Nir's Software Company

Excellent Resource for Freelancers

Nir Dobovizki — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:49:15 GMT

Just in case any freelancer or consultant that is reading this blog doesn’t know about Freelance Switch it’s a great blog with freelancing advice and resources.

They even recommended yaTimer about a year ago.

Productivity Tips: Interruptions are evil

Nir Dobovizki — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:52:33 GMT

The most effective way to decrease your productivity is work in an interruption filled environment – and yet most of us work in just this environment.

Writers, programmers, designers and most other creative jobs require concentration, you are most productive only when you are in a deep concentration mode (sometimes referred to as “the flow”), in this mode you can get huge amount of work done in a short time.

Whenever you are interrupted, no matter how short the interruption is, you are kicked right out of this deep concentration mode and research has shown it usually takes between 15 and 30 minutes to get back in the flow.

So every time someone asks you a quick question (or even worse, loudly asks someone near you a quick question) you are actually losing between 15 minutes to half an hour of productive time.

If you have any control over your work environment you’re top priority should be to minimize interruptions, work alone, close your e-mail software and any instant messaging software or social network websites, turn off your cell phone… you get the idea.

It may be boring to work in such an environment but you will get more done in less time, just try it – and use the time you save to do things you enjoy instead of handling an endless stream of pointless interruptions.

yaTimer 2.3 is now in testing

Nir Dobovizki — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:44:26 GMT

All the features, fixes and improvements that will make it into yaTimer 2.3 are finished, as always I had to delay a lot of features to the next version to keep something even remotely like a schedule.

If there are no serious bugs yaTimer 2.3 will be released this month.

yaTimer 2.3 will be a free upgrade to all yaTimer customers, you can download the current version on the download page.

Scott Adams on the upside of the recession

Nir Dobovizki — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:12:36 GMT

The Upside of the Recession on the Dilbert blog.

Productivity Tip: Don’t Panic

Nir Dobovizki — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:11:39 GMT

The world’s economy is in a crisis, things are bad and they are going to get worse, civilization is coming to an end and we are all doomed.

Are you scared yet?

Your shouldn’t be, the world is not ending, a small but very greedy group of people managed to collapse the world’s financial markets and make some real damage to the economy, the resulting wide spread panic caused even more damage and is continuing to ruin the economy even as you read this.

The result is that lot of people lost an awful lot of money.

That’s it, a lot of people lost money, civilization is not collapsing around us (maybe except in very localized incidents) and society continues to function.

This economic crisis is a also a great opportunity, all you have to do is ignore everyone running around in panic like a headless chicken, get your act together and continue to work.

If you lost your job don’t worry, set your goals (getting a new job, changing your profession or starting your own business) and start working toward those goals.

While the world is in a state of panic you can get a huge competitive advantage by just doing your job while your competitors are panicked out of their mind.

Don’t ignore the economic situation, now is a time to keep on track, improve your productivity and make reasonable and level headed plans to succeed in this time of crisis.

And, of course, buying yaTimer - my very reasonably priced time tracking application is a great first step to improving your productivity.

yaTimer Development Update: Version 2.3 Almost Complete

Nir Dobovizki — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 15:00:01 GMT

The next version of yaTimer is almost done, I expect it will be finished in another week or so.

When it’s finished there is still a lot of testing to do, but based on my experience and the fact that this version is about making the existing features better and not introducing new features I expect the testing phase to be relatively short.

I estimate yaTimer 2.3 will be released sometime near the beginning of December, the actual release date will be when the version is ready.

yaTimer 2.3 will be a free upgrade to all yaTimer customers.

Lambda in XAML

Nir Dobovizki — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:14:34 GMT

Here are links to a 3 part series with code that let you use C#-like lambda expressions in XAML instead of writing value converters.

For example, instead of writing a value converter that takes a DateTime and calls ToShortTimeString you can write:

<TextBlock Text='{Binding Source={x:Static s:DateTime.Now},
                 Converter={fix:Lambda "dt=>dt.ToShortTimeString()"}}'>

You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror

Nir Dobovizki — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:42:25 GMT

I read and sometimes (rarely) post in the business of software forum on the Joel on Software site – and every once in a while someone asks if something he is about to do is ethical (usually it involves taking business away from a previous employer), this is my answer to all those questions.

Follow your conscience and do what you think is right, you will have to live with your actions and the consequences of those actions for a very long time (hopefully).

If you are asking you probably think what you are about to do is iffy at best – just think about how it will make you feel, and remember, hating yourself is a high price to pay for some quick money.

Productivity Tips: Filling timesheets manually is a great way to under charge - and it’s also a waste of time

Nir Dobovizki — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:36:51 GMT

A long long time ago, when I was a young programmer, in a company I once worked for, the management decided they wanted to know how the employees spend their time.

It was a product company so this information was not needed for billing, management just wanted to knows what’s going on and have better information when they plan for the future.

The development team manager quickly built a small application that lets employees fill in what they worked on, this application was equivalent to filling a timesheet, you started the application, selected one of the company’s projects filled in how much time you worked on that particular project and repeated this for every project you worked on today.

It was a disaster, the application itself didn’t have any serious problems but the basic flaw of such a system is known to everyone who ever had to fill out a detailed timesheet – at the end of the day you don’t remember exactly what projects you worked on and how much time you spent on each project.

The information in the system was inaccurate, time spent helping on other employee’s projects was usually charged to the wrong project (because no one remembers he spent an hour helping someone else in the middle of working on his own project) and after a few weeks the system was abandoned.

After that little experience I was sure time tracking is such a huge pain it should only be done if absolutely necessary – that is, only if you bill by the hour - I was wrong (obviously, as I know sell time tracking software).

The problem was not with the concept of time tracking, the problem was with filling timesheets after the fact, no one has perfect memory and when you fill your timesheet at the end of the day (or, god forbid, the end of the week) you just don’t remember exactly what you did.

The pen and paper solution to this problem is to keep a log of what you do, just write down the time whenever you switch tasks – this gets tiring and time consuming really fast, and the information you got on paper can’t be easily analyzed.

The real and easy solution is time tracking software that times you as you work – and does not require you to enter timing information after the fact, any good time tracking software can print timesheets for you as well as perform other analysis of the timing data.

Obviously I’m going to suggest yaTimer, the simple and easy to use time tracking software I wrote, but even if for some strange reason you don’t like yaTimer do yourself a favor and use some time tracking software – you’ll never want to manually fill another timesheet again.

Technical Debt

Nir Dobovizki — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 14:31:49 GMT

"Technical debt" is the mess you make when you take shortcuts while developing software.

It's a very powerful concept and it's easy to explain it to anyone with the basic understanding in taking loans, even without any technical background (for example, management).

When you do something the quick and dirty way, instead of the right way, you take on technical debt, every time you have to do something with that code it's now going to take longer because its badly designed (just like interest payments) and you should sometime re-write the offending code (pay off the debt) and that will take more time than writing it write to begin with (more interest).

Just like financial debt, when used wisely, let's you spend now money you'll only have later – at a (sometimes considerable) cost, technical dept let you get something done quickly and the cost is more work down the road.

Also just like financial debt, when you take on more technical debt then you have the ability to pay off (either due to bad planning or without noticing) your product is doomed.

Here is an article by Steve McConnell that describes technical debt better then I'm able to.