debuggable

Hey folks,

So I'm now 15 days into the 30 day challenge I set for myself. So far I have covered quite a bit of ground and would like to use this post (#16) to share some of the experiences I had.

First of all lets look at the posts:

1. requestAction considered harmful
2. String substitution using UUIDs
3. Hacking the Wires
4. Private methods - Follow Up
5. Two CakePHP tricks
6. Simple Data Access Control
7. I believe in Symmetry
8. Passing controller variables to your JavaScript
9. HDD surgery for my MacBook Pro
10. Normalizing CakePHP model records
11. Lookupable Behavior
12. Cloud Behavior
13. Akismet datasource
14. Datasources, Models, Components, Behaviors
15. TextExpander & Apple Mail recipient name auto insertion

As you can see some of the posts are not necessarily CakePHP / JS specific. However, 10 out of the 15 posts contain previously unreleased code which is a figure I'm quite happy with.

Much more interesting however is that I pretty much planned out none of these posts. I set my alarm to 7:30am in the morning but quite a few times I also allowed myself a little more sleep if I was up too late the night before. So when I got up, I used whatever time was left before 9am to come up with an idea for a post and write it.

In general I would guess that about 50% of the posts so far were written in 30 minutes or less. Some of the posts above were even written in 10 minutes.

This came as an incredibly suprise to me, because I would not have thought that it was possible to write a decent blog post in less than 1 hour. One could of course argue that the quality of my posts suffered, but I haven't seen too much evidence of that. No here is what I think:

If you are given nothing but 30 minutes to contribute to society - you act. You don't let yourself be stopped, distracted or second guess yourself. There simply is no time for it.

Never have I experienced such powerful evidence of Parkinson's law before. But the more I do, the more I start to believe that our biggest productivity bottleneck is having too much time!

I mean we have a whole life time for our accomplishments. But if you look at the achievements of the vast majority out there, you'll surely agree that most of it could be accomplished in less than a year.

Quite seriously, I think I would be excited if at any point of my life I was told I had 90 days left to live. Don't get me wrong, this is not a suicidal kind of fantasy after too much dealing with internet explorer. I obviously hope to live much longer. But I'm really happy to have come to the realization that no matter how much time we have at our hands, there are incredible things we can do with it.

So I am already exploring new ideas to enforce time constraints with other aspects of my work. I have a few side projects I'm quite excited about, but that seem to move at an incredibly slow pace. The main problem is that there are no consequences of not having them move rapidly and so they don't. I will update you as I start to implement new approaches for them.

Anyway, I want to thank everybody for helping me with this! A few people have email'd me about the money because they missed my post updating my reference time zone (EST now) or were a little too early when I posted an article 10 seconds before the deadline ended. Amazingly pretty much all of them wanted to donate the money to the cake software foundation which is great. However, I will still try to not loose my challenge : ).

So stay tuned for the new and exciting posts to come beginning tomorrow.

-- Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined