Posted by Sébastien Lachance with Comments (0)
Motivation can be hard to understand. Someday you are and the next day you’re not. While cleaning my bookmarks, I came across this talk by Dan Pink on The surprising science of motivation on TED.
It applies to us (Knowledge worker) and he demonstrate why it can be so hard to motivate us and how everyone knows how to, but it’s never applied.
There is also an animate version of this talk done by RSA. If you are more visual check this one out.
Daniel H. Pink is a writer, blogger and speaker with 4 books under his belt.
Edit: I’m ashamed of myself for letting this post slipped my mind. I have completely forgotten to post it here.
I have been watching some Mix presentation this week and found some of them to be very interesting.
2010 will be a great year and I’m sure that my life will change dramatically. I have a whole bunch of ideas and things I want to do. Here is a list of my “professional goals”.
Ever since I first heard of ASP.NET MVC, I knew I should become proficient in it. But I can’t control the type of project I’m working on, so I neglected to do my homework and stay up to date.
A big gap to fill. I’ve made some progress but still not able to do it efficiently. I will probably pick up some books and try to design web site from scratch just for gun.
I have some ideas of plugins that haven’t made it to general release. This year, I will definitely launch one to have a real experience with launching an open source project and responding to feedback.
Something else than the jQuery plugin mentioned earlier. I have made some “improvement” to BlogEngine.Net and maybe I will submit them some changes I’ve made.
95 posts to go and around 50 more readers. Completely feasible. I also picked some tips while I had a complete lack of posts for some month and I am now ready to apply them.
I need to finish Getting Things Done and try it for some months. A goal that I really need to complete this year.
I took some weight since the wedding in October 2009 and I can now see how it affect my health. So I am ready to take care of this again. It may not looks like a professional goal but I’m sure It will have a big impact in the end.
2009 has been a big year. A lot happened. Professionally and in my life in general.
I have been reading a lot of books that had nothing to do with the technical aspect of my job, but with other challenges in mind. I’ve read about business development, learning process, design (not software design) and project management. I’ve also came in contact with the Pragmatic Thinking and Learning book which gave me a lot of great tools to learn more effectively.
I’ve been working with an Agile Team for half a year now, going back where I really belong. I liked the experience and hope we (the team) can get even more benefits from this methodology this year. I’ve also assisted to some of the conferences of the Agile Tour 2009 which was a fantastic event.
I’ve always been a developer with a little knowledge of web design but no deep knowledge. I’ve always had design supplied to me and been able to hack through it and get thing done. This year, I’ve gone deeply in web design and CSS, so deeply that I now really hate browsers differences :). And I’m now an expert in Javascript, thanks to jQuery. Seriously, I made really big improvement on this side.
Search Engine Optimization that his. I was expected to increase visitors from the US on a website. I’ve started with no real knowledge on how Google was indexing content. So I geared myself, watched videos and read everything I could for this. It’s not always easy but it was a fun learning experience. One tool worth mentioning is the IIS SEO toolkit. The first analysis with this extensions showed me that I had a lot of problems with missing descriptions, keywords, titles, broken links, etc, on my blog, and it provided a great experience in allowing me to resolve them and understand what I did wrong.
I’m now married. Since October 17. What an intense ride it was. And we are now waiting for our first child to be born (due February 2010).
I’ve done some consulting work at the beginning of the year and it was really fun. Delivered on time and exactly what they wanted. Great experience. Great customer.
I have missed a lot of opportunity to blog and I intend to get back on track this year. I also migrated my blog from Wordpress to BlogEngine.Net this summer and seen a drop of more than 50% in traffic. I blame myself for my lack of migration strategy.
I read some technical books in 2009, but not as many as the other years. In fact, aside from Clean Code, CSS Web Design and ASP.NET MVC in action, I had read no other technical book.
A situation has occurred in which I was unable to deliver a project on time. Some deadline were too thigh and a last minute change (technology switch at the last minute) made the situation goes havoc and the project was abandoned (by me).
