Eric Wendelin's Blog

1. Don’t create prototypes

Clients do not know what they want. Managers do not know what they want. When you prototype, you learn about the constraints you are going to face and your audience learns what they can have and what is impossible. NOTE: Try not to use your prototypes for production code, they are meant to be prototypes. Learn from them and don’t just….

2. Copy the code

When you copy code one of these scenarios is likely to occur: either you don’t fully understand what it does or you may know but don’t think about refactoring it to be better because you expect it to just work. I know many of you out there see this all day long: someone copies code because they are lazy and don’t correctly create an abstraction, and they end up violating the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle. Now when rules change, you have multiple pieces of code to change. Unfortunately, it seems that people who copy code also tend to believe that they should…

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Here is a list of productivity add-ons for Firefox. These are NOT just for programmers. These are split up into 4 groups: Keyboard, Mouse, Upgrade Firefox features, and Google. Did I miss any? What do you use to make you more productive?

Enhance your keyboard (mouse-less browsing)

• Hit-A-Hint - This add-on allows you to click links to interact with form inputs as seen in the screenshot. Just hit “H” and then the letters that correspond to the object you want to click
• Keyconfig - Configure keyboard shortcuts for pretty much everything all in one place. A staple of mouse-less browsing
• functions for keyconfig - This adds additional shortcuts for things such as Tab Focusing, Frame Focusing, Copy URL, and a lot more
• Surfkeys - Make surfing super easy with a keyboard. Sets shortcuts keys for many common browsing tasks (Back, Scrolling, Stop…). Using keyconfig is a must so you can configure these keys, but it is soooo worth it :)

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A life hack reprograms your personal workflow to save you time and effort.

Gina Trapani’s Lifehacker book centers around this philosophy. Life is too precious to waste time doing some monotonous computing task. You must find ways to make your computer do more for you. This book outlines 10 main principles of being a lifehacker, organized into 88 life-hacks that range from taking great notes to accessing your personal wiki on your home computer from work:

Chapter 1: Free Up Mental RAM

Gina explains how to relieve your mind of the brambles of ideas, notes, and tasks so you can concentrate on the task at hand. My favorite tip here is using Flickr to develop your (Digital) photographic memory by taking pictures of signs with store hours, possible gifts, insurance photos, or items that will remind you of something you might need to do. A good lifehacker always has resources to write down ideas or a way to remind yourself
later - even in the bathroom.

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