2015 - Page 4 of 4 - Michael Bianco

3 Quick Tips for Managing Your Inbox

Email is hard. It’s so easily abused and can be an enormous time suck. Here some quick tips that I’ve been trying to implement over the last couple months: 1. Unsubscribe from any newsletters you haven’t read in the last month. The information won’t disappear if you don’t read it. If it’s important, you’ll run into it somewhere else. More emails is more noise; kill the noise, be realistic about how many newsletters you can read. 2. Use Unroll.me to manage newsletters you want to read. This tool bundles all email newsletters into a single daily email, reducing noise throughout the day. 3. Setup Gmail filters for any transactional emails that you never actually read…

Manage Your Psychology

I make the most progress on programming, design, and other creative work in the morning. I process email best after accomplishing one big item. For me, A 30 minute meeting destroys at least an hour of productive work time; context switching has a high cost. I know these things about myself and try to mitigate any activities that trigger these “black holes” of productivity loss or momentum killers. Don’t let your workflow be defined by your surroundings. Know how you work and defend the process that works best for you.

Your Brain Isn’t for Remembering

I’m reading through the productivity classic Getting Things Done. This book has helped me create systems to manage the deluge of information thrown at us every day. The never ending stream of information is overwhelming if not managed with discipline and systematically processed using systems. That’s what this book is about: creating systems to manage constant streams of information. One of the main points that David makes is that our brains aren’t made to remember information when we need it. Our intellect is great for creative thinking, but remembering that you ran out of paper clips when your at Walmart isn’t where we excel – especially when we’ve processing information all day long…

Multi-Engine Rails 3.2 Testing Tips & Tricks, Part 3

This is a continuation of my second post on setting up a CI server for a multi-engine rails 3.2 application. Use `Pry.rescue {}` For Dynamic `binding.pry` Getting access to an interactive REPL is essential when debugging a web application. Better Errors does a great job when when interacting with the app directly (in rails4 this functionality comes built in). binding.pry is a great tool when interacting with your code directly in your development or testing environment. However, there are some cases where adding binding pry to just the right place is either painful or would require you to modify a external gem. An easy way to get around this is to use pry-rescue which will open a pry REPL wherever an exception occurs…

Year: 2015