Interesting

35 Apps & Services I use daily

35 Apps & Services I use daily

From the moment I wake up till the time I go to bed, I’m always interacting or using some sort of applications and services across multiple devices. Since I’m a software developer, I spend a large amount of my time in front of screens. Even when I’m not working, I’ll be reading and interacting with smaller screens.

So, I’ve decided to go through a typical day and list the applications and services I use on a daily basis. I’ve identified 35 of them and grouped them into categories. Hopefully, you’ll discover something new and can consider adding it into your daily routine.

Effective communication is more than just words

Effective communication is more than just words

If you could only improve one skill at this moment, choose to get better at communicating. Communication (listening, verbal and writing) is one of the most sought after skill in the workplace. It doesn’t matter if you are in a managerial position or not, being able to communicate effectively, provides tremendous value to the company.

A good communicator is not only someone who can listen, speak and write well. She also knows which channel to use to get her message across and chooses the right mode of communication to improve its effectiveness. To get the message across, you have to care more than the words you use.

My toothbrush is better than yours

My toothbrush is better than yours

Even if your toothbrush is newer, cleaner, fancier, more colorful, electrically powered or emits ultrasonic wave, I still prefer mine. After all, why would I want to use someone else’s toothbrush. Yuck!

This is fine if we are just talking about toothbrushes but in reality, we have the same concept towards other peoples’ ideas. We tend to prefer ideas we came up with rather than those from others. This is known as the Not-Invented-Here bias or the Toothbrush Theory.

Culture and values you want in your company

Culture and values you want in your company

The single most important advice Peter Thiel (Co-founder of PayPal & Palantir) gave to Brian Chesky (CEO of AirBnB) after he invested $150M in the company was, “Don’t f**k up the culture”.

He didn’t say “Don’t waste the money” or “Don’t buy a Ferrari”. What he is implying is that you need a good culture to build a successful company. But what the heck is company culture?

Timeboxing

This is a technique I learned over the years from project management gurus to manage time and boost productivity. Instead of letting a task or agenda take as long as it needs to be completed, you set a hard deadline or “time box” for it.

A simple example would be the time limit we have for our daily meetings where we time-boxed it to 10 minutes. This means the meeting can not last more than 10 minutes and if it does, we just end it right away. This is very useful to make sure we don't waste everyone’s time and get straight to the point.

The Pomodoro technique also employs this strategy by time-boxing your task into 25 minutes interval separated by short breaks. (e.g. 3-5 minutes) This teaches you to break tasks into small chunks that can be accomplished within each interval.

Timeboxing has been very useful in software development. The limit forces you to aim for some sort of deliverables when you approach the deadline. It prevents you from spending too much time on a particular task and affects the deliverability of others tasks in the pipeline. The notion of a sprint in Agile/Scrum is basically a timebox of 1-2 weeks.


Some examples of timeboxing we use when developing web applications.

  1. Keep meetings short by timeboxing them.

  2. Plan and schedule tasks that can be completed within a fixed time-frame (e.g. a sprint of 2 weeks)

  3. Prevent yourself from spending too much time on certain process. For example, timebox yourself to only spend X minutes updating status or writing reports.

This is not only useful for your work but also serves as a time management tool in your personal life. Start timeboxing your life and you may discover that you can get more things done.

Inspiring Action

For our last Webcamp KK of the year, we decided to round up a bunch of local talents to showcase their work. We had a film-maker, an animator, 2 web developers, a sound engineer and even a prop-maker showing their work and made it the best Webcamp KK, bar none.

Once again, it shows how passion is contagious, inspiring and universal. Seeing others working hard on their passion inspires all of us to do the same. We plan to keep showcasing and featuring local talents from all over Sabah regardless of what industry they are in. There are always something we can learn from each other.

But we wanted something more. A way to inspire more people to take action and do great things. So we created INit.mya platform to inspire others with passion of our local talents. We plan to do monthly webpisodes that features the awesome work of Sabahan. If all goes well, we will have our first episode by the end of January 2013. 

