Category — Personal

I use Maven every day to build WSO2 Carbon based products and it takes huge amount of time due to the size of WSO2 Carbon platform. So I used to run the build and do some other work until it finishes. But most of the times, I forget to check the build status and this has effected badly on my productivity.

I thought that I could reduce the effect on productivity, if I can trigger some notification sound and a bubble when build is finished. Using Growl notification system(You need to install growlnotify tool as from Growl extras.) and afplay command line tool I came up with the following script which let me trigger notification after invoking any command line tool.

For example think you want to get a notification after a maven build, you can execute the maven command like following(Note: I have named above script growlexec and made it a executable):

growlexec mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

This will create notification bubble and will make a sound after the command line tool is done with it’s work.

How can we create something like this for use on Linux?

You can use libnotify to trigger visual notification bubbles. For audio notifications you can use tool like beep.

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeisterhas found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

Read rest of the article at blogs.hbr.org.

As a developer, you are sitting on a goldmine. Do you even realize it?

No, seriously, a @#$% goldmine! Never in modern history has it been so easy to create something from scratch, with little or no capital and a marketing model that is limited only by your imagination.

Think about the biggest websites you visit or use on a regular basis: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, or even Google for that matter — all of them were created by developers who created something from little more than an idea in their head. Was it easy for them? Heck no. But it could only have been done in today’s day and age. So why in the world are you sitting there day after day working for someone else?

Yeah, I do too. I hate it.

So if there are so many amazing opportunities out there, why aren’t more developers out there working for themselves? I think there is a pretty common set of excuses that we tell ourselves. None of them are legit!

- Intermittent Intelligence

Viewport splitting support is a really cool feature provided by Vim. This allows to split the viewable area between one or more files. Most Vim user may already familiar with this feature if you have ever used Vim’s help(:help topic). When you enter help, Vim splits the viewport and opens the help in top viewport while you document is open in bottom viewport.

Here are some interesting Vim viewport keybindings:

• :sp (or :split) – Split the Vim viewport horizontally(divvy up the viewport into two equal viewports for the file that you have open)
• :vsp (or :vsplit) – Split the Vim viewport vertically
• :sp filename – Will open the filename in the new viewport(same is true for :vsp)
• :10 sp filename – New viewport will fill 10 lines(you can change the value).
• Ctrl w = – Tells Vim to assign an equal number of lines to each viewport
• Ctrl w j – Moves one viewport down
• Ctrl w k – Moves one viewport up
• Ctrl w h – Moves one viewport to the left
• Ctrl w l – Moves one viewport to the right
• Ctrl w + – Increase the active viewport by one line
• Ctrl w - – Decease the active viewport by one line
• Ctrl w q - Close the active viewport
• Ctrl w r – Will rotate windows to right
• Ctrl w R – Will rotate windows to left

Update: Some of the above keybindings will not work in Mac OS X.

Additional Resources on Vim Viewports

• Vim Tips: Using Viewports
• Splits and multi-file editing

Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is. It’s hard to describe it in words. So, I use pictures.

- Matt Might

Tom Wujec presents his research into the “marshmallow problem” — a simple team-building exercise that involves dry spaghetti, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. Who can build the tallest tower with these ingredients? And why does a surprising group always beat the average?

boston.com has published nice set of pictures taken during first week. Here are some pictures from the boston.com article.

South Africa's midfielder Siphiwe Tshabalala

Argentina's Jonas Gutierrez

‘They are to remind people that we are all capable of much more than we realise and that hidden treasures can be found within every one of us once you know how to access them,’

Read more…

Step One: Write More Code

The easiest way to do this? Start new side projects and contribute simple patches to open source projects. Every time you write code,you will learn something about thecode, your tools, or yourself.

Step Two: Work With Great Developers

Now that you’re creating code, you need to work with great developers so you can see how they write great code.

Above was extracted from article “2 Steps to Becominge d a Great Developer” of   HackerMonthly magazine’s first issue. It’s the monthly magazine of Hacker News and great magazine for every software developer.

The above mentioned article was written by Eric Davis, and in that article, he shares the two steps that he is using to walk the patch to becoming a great developer.

When top level guys look down, they see only shit;

When bottom level guys look up, they see only assholes…