All the tweaks and changes I have been doing over there has left me wanting an outlet to share them. Last week, I whipped the site together (with the same simple theme as RailsTips) and invited my friend Chas Grundy to co-author it with me.

We both enjoy sharing the things we learn and really hope this project will be useful to those interested in blogging for more professional reasons (make money, project leads, make a name for yourself, etc.). We’ve kicked it off with a few articles, that I’ll list here, so you can get an idea of the content going forward.

• It’s the Little Things
• Does Blogging Matter?
• Gardening Your Blog
• If You Post It, They Will Come
• Make Your Post Title Count
• Ribbon Cutting

Head on over and subscribe if you want to stay in the loop. Also, we are sure there are other bloggers out there with stuff to say, so if you would like to guest author a post, let me know.

Track Your Ideas

If you are going to try to generate more ideas, you have to get them out of your brain as they happen. The more ideas you keep in your brain the less ideas you will have. Carry a Moleskine, sign up for a note app, create a list or buy a voice recorder. Whatever you do, as soon as you get an idea, get it out of your head. You do not have to instantly go do the idea, just record it.

Develop Your Ideas

As you become more disciplined at tracking your ideas, more ideas will come to. Some of those ideas will be improvements to original ideas. Over time you will start to see certain a really cool transformation of some ideas. You will create ideas that you would have never been capable of originally, but due to increased attention and thought, they have developed into something great.

Share Your Ideas

Share your ideas. Do not just track your ideas and forcefully try to come up with new ones. Also bring others into the fold. Share your ideas with them and you will be surprised at how differently they think through them, which will in turn help you think differently. Sharing an idea with someone is one of the best ways to really develop it. 

Pick One and Do It

So now you are tracking your ideas, generating more ideas, and sharing them with people which in turn is generating more ideas and mutating previous ones. Pick one. Pick the idea that meets at the crossroads of interesting and profitable. Design it. Build it. Market it. Do not stop there though. Keep generating more ideas. It is possible that the idea you pick will not be successful. If that is the case, you only need to worry if you have at some point stopped your creative process.

The Idea Idea

Today I had an idea on how to better share ideas. You will never have time to build all your ideas, but that does not mean that the ones you do not pick are not solid. Try to get someone else to work on the solid idea and consult with them. Sharing ownership and seeing an idea take shape is better than letting it rot.

My idea was a blog where I share ideas that I do not have time to fully own, but that I would still like to see created. Each time I decide I do not want to focus on an idea, I could release it as a blog post. Anyone else would then be free to take the idea and run. All I would ask for is the opportunity to help with the idea at some point because chances are I would want to use it and I believe I could be helpful along the way.

The blog idea almost immediately morphed into something else. I think it would be cool to have a site online where you could store your ideas and annotate them with thoughts, links, screenshots and scribbles. If you decide you do not want to devote time to the idea, you can make it public and allow someone else to work on it. That person can take the idea and run with it, and even more wisely, involve you in the process.

That is the idea. It’s an idea idea. Anyone who stumbles across this can feel free to take that idea and run with it. I cannot guarantee profitability but I think it is cool. I would love to help bring this into fruition, but I have already chosen an idea to run with, leaving me with no time.

How to you store your ideas? What are some good ones that you will never do?

1. Negative Can Be Positive

In order to present my tips I first have to explain one thing. In weight lifting, each exercise has a positive and negative motion. The positive motion is when you exert. On bench press, the positive motion would be when you push the bar off your chest. The opposite of positive motion is obviously negative motion. Negative motion, on bench press, would be when you lower the bar to your chest. 

Positive motion always seems the most difficult but negative can actually work your muscles more. Sometimes when you hit a wall at a certain weight level a purely negative workout (with a good spotter) can help you break through.

