So, Passenger now works in Nginx. Merb and Rails are going to merge to become Rails 3.0. Word has it that it won’t be released at RailsConf as originally thought. Let’s not forget Sinatra, Rack, and Thin. Does anyone still use Mongrel? Or Apache for that matter? MacRuby is coming along to be a nice replacement for RubyCocoa, and IronRuby seems pretty awesome too. MSDN comes in a low bandwidth flavor now. Have you tried Windows 7 yet? (It’s coming along nicely…) What about Visual Studio 2010? Beta1 is on its way. How’s IronNails looking? Don’t forget the RubyMine beta. IE8’s debugger is awesome. Twitter is moving to Scala. Currently, I couldn’t write a line of Scala if my life depended on it. A friend of mine brought up Spec# the other day, looks most excellent. C# is receiving a whole slew of new features, and we’re even getting a new CLR. Oh have you heard about the DLR? Pownce shut down last December. Have you tried Popfly? I was playing with it last night a bit. The Surface SDK looks like it would be fun. ASP.NET MVC is a breath of fresh air. Oh yeah and there’s the Silverlight 3 beta. I wonder how Moonlight is doing these days. Are you using RSpec more than Test::Unit these days? (I am). It’s all about git these days isn’t it? I still use SVN. I might as well admit I’m a leper while I’m at it. But even as a spectator I can say that github is pretty damn awesome. Didn’t Firefox 3 just come out? Oh and let’s not forget Safari’s doing the beta thing too.
Information Overload
Is it just me or is all this stuff supremely overwhelming? I’m not even trying, nor am I as plugged in as I could be, and that’s what I came up with in the .NET and Ruby worlds. If I included the latest Haskell, Java, PHP, Python, Cocoa, Linux, GIS etc etc stuff in there, this blog entry would be obnoxiously long. And even worse, this doesn’t include all the internal, work specific stuff I need to stay on top of as well. It takes a lot of energy to keep this stuff under control. Energy that’s not necessarily well spent. Half the stuff above ultimately will become irrelevant to me. Other stuff I can learn as I need it. And still other things I’m not even aware of might be really useful and pertinent to me — if I only knew they existed.
Here at work things are much more under control (but there is always room for improvement!) I have the luxury of a long shelflife for internal points of knowledge; we don’t change very quickly around here. I maintain a tiddlywiki of just about everything I’ve ever needed to know. It’s massively helpful, and has done an awesome job of making me appear to be way more knowledgable than I really am 
I’ve also learned to exploit our Exchange server. If I have something that’s even remotely time based, it gets put on my calendar. It’s an awesome habit to get into. I also use it as a poor man’s file server, create new folders and store emails that have attachments in it. Oh and iPhone + Exchange = life saving. Even simple things like I keep printouts of all my conference call info underneath my phone. When it’s time for a meeting, no worries on finding the number for it.
Don’t get me wrong, I welcome the overload. It’s awesome that software and technology is so active. It seems like software development becomes more enjoyable all the time. But there is so much room for improvement. We’re software developers, surely we can do something? (Or at least I can anyway, since I’m the one complaining) There’s a lot of stuff out there already, from the offerings by 37 Signals (I’m a big fan of tadalist myself), to Microsoft’s OneNote. Just today someone on Reddit posted about KeepNote. There’s more GTD (Getting Things Done) software than I can even know where to begin — especially for the Mac. RSS readers, todo lists, calendars, you name it, it’s out there.
Leveraging What I’ve Got
But most existing solutions fall short for my needs. Anything that is not web based doesn’t interest me. I use at least 4 computers every day — with three different OSes amongst them — and carry an iPhone with me everywhere I go. Thick client solutions, even if they offer some means of syncing, are immediately more trouble than they are worth. I also don’t like how most existing solutions are black boxes and intended to work on their own, or at best with other products from the same vendor. I want to be able to bend and hack these things together to form my complete solution as I see fit.
Here I have this server I am paying for and all it does is serve up this blog. What a waste. Why not create some organizational mash ups that I can then access from anywhere? Make them simple and clean, so they work just fine on an iPhone’s screen? Why not take advantage of the plethora of websites out there that now have public APIs, and the even larger selection of Ruby libraries? What about a personal mashup that lets me see my blogs, tweets, friends, and whatever else I need at a glance, from any machine that’s on the net? If it cut down the amount of time I spend “catching up” even a little bit, it’d be worth it. Why not throw up an online tiddlywiki that I can edit from anywhere? (Oops, I already did) That’s what, an hour at most (it was more like 10 minutes). I could whip up a todo-list app that really meets my needs in a weekend. Does it have to be perfect? Nope, it’s my server
This long winded post is basically me just voicing recent thoughts I’ve had on this. I am formulating plans to act on them. It just seems like there is a lot of potential here that hasn’t really been explored yet. Stay tuned to see what I come up with.
Tags: gtd, organization, server, tiddlywiki