress that everything needs to be absolutely perfect before submitting. That’s the great thing about open source code - someone can do the first 80% of the work and then someone else can swoop in and help with the last 20%.
So, with that little intro to my experience with github pull requests out of the way, here are the pull requests I’ve done recently:
Adding documentation explaining Collections in the Meteor docs This is the second time I’ve submitted a pull request to Meteor, the open source Javascript web platform, and both of them have been documentation related. I’m finding that one of the best ways to learn a new tool is to help write documentation for it. The project benefits from the view of a newbie and I get to have other people review my understanding of the tool. This one has yet to be merged, but I’m confident that it will, even if I need to make a few corrections/adjustments.
Allowing Project Specific Configurations for the JSHint Sublime Text 2 Package I use JSHint within Sublime Text 2 every single day. One day I was using it and I noticed that it was giving me errors and warnings that shouldn’t be there, since I had created a config file for that project to ignore certain errors and warnings. I got really suspicious and checked out the source code on github. I quickly found out that I wasn’t the only one with this issue, as users of the package were complaining through the offending previous pull request and a new issue. The code that ruined the package for everyone was a very simple change, so seeing it as an opportunity to get more experience with the github pull request workflow, I submitted a patch. A few days later the maintainer and original author of the package merged my pull request, thanked me, and apologized to everyone for pulling in the offending code. Also, packages in Sublime Text 2 are updated from their source repo every time ST2 is relaunched, so after my fix was merged with the main codebase, my code changes were sent to anyone in the entire world who uses that package and restarted Sublime Text 2. Pretty neat!
Compressed CSS for the NebraskaJS website This is the code for the website of the meetup for Javascript professionals in my adopted home town of Omaha. Browsing the social media profiles of a few friends, I stumbled upon their website (which I never knew existed), and noticed the code was on github. I also saw the maintainer had a “To Do” list in his README file, so I thought I’d help them out by knocking one off of the list since I live in Colorado now and can’t contribute much to their group meetings. This change has yet to be merged, but I learned a new git trick. When I was helping to compress the CSS files, I kept forgetting to do little things, like updating the CSS includes in the HTML and crossing the task off of the author’s “To Do” list, so I had to learn how to amend commits (make new changes, git add ., git commit --amend), merge commits with previous commits (git rebase -i, pick and squash), and force the remote branch to forget about that old commit I just did and accept the new version of that commit that I had locally (git push --force). So that was cool too.
So to sum this up: github, open source, and git are all incredibly awesome.
