The Good Bits

I am a big fan of the pomodoro technique when the number of things I have to work on start exceeding 5. The technique boils down to having a strict disciple of working for 25 minutes without any interruptions (yes, email and twitter count!) and then taking a small break immediately after.

Creating chunks of works like this works for me since I can keep track of how far I am into finishing an activity.

Today I came across an article on Hacker News that has some tips for working remotely as a software developer. Here the author goes with a timeboxed approach and uses the pomodoro technique to get a lot more done especially when you don’t have any outside stimuli that act as clues to stop working on a task.

Check out the original article by clicking on the link below.

How to Work Remotely as a Software Developer.

If you have been frequenting the inter-webs like me in the early 2000s you must be very familiar with Experts Exchange. For those of you who are not familiar with it, here is a link to an Expert Exchange search result that shows what I am talking about. Just scroll down and you’ll see what I mean. They show a perfectly valid question that you would ask, tell you that there are answers to it but obstruct the view by blurring it so you cannot see it without signing up. What a waste of bandwidth and your time!

A couple years ago when Quora first started, it was a very promising start up that I thought would replace Experts Exchange and fix the issues of the Q&A world. They had a promising idea that would help thousands of people.

It is now clear to me that instead of fixing the problem that Experts Exchange created by polluting the internet with obstructed Q&As, Quora is following the exact same route.

Clearly, I am not the only person frustrated with this. Scott Hanselman shared his frustration with Quora in the blog post I’d like to use the web my way, thank you very much Quora. – Scott Hanselman.

Thankfully, folks at StackExchange have nailed the problem! Good riddance to Quora.