Coding While You Commute

April 15, 2011

australia, color, education, html, productivity, tools

I gave a talk at Brisbane's alt.net recently. You can download the slides here (1.5M zipped) or:

(use arrow keys to advance)

The theme was 'Coding on the Bus' -- the optimisations and approach I've used for cranking out a dozen mini projects on my daily commute in the last year.

A bus is a seemingly counter-productive environment. As I say in one of the slides:

If your workplace was like a bus: everyone would quit.

And yet I'm producing a lot of stuff while on that short ride, definitely pushing the limits of my abilities. So this talk was an attempt to extract all the lessons I could from this real life productivity success story.

TL;DR;

Here's the quick version:

#1 Internet is bad
#2 Keep it damn simple
#3 Value your tools/libraries/snippets
#4 Don't be a hero

The people at Brisbane Alt.Net are a very cluey bunch so it was great to get their input on the whole thing. They were a very attentive and helpful bunch. It was a massive buzz talking to them. I highly recommend it.

...And Introducing Higgins

Naturally, I wrote the slides about writing on the bus, while on the bus. I don't have Powerpoint on my bus netbook, so I also had to write my own html-based slide presenter, which I've codenamed Higgins.

I've since added higgins to codeplex. You can get Higgins from codeplex and use it yourself, if you're so inclined.

Visit higgins at codeplex

Download higgins here