Alpha’s Manifesto

My time tracker: Google Calendar

Long time ago I wrote about a proposal from a StackExchange user about how to use Google Calendar for task planning across projects and activities. The idea seemed good, and after months of making it my bread and butter, I think I have perfected it to address most of the problems I had with my workflow in Trello. It’s not the holy grail of productivity, but it has helped me a lot.

Let me explain it to you, because if you use Google Apps or GMail, you’re most likely to benefit from this.

How TDD pays off

Software engineers, amirite? They keep blabbing about this fancy-pantsy weird wibbly-wobbly stuff nobody understands and they just want to keep things complicated. They want to test things even before they are done and then develop the app. Are they insane? And it even takes more time, so it’s a waste of money.

Well, my little friend-that-does-not-adhere-to-software-methodologies, they are right on what they do. And it does pay off. Let me tell you why.

(In here also: an update on the mongo-faceted project.)

Sleep time

Many of you that know me also know that it has been forever a problem of mine to get to sleep properly. Not to sleep early. Not to wake up early. It’s about the quality of sleep. I’ve tried many things to address this problem, raging from hormones to witchcraft, but something seems to be making a difference: smart alarms.

My experience with bullet journals

I have just learned about this technique called Bullet Journalism, which seem to have revolutionized daily planning for lots of people. I’ve tried it out myself and it has been definitely something to share. Let me tell you more about it.

Why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby

A few of you may already know that I’ve started learning Ruby. I cannot tell at this moment if its going to be a huge career shift for me or not, but still, here I am. And I started with Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby, a definitely… unusual book.

I’ve got an art degree!

I just finished an art course on an MOOC platform and got a certificate for it. Let me tell you how was it like.

Faceted searches with MongoDB and mongoose

Some people in Latin-America may remember an old Yupi ad where a woman was complaining on how difficult using the internet was. “It’s so difficult. So complicated! There must be something better.” (In Spanish, of course.) Cheesy as it sounds, Händel Messiah’s “Hallelujah” sonorously invaded the screen. Don’t believe me? See for yourself.

That’s how I felt when I was investigating what’s the best approach to achieve faceted searches in MongoDB. But I found something better. Let me show it to you.

Write it down!

Not sure if this has happened to you, but sometimes there’s just too much going on at the same time. Pretty much more that we can handle in our head.

This happens to me quite a bit: I’ll in the middle of an important meeting when suddenly someone comes in Skype saying “would you mind to code review this, please? It’s kind of urgent”. Then somebody will reach out to me saying “hey, I think the server’s down”. Then somebody will say “I think this issue is actually a server configuration thing, we’re blocked”, and somebody else will say “I cannot get the tests to run, it says undefined is not a function”. It’s like it’s raining urgent issues! This a way I found to handle the situation.

Google Inbox and Inbox Zero

I recently received a Google Inbox invitation, after requesting it three weeks ago. And after trying it out… boy, I love it.

Here I’m going to tell you why I love it so much, why it suits perfectly into my inbox management technique, and why I think it’d be useful for other people too. Also, a little bit of what it could have to make it even better.