Anthony Panozzo's Blog

It's Tuesday at 3 PM. I have a few hours of good work left, but get stuck on something pretty basic. Without thinking, I flit around on the internet for a little while doing fruitless research or goof off or grab a snack, and then return to the problem at hand ten minutes later. I then proceed to fix it in two minutes.

Did it really take me twelve minutes to fix it, or could I have fixed it more quickly by taking the right approach?

I find being able to unblock myself important because I work fairly independently. Bouncing ideas off of others is useful, but perhaps no one else is not around or it would be pretty distracting to bother them. Obviously, it's important not to overlook coworkers or experts who might know the answer to the question I'm having. These strategies also help others become unblocked.

(Most of the examples and fixes here apply to software development, but they could also apply to business strategy or other domains. I had a subset of this post in The 20% Difference post, but I thought there were more strategies than I outlined there.

I got married in April of this year. I'd like to share the tech we used to make planning and communicating a little easier. Then I will get all mushy at the end.

Project Management

Setting up any large social event takes a bit of planning. We were initially pretty overwhelmed by the amount of things that needed to be done (invitations, ceremony planning, cake tastings, music coordination, and the list goes on and on.) It felt like every time we talked with someone else, there was another thing to consider, and we figuratively chased our tails a lot. What's more, remembering key deadlines and keeping ourselves on track and motivated was pretty important.

So I thought to myself, "what tools do I know that can help with this?" We need some sort of tool to see what needs to be done and to keep us organized. Pivotal Tracker came to mind, but seemed a bit too geeky and software-specific.

Then I thought of Trello. That seemed lightweight enough, and would provide us with a good dashboard of what needed to be worked on. So step one was to take our list of tasks that started to pile up and put them into Trello.

The next step was figuring out what sorts of columns to do. After some experimenting, we went with the following, from left to right:

• two months after the wedding
• every month leading up to the wedding, in reverse chronological order
• what we are doing this week
• all done tasks

When a new task came to our attention, we tried to slot it based on the other tasks or when it really needed to be done by. For example, getting a dinner tasting needed to precede deciding which dinner options to choose. Then all tasks hopefully flowed from their month to "this week" or "done". When a given month was over, we could see what tasks still were not complete and to move them to the subsequent month.

Basically the tip is: find some way of playing a sound every fifteen minutes or so, and when this happens, check my posture. I have found this useful for better ergonomics and posture while using my computer.

I'm using the Mindful Mynah app on Mac, and have it set to chime every fifteen minutes or so. When I hear the chime, I quickly check my posture and often find that I can improve it. I think this increases my mindfulness of how I type and sit, as the bell reminds me to check it more often. Even without the bell, I realize that I have incorrect posture more often. The nice thing about automating this process is that I just need to have the intention to have better posture once, and then I can automatically lock in that benefit over time without needing to expend much effort.

Today I want to talk about something I read about in GTD-creator David Allen's book Ready For Anything.

A key quote for me from his book is: "Nobody will even try to absorb and manage two hundred percent of what they can do. But they will take on enough to let themselves get ten percent behind their curve. And when you are ten percent behind, you feel like crap. But on the other hand, if you can manage to get ten percent ahead, you're transformed and on top of your world."

The idea he presented was that there is only a twenty percent difference between being ten percent ahead and ten percent behind, but the difference is huge*. Allen suggests that this 20% difference leads to feeling a general sense of ease and also the ability to think more strategically. Fighting fires does not lead to giving time to think more holistically.

I spent a little time during the last week figuring out ways to debug HTTPS issues locally, and wanted to share. My end goal was to run HTTPS with valid wildcard SSL certificate on a Rails server locally (most of this is not Rails-specific.)

Why this is useful

I wanted to do this so that I could see which pages had partially insecure content or looked incorrect when using HTTPS. If your "secure" page loads a stylesheet or image or JavaScript file in an insecure manner, you could leak private user information, etc. You can see whether you are really secure by looking in the URL bars of modern browsers.

However, we only had a valid SSL certificate in production for a client project that I was working on. If I tried to look at the staging server or a local server with HTTPS, I would get a pretty ugly error and the browser would just tell me that the certificate was not accepted. Plus, I wanted to be able to make changes and see the effects locally without needing to push to staging (increasing the feedback loop speed is always high on my list of priorities.)

Setting up the SSL certificate

I followed the instructions at Heroku's Self-Signed SSL Certificate post. I created a script which looks like this (to automate):