Programmers Don’t Like to Code

Jonathan Rentzsch has blogged that Programmers Don’t Like to Code and I couldn’t agree more with what he says. The gist of his post boils down to this:

Programmers don’t like to code, we like to solve problems. Coding is not problem solving, but software problem solving usually involves some coding.

Solving problems is far more interesting than writing code. Writing code is tedious and annoying half the time. And personally, once I’ve solved the problem I am very disinterested in the rest of the code that needs to be written to create a full application. I’m not really a finisher. Any projects I have finished took a lot of effort to push through the de-motivation of working on something I was fundamentally not interested in. When you’ve got a problem you want to solve you are generating ideas and ideas are fun to play around with. Once you’ve got a solution in mind finding how to implement it can also be fun (though not always). I enjoy writing prototypes and getting the guts of the solution in place but once it comes time to move beyond that I start to slow down. My interest wanes and my procrastination increases.

This isn’t only in relation to software projects. I enjoy the act of photographing and solving the problem of creating the picture I want but I rarely bother to print the result. The series of articles I want to write for this blog were a lot of fun to research and makes notes about but I haven’t sat down to write them yet. When I took my first course at The Workshops the founder of the school gave a presentation that resonated with me. He said it was quite alright that you not be a finisher so long as you form a relationship with a craftsman who is one. In photography this means finder yourself a master printer. I wonder if such detail oriented folks exist in the software industry? Perhaps I need to find one for my software projects.

Orange Hipster Shuffle

This must be a sign. On the same day I read about the Hipster Shuffle the folks at Apple released iPod shuffles in new colors (pink, blue, green, and orange in addition to the original silver)! So not only can your Hipster PDA gain multimedia capabilities but it is also now available in snazzy colors. As orange is my favorite color I am very tempted

PagePacker from Big Nerd Ranch

Big Nerd Ranch are known for their excellent classes about many Mac OS X technologies include Cocoa Bootcamp. One of their instructors is Aaron Hillegass, a name you should know if you do any Cocoa work on the platform as he’s written two great books on the subject. He whipped up a small application called PagePacker that lets you print 8 of the DIY Planner templates (or any single page PDF you want) onto a single sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 paper and fold them into a tiny book. I think the UI for selecting the template could use some work, but it is still a nice freebie. Check it out!

Unfortunately my output has most of the spaces in any text in the templates converted to exclamation points. This probably isn’t going to happen for everyone, but I don’t have solution for myself yet. If you know of a solution please leave a comment.

First Steps into GTD

I’ve known about David Allen’s Getting Things Done for some time now but I hadn’t really looked into it. On tuesday I decided to take action and purchase the abridged audiobook from iTMS. This was partly driven by seeing GTD mentioned around the blogosphere but also because I’d just come off a week of not feeling productive because I was very unfocused. I was making changes all over the codebase of Anzan and I knew this wasn’t a good approach. The GTD audiobook resonated with me and I could see how such a system would work for me. I could also see there would be some challenges in determining things like contexts. Rather than spend too much time worrying about any problems I plunged into the collection phase which really turned out to be more of a mind sweep for me since I don’t deal with paper much. The resultant list of projects/actions is quite large which served to further convince me that I did need to get this stuff out of my head and into a workable GTD system.

I decided to use Kinkless GTD because it seems to be fairly mature given what it is and Omni are working on OmniFocus. I already had a license for OmniOutliner (2 actually because one was included with my MacBook Pro) so I upgraded to Pro and got started populating my Projects and Actions from my mind sweep list. So far Kinkless seems to be working well but I can definitely see that creating the appropriate set of contexts will take some time. To that end I’m considering using Fast User Switching to simulate a work environment vs. a home environment for my computer use. If anyone has tried this please leave a comment with your experience.

Introducing…

Tuesday I hit a major milestone for the new application I’ve been working on feverishly for the past few months. It was such a great feeling to see all the effort come together and “just work” like any true Mac application should. Suddenly it was real instead of just a collection of classes and NIB files and just as suddenly the internal development name wasn’t enough anymore. A good name is an important aspect of a successful application but it doesn’t necessarily have to convey the exact purpose of the application. What it needs to do is stand apart from other product names and be easy for people to associate with the functionality you are providing. I don’t find the process of discovering such a name to be easy but I am very happy with the result. So without further ado, the name of my new application is Anzan.

Is your curiosity piqued? Here are a couple more tidbits…

• Anzan is there when you need it and unobtrusive when you don’t
• Anzan will change the way you do something, especially in groups