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From the 40 books I polished off in 2018 these are what I think you may want to add to your own lists and why. There’s also a Do Not Read list to save you valuable time.

For some reason, I have this impression that the books I read in 2018 were less impactful than those I read in 2017, but drilling down on the list, that’s not really true. The ones I did find amazing though were much more eclectic and a much less consistently thematic than my 2017 list. Probably the biggest problem I had in 2017 was reading books that other people or the industry raved about and which I thought were mediocre or higlhy derivative and a waste of my time. I also lament (really!) for the fact it’s impossible to find what I consider a truly compelling programming book in any area I tried to learn more about.

Emacs org-mode’s focus on plaintext organizing files is surprisingly powerful. However, archiving files to keep thing lean and fast becomes important as your corpus grows. To fit with my GTD style, I took an alternative approach to org-mode’s native archiving and automated it.

My GTD style heavily revolves around a daily org-journal file that collects notes and TODO items into a rational structure for reference and tasks tagged by various semantic grpups, critical to moving forward my 100+ person team. Separate from project files, habits, or my repeating tasks org-journal daily files end up being the meat of moving forward and tracking things across the large organization.

The Emacs org-mode system from last post is supported by a fairly simple, robust email flow designed to GTD and keep me at Inbox Zero and not overwhelmed with mail or have things fall through the cracks. This is how it runs.

For about ten years now, I’ve been using this system which I’ve modified slightly to work with what has become the default mail client for most companies, Gmail, and recently to my experiments with moving to org-mode as an organzier. It is pretty extensible to any offline client you’ll use (or Taskpaper as an organizer) as long as it integrates with Gmail. It’s a combination of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system and a riff on Gina Trapani’s Trusted Trio approach.

Productivity gains compound. So, every year I experiment tweaking my GTD system to get better at goals, planning, and, well… Getting Things Done. This is how things have gone otg-more so far compared with the Taskpaper system I’ve been using for most of the previous five years.

TLDR

Emacs (and by extension, org-mode) has a different philosophy than other tools. The idea is to do everything in emacs, which is a bit out of line with the unix philosophy I’m used to of one tool doing things well (eg. vim) and being able to string them together. It has taken a while to get used to, but after years of vim, I have to admit, I am kinda sold on the idea of an interpreter in your text editor (sorry, vim) though I am not completely sold on emacs itself (though worried I may not be able to move back from org-mode, org-habit, and org-journal anytime soon.). As an experiment, it’s been positive. Is it life-changing? Possibly. Am I sticking with emacs and org-mode? Let’s see.

My only real superpower is travelling well. I’ve crosscrossed and lived all over the world now, and a big part of the secret sauce has been a single, carry-on bag approach to travel. This is my setup.

« Pour voyager heureux, voyagez léger »
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(To travel happily, travel light)

Why travel light? It lowers the cost of moving, both in terms of inertia and money as well as the pain and slowness of modern travel to allow you to seize more travel opps and enjoy yourself more. I travel 25-50% of the time, and abuse my vacation time every year, so I’ve worked hard getting down to a pretty bulletproof setup (for me. YMMV) and people keep telling me to share and asking gear questions. This setup has allowed me to travel virtually indefinitely for months at a time (I think the max is about 3 months steady travel) and covers almost all my business and vacation use cases with a single carry-on backpack (the exception being trips requiring special gear like snowboarding etc., but see below). As with all things, YMMV, but my fervent hope is you can take away some ideas to make your own travelling better and enjoy your experiences more.

It’s time for the 2018 refresh of the Desktop tools I use . I’m amazed what changes year-to-year as I try to simplify and clarify my toolchain and productivity.

Some of the evolutionary changes were interesting as I started experimenting with moving off the Apple ecosystem and moving back to Linux and an environment I move directly control and can future-proof. In particular, it’s brought up interesting compromises (and opportunities) I’d have to consider before making the leap.

From the 48 books I completed in 2017 this is what I think you should add to your own lists and why (and some you just might want to). More importantly, a Do Not Read list to save you valuable time.

A lot of the books were historical, as I was trying to more deeply understand the period between 900 CE and 1600 CE and fit it into my understanding of how that led into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The rest were a healthy, non-fiction dose of science, technology, and career semi-applicable reading.

One of the best things about Padrino is the drop-in admin generator (inspired by Django’s) that makes building simple, robust apps that need to work, run, and be admin-ed by real people a pleasure to work with. At some point though, the natural limits of the default generator will need to be extended as you return huge numbers of records. This is one battle-tested approach we used to be able to paginate and search across 7000+ records via ajax and DataTables setup with will_paginate when the default Padrino admin hit its limits.

I love reading Uses This where people share their tools and workflows. I’ve sniped some great tools from their posts. And back in 2004 when I started the blog, one of my most popular posts was about the tools I’d moved over to as an Apple switcher and early adopter. Time for a 2017 refresh post.

The first thing that amazes me is how much the character of my desktop and tools have changed over a decade. I’ve also changed my tastes considerably to tool selection and usage. I’ve shifted over time to moving to simpler, well-designed tools, with a much greater emphasis on text formats and simpler syncing and future-proofing, as well as adding much fewer things judiciously rather than trying to jumping to the next shiny thing unless it has a clear and compelling value over my current stack in productivity or problems it can solve.

At some point in the lifecycle of any useful application you write, there will be a request to get something out of your system in Excel format. Here’s an easy, transparent method to get downloadable Excel reports out of your Padrino app.

Spreadsheets are still king in most organizations and Excel is still the main tool business users and decision makers comfortably interact with, often for for end user reporting, data consolidation, or intermediary analysis purpose.