2. Breathe!!!

Breathing is really important in weight lifting. Grunting, contrary to popular belief is not, but rather it is the fact that grunting is kind of a way of exhaling, which is similar to breathing and thus is more helpful than not grunting but less helpful than actually exhaling. Anyway, always exhale during positive motion (when you exert effort) and inhale during negative motion. You don’t have to inhale and exhale each time but never inhale during positive and never exhale during negative. 

3. Vary Your Speed

Related to the motions and breathing is timing. Typically, positive motions should be half the time of their negative counter parts. On bench press, this would mean slowly lowering the bar to your chest (3-4 seconds, negative motion), followed by a burst of power to raise it back up (1-2 seconds, positive motion). 

To sum up the first three, inhale during negative motions, and do them slowly (think balance) and exhale during positive motions and do them quickly (think power). 

4. Bigger to Smaller

Always, always, always work larger muscles first and work your way down to smaller muscles. Take your legs for example: first work out your quadriceps and hamstrings, then work out your calf muscles. If you work out your calf muscles first, you will not be able to properly work out your upper legs. The same is true with ams vs. chest/back. Do your chest or back first, before working out your biceps or triceps. 

My Workout Schedule

I do not have set days or set exercises that I do, but rather have set muscle groups that I rotate through on whatever days I end up working out. I always work out chest with triceps, back with biceps and legs with shoulders. In each workout I start with the larger muscle group and work to the smaller ones. I also try to do abs 3 to 4 days a week. Abs can take a beating, typically.

So why am I not ripped and a physical specimen? I believe I just dished some good advice, but I am pretty undisciplined at following it for more than 3 months in a given year. The other 9 months? I use them to make up for all the hard work during the 3 good months. :)

I might be weird but I still do stuff for my mom. Heck, I even have a tumblr account dedicated to her, aptly named “For John’s Mom.” Anytime I post to one of my many blogs (or blawgs as she pronounces it, yes you do mom, don’t deny it), tweet or find something funny on the internet my mom knows about it.

Often times when I am working on something I will send her an email or give her a call and tell her about it. She could tell you my favorite programming language (and my favorite framework for said language). She knows that each Friday I spend time on an app I am building, and that its name is Harmony. 

The next work project you do, do it for your mom. Put everything you have into it and show it to your mom when you are done. Explain to her why it is cool and how hard you worked at it. She will be proud. You will be proud.

I guess the point I am trying to get across is often people start off fired up about something, but over time it fades and they stop putting effort into it. Lately, I have put a lot of effort into blogging at RailsTips and I have noticed results. Pageviews have increased. Comments have increased. You can have a spike of success through great effort over short period of time, but if you do not consistently put forth effort, it will remain just that, a spike. Spikes in success are exciting but with effort and time, one day you will look back and that spike will seem pretty small.

I guess the kind of funny thing about me saying that success takes time and effort (see how I changed the order, just noting that) is that it assumes that I have known success. You might not think of me as that successful but I would respond that success is relative. Always aim high, but never feel discouraged by the fact that there are bigger dogs out there. Likewise, you should never feel over confident about the smaller dogs.

Boil Water

If you have some other way of acquiring hot water, you can skip this step. :)

Select Coffee

I’m finishing off a bag of Ethiopia Sidamo. I don’t know much about the different kinds but I typically like bolder coffees. My next bag is a House Blend which is more of a medium. Whatever you do, don’t get pre-ground coffee. Once a bean is ground, the flavor begins to go. For the best coffee, always grind when you are ready for the cup, not in advance.

Put Beans in Grinder

I use a blade grinder. You can purchase them online (think ebay) or at any Starbucks (other stores too I’m sure).

Grind Beans

Because we are using a press and making coffee (not espresso), you want the beans to be pretty chunky. Don’t grind them up too fine.

Put Beans and Water into Press

I always put the ground beans in and then pour the boiling water on top. Also, note the small size of my press. I can make myself a cup of coffee and I don’t have a whole pot to dump out later. It makes about two normal coffee cups or one of the cups I have pictured below.

