Running notes from Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks Danny O'Brien http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4802 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference: http://conferences.oreilly.com/etech/ 11 February, 2004 San Diego, CA by Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- This started when I was procrastinating over all the crap I needed to do and reading my pals and seeing how prolific they were, so I wrote to all of them and asked them how they did it. [NB: Danny is getting tons of laughs and being fantastic as usual -- this is the best session so far at ETCON] The results were surprisingly dull. But the screenshots are exciting and very large (alpha geeks!) and are dominated by enormous shells. JWZ's screen has a flame from someone who wants to know why xscreensaver isn't available for Windows -- "Is it because you're one of those people who actually thinks Linux is a good OS?" Why the shells? Not because these are Unix geeks. Not because of inherent efficiency. Because the people who replied to me were people who work on the public web. Shells are still the system for bridging the private and the public: if you're living through a webserver, you need to have a shell interfact to it. -- People who already get this won't benefit from having someone present the scripts (Guido von Rossum: My 10-line python scripts are just like everyone else's except I wrote a script to interpret them) ETCON is about tech that geeks are using now that will cross the divide into mainstream soon. All geeks have a todo.txt file. They use texteditors (Word, BBEd, Emacs, Notepad) not Outlook or whathaveyou. -- JWZ wrote his answers to the questionairre in his todo.txt Paul Ford has a 27k-line file for this -- What we keep in our todo is the stuff we want to forget Geeks say they remember details well, but they forget their spouses' birthdays and the dry-cleaning. Because it's not interesting. It's the 10-second rule: if you can't file something in 10 seconds, you won't do it. Todo.txt involves cut-and-paste, the simplest interface we can imagine. It's also the simplest way to find intercomation. EMACS, Moz and Panther have incremental search: when you type a "t" it goes to the first mention of "t", add "to" and you jump to the first instance of "to", etc. This is being added to Longhorn (Unix geeks, we've had this since Jan 1 1900, and it will go away in 2038). -- Power-users don't trust complicated apps. Every time power-geeks has had a crash, s/he moves away from it. You can't trust software unless you've written it -- and then you're just more forgiiving. Text files are portable (except for CRLF issues) between mac and win and *nix. Geeks will try the Brain, etc, but they want to stay in text. -- JWZ: Every program expands until it can read mail. Danny's Corralary: Every program that can read mail ends up getting used for everything else. Sysadmins get thousands of emails from automated processes, "My HDD is full, My HDD is full, etc" -- Everyone, including Alpha Geeks, use only one app: People complain about how their work wants them to use organizers... Joel Splosky uses Excel for everything. HR person sends website designs in PPT. Don Lancaster sees the world in Postscript. -- The private blog -- a secret blog, using a tool: Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal: 8 entries every 10 min are private. Closed off from everyone. Announce stuff is moving into RSS -- email announcements to something that syndicates over RSS -- Geeks write scripts to take apart dull, repetitive tasks. They'll spend 10h writing a script that will save 11h -- because writing scripts is interesting and doing dull stuff isn't. Scripts are embarassingly coded, often forgotten. http://simon-cozens.org/programmer/secret-software.html -- Everyone invents the same scripts (i.e. random sig generators) -- Torvalds' first Linux-y email was "I'm trying to write a random sig generator, how do you use a pipe?" Everyone has synch scripts to keep multiple machines in synch. There are commercial apps for this. All geeks back up. They've all learned the lesson. They do it instead of backing up. Synching is the new backup. Spread stuff as widely as possible -- that way the nuke won't get it all. Geeks have boilerplates for invoices, etc. Mungers -- transform things from one format to another. Everyone has something to organize files by creation date and diskspace -- finding archived copies of myDoom, etc. Ward Cunnigham clusters files by time -- see what projects he was involved in by changedates. -- Not much cross-app automation. Not just because it's crap, lots of people were using Win with OLE and MacOS with AppleScript. Geeks don't write giant robots that trundle through their appls. They do little unix-y widgets, not automation (reach into Excel, paste into Word, etc, drive the browser, etc). Longhorn will be the big test of this -- it has a shell. -- People do lots of webscraping. Scrape stuff and turn it into RSS -- make your own feeds. JWZ uses this to help him run his bar. Lots of people do this with banking services -- to keep an eye on their accounts. -- People make utilities to make their stuff public. Not just blogs -- but stuff like Eric Raymond's "shipper" -- package a code into an RPM, upload to SourceForge, announce, etc. Edd Dumbill: Ideas rot if you don't do something with them. Don't hoard them. I blog them or otherwise tell people. This is a way to look organized, "That guy has lots of ideas, what a genius." You only have to be right once -- people google for some idea and find your ramble about it and are impressed. Making stuff public is like having your parents come to stay -- you clean everything up. Email danny@spesh.com with "life hacks" in subject to get notified when lifehacks.com goes live. -- People need: * Decent email search * Easy webscraping * Keyboard macros * filepile for everyone (flickr does this) -- Reco'ed reading: Getting Things Done, David Allen Home Comfort, Cheryl Mendelson Test Driven Development eof