Every now and then I discover a Windows utility that really makes my life easier and my tasks more productive. My latest discovery is Stardock Groupy.
Groupy allows Windows users to drag and drop multiple applications and documents together to group them into a tabbed interface for easy access and reference.
Continue reading Groupy—grouped tabs for any application in Windows
A few months ago, my team at work considered using DSDM’s MoSCoW prioritsation technique for our project’s user stories in Jira.
After a little pondering, this morning I worked out how to do this in our cloud-hosted Jira. This short post shows you how.
Continue reading How to create new MoSCoW prioritisation statuses in Jira
Here’s a website that I came across a while ago that beautifully expresses something that I’ve been passionate about for a long time in web and software design: flags are not languages.
Continue reading Flags are not languages
A couple of years ago, I came across an essay by Shubhro Saha, a software engineer at Facebook in California, entitled “Software engineers should write“.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently.
He writes,
“An engineer who writes code should also write essays.
“Software engineers should write because it promotes many of the same skills required in programming. A core skill in both disciplines is an ability to think clearly. The best software engineers are great writers because their prose is as logical and elegant as their code.
“[…] Even if nobody reads your essay, writing it will make an impact on you. It will clarify your opinion on a topic and strengthen– or even weaken– your beliefs. The process alone of putting jumbled thoughts into concrete words is valuable.”
It’s a very good essay with a very compelling argument.
At high school I ‘failed’ my English higher the first time round; I actually got a D pass but the school felt that I could do better. They were right: I sat it again in sixth year and got a C.
It wasn’t until I went to university and studied Hebrew that I really began to understand language better. After that I went back to English and read numerous books about syntax, and grammar and punctuation. And I read widely.
I read well-written books and articles and journals. As I read them I stopped to consider why they had been written that way. I questioned why certain words has been used: what effect did they have. I analysed sentence structure. And I observed how simple the best writing was.
And I wrote. I wrote a journal—I still do. And a blog (this one). And a book, which was published in 2007. I’m currently, and slowly, writing another.
Writing helps me to clarify my thoughts. It helps me to express myself better. And if any of it helps someone else, or makes them laugh, or look at something from a different perspective then that’s a bonus.
I suspect that it does also help me write better code. And at the very least: better comments.
If you are a coder then I encourage you to read the article. If you are a writer and are wondering whether you ought to learn to code then perhaps start here: please don’t learn to code by Jeff Atwood.
A couple of days ago, when I switched on my PC and opened My Computer I was presented with a bright red drive tile icon, indicating that it was running short of free disk space.
I was puzzled as I had only recently run CCleaner to collect unused files, old browser caches, un-required file settings and bin them all. I was sure that I had over 13 GB of free space.
I turned to TreeSize Free to help me identify what was taking up so much space. I first blogged about TreeSize Free in 2011 in a post called My top free Windows 7 add-ons.
Once installed, all you do is right-click a folder (or drive), select TreeSize Free from the context menu and after running for a moment the application will tell you how large that folder and all its sub-folders are.
This is what it looks like.
What I learned the other day was that four items were taking up the most space:
I deleted the podcasts and music—I keep the music I listen to on another drive, this is simply where I download them after purchase.
Then I uninstalled Adobe and XAMPP, and reinstalled them on a larger drive.
Now I have a much more healthy 36.0 GB of free drive space.
If you are in a similar situation, I thoroughly recommend TreeSize Free. As they say: if you don’t measure it, you can’t control it.