Stir and Steep

Once you’ve got the ingredients poured in, stir it up and let the coffee steep for 4 or 5 minutes.

Press

Press the coffee grinds down. This is probably the easiest step.

Pour Into Cup

I lied, this is probably the easiest step. I’m a big fan of the cup pictured. Never gets hot on the outside but keeps the coffee very warm on the inside. Also, the top is really nice and seals well.

Recap

All you need is hot water, coffee beans, grinder, press and cup. The whole process takes 5-10 minutes, of which most is spent waiting and not actually doing anything. As far as cost, the grinder and press can be purchased for around $50 total and the beans are typically $5-$10 per bag. The benefit of this process is great coffee and you can claim to be a coffee snob.

Sometimes I have a problem getting into the zone while working. What I’ve found is that music by itself doesn’t really help. I still hear all the distractions and such. Not too long ago, it hit me. Every time I put headphones on, my focus skyrockets. Headphones seem to function as blinders for me. Something about putting them on makes it impossible for me to multi-task, which is a good thing. It makes me want to close my email, avoid my feeds and hammer down.

Headphone Equality

The other thing I noticed is that not all headphones were created equal. Headphones always help me focus but certain pairs (I have several different types) put me into hyperdrive. About six months ago I was walking around target while my wife shopped, most likely for a new purse. I meandered into the headphone isle out of curiosity, with no intentions of purchasing anything (though I had some Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket). I picked up a pair. Tried them on. Ooohh, they felt like pillows on my ears. But what do they sound like I thought? I delicately graced the play button with my majestic pointer finger and floated into inner-ear ecstasy.

Good Things Cost Money

I’ve never spent more than $20 on headphones so the $140 price tag seemed insurmountable, but then I remembered the hole in my pocket. I picked the singed Christmas money up off the floor, grabbed a pair of the headphones and headed to the nearest checkout. As I approached, the gentleman behind the counter greeted me with a cheery, “Good day, Sir! Excellent choice.” Ok, that’s not true, but I’ve never been happier with a pair of headphones and I would now like to recommend them to you.

Bose Around-Ear Headphones

P.S. I Love You

Also note, that these headphones are so good that Oak, one of my friends, went out and purchased a pair. He too enjoys the daily eargasms though often to the beat of a trance track. Am I allowed to say eargasms on this blog? Man, that feels wrong.

Work Harder or More Hours

The first is to work harder. Working harder is easy. Anyone can do it. All you have to do is increase your intensity or work more hours. I can promise you this, it won’t get you anywhere. Chances are you’ll keep getting more and more busy as higher volumes of work come in, which will make it harder to ever work more efficiently. Working hard might inflate your hours logged but it turns you into another cog in the machine. You can boast your dedication and hard work but you are tying your worth to the amount of time you have available.

Work More Efficiently

Stated as the opposite option of working harder and more hours, this seems like the obvious selection. However, because working harder is easier, it is often the first choice and, like learned helplessness, becomes a mainstay as the pressure continues to mount.

So why don’t more people attempt to work more efficiently? I believe it is because they can’t see the patterns. Think assembly line for a moment. Henry Ford noticed the pattern that is building an automobile. Mass production was made possible for Ford Motor Company not because Ford told his employees to work harder, but because he taught them to work more efficiently. Wait a second you might be thinking? By turning your task into an assembly line, aren’t you turning yourself into a cog just like Mr. Hard Worker? My answer to that question would be another question. Was Henry Ford a cog? Absolutely not.

The world is made up of two kinds of people. Those who can do a job and those who invent new ways of doing that job. Both are necessary, but the latter creates value that is greater than the hours they have available. This means you work less and get more done.

Putting it into Practice

So how do you avoid becoming another cog? Below are some tips that will help you on your way to efficiency land.