I had a pair of Skullcandy headphones that broke unexpectedly. But due to the formidable warranty (complete replacement or half-price on another pair), I had sent them to be replaced in October. I’m still waiting and all my attempt to contact them has failed. The problem is that I would have been able to repair them myself and now I’ve just lost them.Update 1 (January 14, 2010 : It seems the package never arrived…). Update 2 (January 19, 2010 : Now they found it and the new headphones are being returned to me.Update 3 (February 11, 2010) : 3 weeks now and still haven't received them (Canada Post is slow or ...).
Yes, it's another meta-blogging post (see Jeff Atwood post on meta-blogging). But I think it's a relevant one. I finally made the big move and decided to use an hosting provider to host my blog. And more importantly, I switched from WordPress to BlogEngine.Net.
How I made the choice to go with BlogEngine.NET?
Back in July, I decided to create my own blog engine. So I began the development with exactly what I had in mind for the most fantastical blog ever. After a week and really slow progress (I was sure to finish development by the beginning of August, 1 month later), I decided to look at other blog engines to gather idea on architecture and what is needed to be implemented. I looked at Oxite and BlogEngine.NET (since they are in .NET). I had a big surprise. I haven't realized coding your own blog was so much work. In fact, BlogEngine.NET was already doing everything that I wanted (except for extension-less url).
And the ability to write your own theme is so easy! The BlogEngine.NET really did done a good job.
How was the migration?
Horrific. WordPress use a proprietary format and can't be imported directly into BlogEngine.NET. But it was no big deal since I wanted to reread all post and correct spelling and bad grammar, I decided to recreate them all. I used the WordPress statistics to know which post were the most read and done them first.
Uploading to GoDaddy.
I’m not an expert in hosting server. I guess the experience was relatively easy, if it wasn’t for the fact that I abandoned after 2 hours and when getting back, everything was working as expected. The important thing is that it worked and it’s fast.
My apologies to Wordpress.
I have nothing against you, really. You are a great service and a wonderful blogging platform. For 2 years you made blogging a unique experience. But my world is in .NET and you are not written in it. But again, thank you!
That was disastrous. No really. I had a lot of modifications to be made fast and it just seemed that viEmu was always in the way. I’m not blaming viEmu here, it’s just because I was not completely comfortable with it and I should had it deactivated for the rush. On another side, I learned how to do search without using Ctrl-F. Disturbing at first, a must now. 24 days left.
I’m starting to really like this. I’m much more confident and often I don’t need to think twice before using a command. Today I have used many times the “yank & put” keys along with v,V (selection) and o,O (new line before of after the current line). I am not required to think. So far, so good.
Today I had real opportunity to use gVim so I decided to install ViEmu for Visual Studio and give it a try. A had a lot of code to write on a recent application I'm working on so why not.
I'm starting to get a hand on basic navigation and on inserting/appending removing/deleting characters. It's too soon to know I it had improved my productivity yet, but I'm still learning so let's see in a couple of days how it goes.
Not been typing much today, but I wanted at least to clear something. How do I cut/paste inside gVim.
First you need to enter the selection mode by hitting "v". Then move the cursor to select text using h, j, k, l, w, e, etc. When the text is selected, hit "d". This will cut the text. Now hit "p" to put the line back.
On another note, I talked about vi/vim to some of my colleagues and friends and everyone is just laughing at me. Everyone seems to agree that there is no points in learning this and should stick with "what everyone do". I do hope to show them what it's really about.
Day 2 of the trial, I have gone through half the tutorial (up to Lesson 3.3) and I begin to see where the power of this vi/vim residing. The most annoying thing so far is the color scheme/font that is not remembered, but I'm pretty sure it will have to do with learning vi (maybe a hidden command or something :P, or maybe not and will have to modify a config file somewhere).
Here is a recap of what I learned today
First, I have been using the "w" and "e" key to navigate through text in "Normal mode" (Normal Mode is where you are when you are not typing, hitting ESC get you there).
Next, the "x" key. Again, in normal mode, you hit the x key to delete the remaining of the words. If you are at the start of the word, it removes it completely and if you are at the second characters, it remove all remaining characters after the cursor.
This is it. I learned a lot through the tutorial but haven't used it much so it does not count. Tomorrow I will try a few new commands to keep learning it until I'm a master of vi/vim!!