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The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Just wanted to recommend this book The Four Steps to the Epiphany, it was recommended to me by Scott from Directed Edge who are doing amazing thing with their recommendation engine as a service.
The book contains a fair amount of common scene (well seemed common enough to me), but its good to hear it from someone who's been through it all and validate your hunches. I would go as far as to say that is should be mandatory reading for anyone who is planning to launch a product or service.
Coder's block
Writers block is well known and documented. It's something that I experienced first hand whilst writing Beginning Merb, and it's not easy to overcome. I read on wikipedia that a neurologist reckons it's the creative parts of the brain being disturbed that causes writers block.
Coding is creative. Whilst writing code may not be as glamorous as publishing a book the two are closely related; creativity is needed to solve problems. As a coder it is safe to assume that at some point in time you might 'hit the wall' and develop coder's block.
What can be done to overcome coder's block?
If you look at some of the advice for writers block, it revolves around changing your mental state.
- Take a break, relax
- Just write
- Break it down
So how do these tips relate to coding?
Take a break, relax
This is fairly self explanatory, drop what you're doing and do something that you find relaxing for a while. Take a stroll around the block, get the blood circulating again. It might even help to have a quick nap, a soft reboot.
Just write
Get back into the flow. Pick up a side project and code on that for half an hour or so. Better yet create a branch and work on an easier feature. If you're not writing tests, now is as good a time as any, write a few tests for the code you're stuck on.
Break it down
It could be that you're just attempting to accomplish too much at once and don't know where to start. Take a step back, break the features down further until you have a chunk of code that can be implemented easily. It can help to have another pair of eyes while breaking your problem down, as they might be able to spot an other approach.
Make sure your problem is well defined, having a vague specification can lead to blocks.
Update: problem definition from alex_young
Hopefully after a while you'll be able to overcome the block and get back into it. I would be very interested to hear how others deal with coder's block, have any tips of your own?
5 Questions you need to be able to answer as a start-up
As I go around some of the start-up events in London, lately I keep hearing the same questions over and over again. So to save some time for other budding entrepreneurs, make sure you can answer the following:
- How long have you been established?
- Where are you based?
- What is your business model?
- What do you do?
- What makes you different?
Lets get to the true meaning behind these questions.
How long have you been established?
Is a way to partly gauge your level of success and see at what stage the business is at. Have you been around for a while (and have something to show for it) or did you form the company yesterday?
Where are you based?
Are you two guys in a garage (nothing wrong with this) or do you have an office that people can drop by.
What is your business model?
Where is the money? (more applicable to a product startup)
What do you do?
self evident
What makes you different?
Why should I care about your product/service, or do we really need yet another social network/facebook/iphone/twitter app
So in our case, it's:
1. Since April '09, we've built kohive, teepay, and @tweetarium and we've also done a number of short Rails consulting contracts
2. London - offices on commercial street
4. Same as 3
5. We specialize in fixing bugs, improving performance and bringing your application to completion, but we're also brilliant at building web apps from scratch
I <3 Coffee
With the number of cappuccinos I'm making, I'm practically a barista in training.
Matt's tip of the day, when frothing milk don't just rely on a thermometer, stop when the milk jug gets too hot to touch.
@slanket is pretty cool
Gearing up to visit my family back in Chile soon, and just bought some travel Slankets (blankets with sleeves) which quite frankly look awesome! - especially for long plane flights.
Moving to posterous
I've decided to move my blog over to posterous, if you want to checkout my old one, it's still on tumbler http://matthewcford.tumblr.com/
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