1. Look for new ways to do each task. Don’t always do something the way you did it last time. After each timely task, reserve time for thinking about how you could have completed it faster. This might seem like a waste of time but will ultimately lead to more speed. The first few times it will take longer as you analyze the patterns and attempt to automate more, but each time after that you’ll start seeing results. A side effect of this is increased knowledge in what you are doing as often the only way to get faster is to know something intimately.

2. Look for patterns. Practice makes perfect. Look for patterns in everything–letters, numbers, road signs, commercials, etc. Awareness will go along way in discovering patterns. Anything that you find yourself doing that feels repetitive is prime for automation. Find ways to do similar tasks together. For example, for quite a while I was doing 4-5 flash spaces in the nd.edu carousel per week. If I did all 4 together, it only took 2 hours but if I did them separately it would often take 3 or 4.

3. Look for others to share the efficiency gains with. Like they say in most sports, the great ones are not just great by themselves, they also make the others around them better. There is also something educating about teaching others. You really have to know your stuff to teach it. Also, you sometimes notice things when teaching that you don’t when learning.

I guess that is all I have. Did I connect the dots? Was I talking gibberish? I’m curious if others have noticed the same.

My first car, a 1996 Geo Metro, wouldn’t have been able to take off with cement blocks in the back. “The Turd”, as it was affectionately known, served me well through high school and college, but was not something to proudly show a son in an effort to prove you were once cool.

I have always had a thing for Mustangs, especially red. Thursday, I became a proud owner of a red Mustang, which from now on will be referred to as Sally, on this blog and other corners of the interwebs. It’s been crummy weather so I haven’t taken all the great photos that I want to have yet but hopefully this week I’ll get a chance. Here is a shot from Thursday that I took with my iPhone.

I also added a hover to the logo that makes it look like my eyes and mouth are open. At some point, Oak and I are going to make a sweet and fun flash piece out of the logo but for now that will do. Oh, and lastly, I added a favicon, which addicted to new has never had. Woohoo!

I’m a big fan of quotes so as I read books, I keep track of the lines and paragraphs I like in a tinye moleskin book. The other day I was reading through some of the things I’ve stored in it over the past year and found the notes I took from the book “Good To Great” very interesting. FYI: Several of them below are paraphrased and not direct quotes.

Celebrity leaders from outside the company didn’t lead to greatness. Leaders promoted from within did (10 of 11 of the CEO’s of good to great companies were promoted from within).

Great companies did not focus on what to do, but rather what not to do and what to stop doing.

Greatness is not a function of circumstances. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice. You must maintain an unwaivering faith that you can, and will prevail in the end.

The right people are your most important asset.

3 Simple Truths: 1) If you focus on who rather than what, you can more easily adapt to a changing world. 2) If you get the right people on the bus, the need to motivate and manage goes away. 3) Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

Those who build great companies know that the ultimate throttle on growth is the ability to get and keep the right people.

When in doubt, don’t hire–keep looking. When you know you need to make a people change, act. How can you tell if someone should get off the bus? Answer these questions. Would you hire them again? If they took another job would you be sad or relieved.

Put the best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.

Members of good to great teams tended to become and remain friends for life.

Charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow seeds of problems when people filter the brutal facts.

One of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events. Leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts are confronted. How do you create a climate where the truth can be heard? 1) Lead with questions, not answers. 2) Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion. 3) Conduct autopsies without blame. Openly discuss failures. 4) Build “red flag” mechanisms. Turn information into information that cannot be ignored.

The Three Circles of Greatness. 1) What can you be the best in the world at? 2) What drives your economic engine? 3) What are you deeply passionate about?

A hedgehog concept is not a plan or strategy on how to be the best, it is an understanding of what you can be the best at.

In the last paragraph of that post I said, “I mainly write this post for myself. I think it will be interesting to look back on in a year when I know what path I have chosen.” Funny thing is, it was interesting to look back on. Not sure what made me cruise into my archives for that post but it came to mind tonight, so I thought I would reflect on it for a sec.

