In this week’s episode, I take a light-hearted approach to discussing the physics of productivity. I’ll highlight some of the more popular rules that govern us and how our awareness of them can improve our work
Show Notes:
• Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)
You can listen to the Cocoa Nomad Podcast on the following services:
• iTunes
• Spotify
• Stitcher
I’d love to hear from you. Reach out with comments, feedback or show ideas on Twitter or Instagram
Photo by Roman Mager on Unsplash
I often meet people who struggle with ideas when trying to create passion or side projects. As someone who has the opposite problem, I’ll share some of the techniques I use to come up with ideas in the latest episode.
Show Notes:
You can listen to the Cocoa Nomad Podcast on the following services:
I’d love to hear from you. Reach out with comments, feedback or show ideas on Twitter or Instagram
My uncle coached youth baseball for a number of years and he left a huge impact on the way I handled myself and players when I started coaching. In this episode, I talk about how that influence has impacted my work as well.
• Give yourself the time and space to learn. There are enough stress/distractions on the playing field (i.e. at work). Kids are hearing their teammates, their parents and the opposing team. Likewise, you’ve got the voices of all of your responsibilities vying for your attention. All of these voices create a significant amount of noise and it’s very hard for signal to get through.
• Proper practice makes you prepared. The more preparation done in practice, the less there is to think about on the field. This preparation includes not only focus on technique but contingency plans and working under duress. The reason teams practice hurry-up offense and audibles is because the conditions won’t always be ideal.
• Leave the judgement on the practice field. Mechanical thinking during game time is counterproductive. My biggest flaw in golf was that I was overly focused on position during play. Instead of simply trusting the process that I’d established in practice, I was judging myself as I was doing it.
• Have fun at practice. The time you spend honing your craft doesn’t have to be dour or onerous. I grew up with coaches yelling at us with colorful language but we also had fun even as we were working hard. Make sure that you make room for that in your practice. Balance is key.
You can listen to the Cocoa Nomad Podcast on the following services:
I’d love to hear from you. Reach out with comments, feedback or show ideas on Twitter or Instagram
In the latest retrospective, I share my excitement about the launch of my YouTube channel, how fun it’s been to build a SwiftUI app for Menus Del Día and my progress with doing training in Spanish.
Show Notes:
You can listen to the Cocoa Nomad Podcast on the following services:
I’d love to hear from you. Reach out with comments, feedback or show ideas on Twitter or Instagram
I came across a post on Facebook, in which you’re challenged to provide the “correct” answer. Normally, I would bypass these as I don’t have much time in the day-to-day work to engage but I had a build that was particularly slow so I “play”
“Which one has two zero and two four?”
I’ve recently started taking formal Spanish lessons again to improve my public speaking and I looked at the question a bit differently. As I started thinking about the solution, I was taken back to my sophomore year of college at the North Avenue Trade school, when I changed my major from Computer Engineering to Computer Science. That summer, I stayed in Atlanta and took a pivotal class, CS1411. It was there that I met 3 of my best friends. It was in this class that I started learning about parsers by way of building an operating system over the course of the class.
Let’s break the sentence down or in compiler-speak apply a lexical analyzer, parsing the components (tokens) in order to make sense of it
“Which one has” – this is equivalent to a query/filter command, returning a single result similar to:
• “SELECT TOP 1” in SQL
• “.first(where: )” in Swift
The correct answer is “It depends”. Let’s look at the ways in which we can interpret the remaining components
The most common interpretation (based on responses) may say that the words TWO, ZERO, TWO & FOUR each represent a LITERAL value. We will also state that AND is a concatenation operator, meaning we simply combine it with the preceding value(s)
With this interpretation, we get “2024” and B is correct
Let’s now say the first number represents a COUNT operator and the following number represents a LITERAL value. We will maintain the rule that AND is a concatenation operator, as above.
“Two Zero” would be interpreted as COUNT (“TWO”) followed by a LITERAL number (“ZERO”) meaning “2 of the literal value (0)”, which results in “00”. Similarly, “Two Four” would be interpreted as “44”
With this interpretation, we get “0044” and C is correct
Imagine that our AND did more than just concatenate, which makes sense as it feels unnecessary in the prior examples. The values can simply be returned, negating the need for the AND (Think “me llamo Alondo” instead of “me llamo es Alondo”)
Instead, consider AND behaving as switch operator, moving between modes of the LITERAL and COUNT/LITERAL interpretations.
• COUNT/LITERAL “2 of the literal value (0)”
• AND (switch modes from COUNT/LITERAL to LITERAL)
• LITERAL(“24”)
With this interpretation, we get “0024” and A is correct
For me, this was a simple reminder that there are often more than “2” sides to something and that the “correct” answer is usually context dependent. It’s important to pay attention to the factors that impact interpretation and therefore resulting outcomes.
In this week’s episode, I talk about the value in creating small things and how you can use it to increase your likelihood of success. I’ll share some of the advantages of starting small and using those wins as building blocks
Show Notes:
You can listen to the Cocoa Nomad Podcast on the following services:
I’d love to hear from you! Reach out with comments, feedback or show ideas on Twitter or Instagram
As aspirational people (those who want to do), we often look to the inspirational people (those who have done it) for the keys to success.
We would do well to learn from those who are in media res (those who are in the middle of doing).
Their stories provide the context of their decision making w/o the fog of memory, sanitization nor embellishment .
It’s why we love the the hero’s journey. We can follow the story as it unfolds. It’s exciting and we don’t know how it’s going to end.
Though it’s tempting to dismiss people who “haven’t made it yet”, I encourage you to reconsider and take advantage of what their journeys have to offer.
Most of these habits listed in this blog post by Andrew King are effective for non-developers as well.
Even 8 & 9, though seemingly development specific, can be modified to match your industry (review your work, save in batches)
Also, remember to REST!! Your body and mind will thank you for it.
The best time to look for the next opportunity is when you already have one.
The best time to start your side hustle is when you don’t have to depend on it for income.
The challenge is that there’s no sense of urgency.
You have comfort.
You have consistent income.
Things are getting taken care of.
Eventually, you’ll “find the time” to work on it, right?
As someone who’s been frustrated with his progress, I had to finally get fed up with the feast/famine cycle of client work to finally make a change.
I encourage you, MAKE the time to get that project going TODAY.
When setting goals it’s important to establish boundaries to avoid negative thinking about your journey. Committing to a certain period and then evaluating afterwards is good for a number of reasons. In this episode, I talk about the importance of “finishing the season”
Show Notes:
You can listen to the Cocoa Nomad Podcast on the following services:
I’d love to hear from you. Reach out with comments, feedback or show ideas on Twitter or Instagram