Exciting times are ahead of us. There are a lot work left to be done but this is a start. And of course, as always, this is an effort from the community. We hope you can come check it out and support INit. Let us know if you know of anyone who is doing great things. We would love to feature and promote them.

Nothing inspires us more than seeing local Sabahan making it big. Of course, if you want to meet some of them, join us at our next Webcamp KK and be inspired!

How will you measure your life?

Recently I read a post by Jason Fried on 37Signals blog explaining why we can only teach someone who are willing to learn.

He met up with the author of Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen who said (paraphrased by Jason), "Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven't ask the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It his your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question - you have to want to know - in order to open up the space for the answer to fit."

Clayton's latest book (How will you measure your life?) is also full of insights on how we should approach our career, family and life in general. He provides interesting and insightful examples from the business world.

his book does not offer answers but rather tells you how to think about decision you make in your career, family and life. It tells you the type of question you should be ask when deciding your career path, what kind of family you want to raise and ultimately what kind of person you want to be.

It's a book I recommend EVERYONE to read. Go get it NOW!

I really really love building on the web

You probably have heard this a million times. Follow your passion. You should find out what you are passionate about and do that. I myself blogged about passion quite often.

But Mark Cuban have a different view on all this fuss about passion. He believes instead of following your passion (which you can have many), you should follow your effort, things that you spend most of your time on because time is a resource that you don't own.

by Hugh Macleod
by Hugh Macleod

This makes sense because if you are putting in a lot of time and effort into something, you are definitely passionate about it and most likely you are quite good at it too.  

I took a trip down memory lane and realized that besides sleeping, eating, being lazy and gaming, I've spent quite a significant amount of my life building stuff on the web.

​Here's a short summary on some of the fun, failed, lame and stupid stuff that I've built.

​Highschool years

  • ​A browser plugin review site. Back then, browser plugin was the craze.
  • Phrozz.com - Attempted to start a hardware review site with my classmates back then (John & Ed)​ hoping to get some free hardware.
  • Website for my school (KKHS). Also did a Flash intro (yuck) and interactive flash tutorials. Manage to win 1st for design, 2nd for content in the SabahNet Homepage Competition. ​First sign?

​At college/university

  • ​dx's playground - Personal site to mess around with PHP. 
  • ​Website for the college's student government so that I can stay in the hostel.
  • Mamak.phrozz.com - A site for my Warcraft 3 Guild (Mamak). Scraped Blizzard's site for guild members' rank to display on the site. I think it was on Postnuke.​
  • ​My thesis in university was basically building a 'better' CMS (Content Management System)

​Entering the workforce

  • ​My first job introduced me to Coldfusion. Built some HR system and CMS with it. I made a simple framework to make it more bearable.​
  • Managed to convince my boss to let me use PHP. Build CMS for clients.​
  • Also did some Visual Basic, C# and ASP.net. Decided to go freelance and quit my job.​

Flexnode

  • Eventnode - Web app to organize events/outings. My first app built with Ruby on Rails.​
  • Reservation system for a resort. My first paid gig for Flexnode.
  • Biznode - Failed attempt to build a project management app like Basecamp.​​
  • Ravejoint - Managed to convince John to join me and ​build a food/restaurant review site. Plan was to sell ads from restaurants. Didn't work out.
  • ​Switched to consulting and built yet another CMS for Freeform. (KLue, Junkonline & Tongue in Chic)
  • Showtimes.my - Our take on how movie showtimes site should be like. ​Probably our most popular site.
  • ​Zoecity - Joined a US start-up that is based mostly in Kuala Lumpur. Built a few products ranging from social network to news aggregator to social sharing service.
  • Startnow.com.my - Attempted to build a site for entrepreneurs and action-takers. Another failed attempt. No traction at all. 
  • ​2 months contract with Says.my. Awesome company and culture.

I left out a few projects here and there but I think it is safe to say that I'm following my effort and it's definitely my passion too.

I'm not a rockstar web developer by any standards but knowing that this is what I love to do and I'm good enough to make a living out of it, is all that I need to keep going. ​

​I really really love building stuff on the web. What about you? Is your effort inline with your passion?