I use to hate decision-making. I remember when I was younger, I would wait until the last possible second to make a decision, and even then, I would often look to my mom for help. Over the past few years I’ve had to make so many that I’ve learned decisions are temporary. Worst case scenario, you make the wrong one and if you are lucky, you figure it out and course correct. Anyway…just thought the old post was kind of funny.

Do not measure work experience in 2008 – 1996 = 12 years of experience, which is better than 2008 – 2004 = 4 years of experience. Experience is a good term. No one should be judged on age. They should be judged on what they have been through and accomplished. Experience encompasses those things and age does not. Unfortunately, the human resource definition of experience is “number of years”. Heck, they even use phrases like “years of experience,” which instantly materializes experience to only a number of years including no other factors.

True experience is really fricken hard to measure, especially in an industry as young as the web. Others try to measure it with certifications and tests. I can’t say I agree as those methods approve of those who can remember black and white answers. I don’t think I can say this next line without sounding like I think I am a philosopher but here it goes. True experience is found in grey areas. If experience was black and white, wrong or right, then one could safely assume that more years equals more time to memorize those absolutes and thus, ultimately, equals more true experience.

So how do you measure the grey areas of someone’s experience? I don’t have any correct answer. I have a few ideas which I’ll mention but who knows if they are good. One thought, is to measure each year of experience separately. A year of experience as a junior developer is nothing compared to that of a senior developer. I know first hand as I’ve been both. You gain a lot more experience as a leader than a follower. As someone who sets the standards rather than someone who follows them. As someone who is burdened with greater accountability when things go wrong than someone with less. What I’m trying to say is more responsibility equals more experience.

In addition to the experience that you gain at work everyday, you can grow immensely in your free time at home. When judging someone’s experience, you have to include extracurricular activities. Experience is not solely gained at work. If I only gained experience at work, I would be a quarter of the developer that I am today. Some of the biggest breakthroughs I have had in learning have come sitting on the couch next to my wife (thanks for listening to the boring breakthroughs Steph). I have dedicated countless free hours, with which I could do anything, to furthering my knowledge in my field of choice. When determining someone’s experience, you have to somehow figure in the years gained outside of work.

What do those two suggestions above have in common? Well, if you want to find someone with more experience or you want to compare two or more people’s experience, you have to do some work. Experience cannot be accurately determined from a two hour interview. To find someone with experience, you will have to make some effort.

Believe me that was shorter than the monster I had written and deleted. What are your thoughts? Am I crazy? Do you have other ideas of how experience can be rated?

Updates

A few others have followed my lead (ha, yeah right) and posted on the topic.

• Years of Irrelevance by DHH
• Cheaper Talent Hypothesis by Martin Fowler

Last weekend I was on the other side of the country in a town/area I had never been. I took no map, printed nothing from Google and didn’t plan anything. I had to fly there and back with connections in between but I didn’t print my e-receipt. I didn’t scribe into my moleskin the flight numbers or departure and arrival times. “No way,” you say. “That’s impossible.” I’ve got news for you Walter Cronkite, it’s not.

I had my flight plans emailed to me along with all the numbers I needed so when I approached the counter to checkin, I just turned on my iPhone, opened my email and punched in the number. The tickets spewed from the machine and I was off to security.

I arrived in Orange County, where a rental car was waiting for me. “Ha,” you say. “But you didn’t have directions so you got lost on the way to your hotel, right?” Well, of course I got lost. But not for long, as I just opened up Google Maps on my iPhone and typed in the address of my hotel. “Which you wrote down in your moleskin, I knew it!” Nope, I just got it from my email again. Are you catching my drift tokyo style yet?

