Anthony Panozzo's Blog

I am generally a fan of creating small challenges for myself. Sometimes they are to grow in a specific area, sometimes they are just to see if I can do something for a prolonged period of time. Some of the challenges I have done in the past few years:

• fitness challenge, where I exercised six or seven days a week for six months
• publishing more with a writing group
• keeping track of streaks of habits
• eating two meals or less from restaurant per week challenge
• writing 1000 words each day

The Social Media Challenge

Last year, I realized that I was spending more time than I wanted to on Twitter, Facebook, and the like. These sites would often link to posts that I would also read, and ended up being a huge time sink.

Certainly there is value in finding new articles that I wouldn't have normally read, but on the whole the time was not very well spent. How many of the random articles that I read had something of substance or that I could later recite even a single noteworthy fact from? I found myself trapped in a self-inflicted filter bubble / echo chamber.

The Origins

Miles tweeted this post:

I’m going to half-unplug for April; no Facebook, no Reddit, no HN, limited-to-no [various sportsball sites]. Wanna join me? Peer pressure!

My wife and I currently live on the northeast side of Indianapolis and work near downtown Indianapolis. We have been discussing whether we would like to move, and if so, where. For the past year or so, these talks really haven't had much energy. We'd decide to look into moving, and then not really do anything about it. Currently we're in a month-to-month rental with some nice landlords. However, it's pretty far from where we work.

Last weekend I decided to quantify the costs of commuting. I figured this would give us something to work with and if it was surprising, would motivate us to take action. In typical fashion, I made a spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet shows what we are currently paying per month in total housing costs (rent, utilities) and commuting expenses. By extension, it also shows what we should be rationally willing to spend per month in total housing costs (based on our current costs of housing and work transportation.) For example, if every month of commuting costs us $300 and we are spending $1000 in rent each month, spending $1300 on a place with zero commute would be theoretically equivalent.

Here is the commuting breakdown spreadsheet that I came up with.

What surprised me

Overall, I was surprised by the amount that we should be willing to pay. I expected it to be high, but not 50% more than we are currently paying. Part of the surprise was probably due to the fact that two people's commutes would be lowered.

After doing this analysis, I would definitely question any commute to see how it could be reduced. All things being equal, we would prefer to pay less than more, but this figure gives a nice bounds considering we think our current rent is acceptable.

Today I want to share a quick Ruby on Rails tip that I have used in the past and just used again in a recently inherited codebase.

The general problem under consideration is when you have route specifications where you want to change the syntax, but you didn't want to change how the application works. I had done this in the past when upgrading a Rails app from version 2 to version 3, and yesterday I wanted to make some route changes to reduce deprecation warnings at the beginning of test runs.

In this case, I was getting some deprecation warnings about the syntax of the route. For example:

DEPRECATION WARNING: Defining a route where `to` is a controller without an action is deprecated. ...

So I wanted to fix the underlying issue but leave the routes otherwise unchanged.

I recently published a post to my blog newsletter for the first time in a year, and mentioned a writing group that I had started. One of my readers asked for more details about it. So in this post I'll talk about how our small writing group of around ten people helps keep each other accountable and encourages each other to write more.

The beginning

In August 2015, I decided to write more and more regularly. My writing backlog had increased quite a bit but I was not paring it down much. I had some recent experiences with a weekly fitness challenge and a weekly social media challenge (details to come), so figured something like a weekly writing challenge would work well. Those challenges showed that social accountability helps me stay focused on a goal. Also, setting up a system where I need to do something each week is flexible enough that I can make progress but it is not too onerous to achieve.

I didn't just want to write, though. I wanted to have the writing be accessible to others. So I figured something like a weekly minimum to publish would be good.

I didn't really want to have a financial component like the other two challenges. I wanted to see if the motivation of writing for the group would be enough to get people to write. Plus, I didn't want to have to deal with the hassle of moving money around or setting up a system that was correctly motivational.

Today's post is a short one that I have incorporated into Writing With Vim and will publish when I add a few more changes.

When Vim's spell check is enabled, words that are not known to be good are highlighted as incorrect. This is the behavior that we want generally. However, there are certain types of text that are commonly marked as incorrect, and it can be tedious or impossible to constantly add them to your dictionary.

One example would be URLs. These are marked as incorrect by Vim by default, but it would be nice to just tell Vim to ignore them from the spell check so you can navigate spelling errors more quickly and to reduce the amount of noise on the screen. You can accomplish this with: