Today I am launching HabitualApp, a free webapp for tracking thirty day trial habits. You can find it here, and follow it on twitter, @habitualapp It’s the time of year for new year’s resolutions, and thirty day trials are a great technique for making resolutions succeed. They can be used to: Change existing behaviours, such [...]
Author Archives 
laurie
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HabitualApp: Making Habits that Stick
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Software Craftsmanship
Last night I went to a debate on Software Craftsmanship at SPA2010. The general consensus seemed to be that Software Craftsmanship is bad, but software craftsmanship is good. Notice the capital letters. I want to pick up a point Ade made. He said: “I don’t believe that good software comes from a process or an [...]
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Why is it so hard to learn?
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Preparing and Rehearsing a Talk
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The Cult of Done
I totally stole this from Bre Pettis, but it’s awesome so worth repeating The Cult of Done Manifesto There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done. There is no editing stage. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the [...]
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Practice daily tactical decision making
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Influencer Number
Paul Erdos is famous in the world of mathematics. He spent his life travelling America, finding mathematicians to befriend and helping them with their work. In order to honour his contributions, the “Erdos Number” was created. Anyone who collaborated with Erdos on a paper has an Erdos Number of 1, any of their collaborators have an Erdos [...]
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Chain of Fools
What do you do when you have one person who is the repository of knowledge for a critical part of your project, infrastructure or similar. You need some way to address this situation, otherwise that poor person will go mad dealing with other peoples problems, never feel free to go on holiday, and if they [...]
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Getting better – in leaps
The first million you ever make is the hardest – or so the saying goes. This is not only true, but its true at any scale. The first £100 you make, is the hardest. The first £1000 you make is the hardest. The first £10k you make is the hardest. This is because the hard [...]
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Is Rails Stagnating?
The reason Rails is so amazing is the way it pushed the boundaries, and made everyone accept an order of magnitude improvement. On a business level, it made it an order of maginitude easier to create a websites. Companies that could not afford websites now can. Small teams that did not have the ability to [...]