I arrived at the hotel, checked in, once again using my email on my iPhone for the confirmation number and headed up to my room. As you can imagine, at this point I was itching to call my wife. I wanted her to know I was safe for the night and to hear her voice before I settled in to bed. I used (yes, you are correct) my iPhone and with one tap (ok, it was two), I was waiting for her to pick up on the other end. Oh, and my phone was sitting over on my desk as I was using my new Jawbone bluetooth headset which, obviously, just works.

Now you might think “that is a lot of iPhone usage for one day”. No way he is going to spring anything else on me, the reader of this magnificent article. I mean, he is just heading to bed now, right? Wrong. I need to wake up in the morning, don’t I? I softly tapped into the clock area, set an alarm for 9AM and picked Dropkick Murphy’s “Heading Up To Boston” as the ringer to wake me from my slumber. Then, I went to bed.

The next morning, I woke up to Dropkick and got ready. Yes, I even brushed my teeth with my iPhone. The one downside is that it only has mint toothpaste. Ok, that was a lie but I did unplug it from the charger, jump back under the covers, check my email and read the tweets that I missed during my night of beauty sleep.

I used the iPhone’s text messaging to update twitter and let the world know that I was alive and ready for the day. I punched in the address I needed to be at, again using Google Maps on my iPhone and the email, and headed out. Vroooom, vrooom. That was my car starting. I promise I won’t do that again.

I think by now you get the point but I really like to hammer it home. “What about life in an airport with an iPhone?” Well, I can’t answer that. Watch “The Terminal” or something. I can tell you that waiting for connecting flights, walking from terminal to terminal and sitting on the runway is far less stressful with iPhone in tow. Both to and from my destination, everyone in the airport seemed frantic or furious. I believe it’s because they didn’t have Dwight Yoakam’s “Honkey Tonk Man” ringing in their ears.

This is where the story gets interesting. It does, I promise. I got stuck in Chi-town because it was too foggy in South Bend to land. I was left with three options: rent a car and drive home, attempt to sleep in the airport or get a hotel for the night. I quickly grabbed a sheet from one of the United workers and within a few minutes I had called every rental car company at O’Hare. Unfortunately, they were all out of cars (or they didn’t like me) so I decided to take the flight home the next day. I called Steph and she talked me into staying in a hotel, so I called the number given to me and a few minutes later I was in the hotel.

The next morning, I received a text message from my buddy Oak, who saw my tweet the night prior that I was stuck in Chicago, saying that my buddy Matt was also in Chicago. I text Matt and a phone call later, he was on his way to pick me up and take me back home. But why, if I had a flight lined up would I take a car ride home? Because I checked the weather and knew that no flight was headed into South Bend for quite some time as it was still extremely foggy. Oh, and of course I did that from my iPhone.

So there. That is my iPhone story. Names were changed to protect the innocent. Oh, guess not. Well, at any rate, you can see how handy my PHONE was last weekend. So next time you see some egotistical web developer rockin’ out on his iPhone, don’t tell him it’s too expensive. Tell him that he is wise for purchasing such a helpful life device.

P.S. This is also a post about how much I love Twitter.

P.P.S. This is probably the longest article with no pictures that I have ever written.

Whenever I run into a small problem, I Google it and I take the internet for granted. I continue in this pattern until I find myself without a beloved internet connection. It is then that I realize I don’t really know that much. I mean, what do I really know? I guess the answer to that question would be, Google.

Not a problem has arose that I have been unable to find a solution for, using the right keywords on Google. Noticing this tonight, as I sipped on my latte, it got me thinking. How ineffecient would I be if I had to code without the internet? Granted, I am a web developer, so at some point I would need the internet to deploy my work, but what would happen if each time I buried my nose in TextMate, I disconnected from the net.

Would I struggle for weeks until desperation forced me to turn it back on? Would I start to challenge my own brain for solutions instead of quickly finding and implementing a solution someone has blogged about? Would I begin to think outside the box and come up with innovative solutions to problems? Or, would I repeat everyone else’s mistakes when a simple search could have enlightened me? I don’t know. Got me thinking though.