I think the difference is that some of us need a little more structure. By providing a method and a repetitive activity, by the 21st day or so (3 weeks they say), it will become habit. After that point, making a point of solving problems for a particular purpose everyday will be much easier, and you'll be making more progress.
A few stories to illustrate:
1. I had a few friends that made it a point to learn a new technology every day of the month and blog about it. In the end, the friends had learned quite a bit, and even though they only had cursory knowledge of the subject, the structure allowed them to succeed at their goal to have a more general knowledge in their discipline.
2. I have another friend that started writing an application with the point for it to be the central product of a great new startup. This friend is not only intelligent, but very capable in the whole stack, self-organized, and I would have expected him to succeed. However, he lost interest in the end before go-live. there were competitors, and I think he lost the vision that he had in the beginning. He could still finish the product, but now he has another job. I credit this to lack of structure, which is not his fault; I've gotten no where near as far as he did on a myriad of ideas for products.
> I think the difference is that some of us need a little more structure. By providing a method and a repetitive activity, by the 21st day or so (3 weeks they say), it will become habit. After that point, making a point of solving problems for a particular purpose everyday will be much easier, and you'll be making more progress.
Yep, I agree. As long as you are able to find problems to solve. Personally, this doesn't work for me because I am not able to come up with problems unless the present themselves in something I'm working on. I can read 100 books on a subject, but if I can't apply the knowledge or imagine how I can apply it, it doesn't stick. Just different ways of learning, I guess.
I loved this story! The only parts that need a little work were: 1. His background, because he didn't just go from zero to book writer, 2. How in the heck Nick Gauthier decided to co-write with him on a topic Chris previously knew nothing about, 3. Usually "I'm awesome!" is just asking for a humility check... but I think that the point is that you can be awesome.
I've been coding since the mid-nineties and had been content to be good/competent. From there to book writer is, I think, a natural outgrowth of the chain posts.
I know Nick IRL. He had previously toyed with the idea of doing a book. I can't speak for him, but I think he signed up after seeing what I did with The SPDY Book. It worked out well IMO. He took the more in-depth ones, I took the more foundation recipes and then we proof read each other.
Oh wow, I definitely missed that part. For some reason I thought the middle of the post was the end. The bold "How'd I do" made me think that was a closer
First off, this is great. I applaud the fact that you can be profitable working fewer hours, and hopefully paying more than competitive salaries with good benefits.
But, that said, I'm surprised that no one has mentioned here that M-Th, 9-6 isn't a 4-day week, unless you include a required lunch hour, which most don't. So, since you didn't mention that, and I'm fairly sure that you work through lunch as many do including myself, then 9-6 M-Th is 36 hours, which is 4.5 "normal" 8-hour workdays.
I challenge you to be profitable working 32 hours a week (the equivalent of 4 8-hour workdays), preferably using flex time (so people can work those hours whenever they wish) and allowing telecommuting whenever the employee desires, and still be profitable.
I'm on the product team at Treehouse and wanted to comment on a few of the things you mention here. Not everyone at Treehouse takes a lunch hour, but most of us do. I usually spend 30-45 minutes on lunch every day. A lot of our team at the office in Orlando goes to lunch together each day. I was at lunch for an hour and half yesterday with a big group of our product team and it's not like Ryan came and yelled at me afterward. In general I don't think anyone on our team cares too much how long you take for lunch or what your exact hours are. We care way more about what we're getting done than hours.
We also don't all work 9-6. It's a guideline that we use to help us know when we should be available for collaborating with others on the team, but I generally start at 8 AM and end at 5 PM each day.
A whole lot of our team works remotely or at least has the option to, but our video production generally requires that we be on site to produce our videos at the quality we want. Even with the people who need to be in the office there's a decent amount time spent away from the office, though. All of our developers and designers who work on the site work remotely.
Great to hear that. So you say most of you take a lunch hour, and then say you only take 30-45 mins. So, some work 32 hours, some work 33.5-34 hours a week, and others work 36, so that's 4 to 4.5 days a week, depending on who you talk to on the team. When I'm talking about flex time, I'm not talking about a long lunch, I'm talking missing hours in the morning or afternoon because your wife or kid is sick or is in a play at school and making up those hours on Friday. My point is not that Treehouse isn't a great place to work or that a 4 day work week can't work, but that there are a ton of startups that have flexible 40 hour weeks that allow telecommuting, and that flex time and telecommuting add to the complexity, which makes it just as much if not more of a feat to be profitable- and that is my point: it is laudable, but just isn't that big of a difference. If everyone in the office did 32 hours with no extra time and have flexibility to take care of their family as needed and work from any location they want as much as possible if they desire as long as they get the work done, and still be a profitable startup, then that would be impressive to me personally.
Great article on 2-factor auth. I didn't understand how easy it was, so I'm switching to it now. However, if you use a mail client and generate app-specific passwords that last forever, can't the hackers just hack via IMAP login instead which won't be 2-factor?
It seems like it would be better to use private keys on the client with 2 factor auth for authentication recovery. That way as long as you have the right private key locally that your mail client uses, you are set- otherwise you have to both provide a password and an SMS delivered code in order to use a different private key on the client.
And you think that Google actually deletes email when you tell it to? More likely they just mark it as deleted and retain it, in which case every email you ever received regardless of whether you think it has been deleted may be available. If you want better privacy, install and manage your own mail server and encrypt everything.
Do you really think your shared host drops blocks when you delete them from your virtual disk, and do you really think that requests to mlock memory with crypto keys are really honored? Maybe if you have a dedicated box, but not if you are using a virutal host. (Have you ever physically seen "your own" mail server? If not, why do you trust it?)
Also consider what happens to unencrypted email you send or receive: any upstream servers can be subpoenaed, as can the person on the other end. Encrypted mail only works when it's encrypted end-to-end and your adversary cannot seize the sending or receiving computer. I imagine that people who encrypt their received email end up in court because their sender was not so careful. Do you trust every person that will ever mail you to keep your secrets safe? Why?
Ultimately, if the government is your enemy, you need to take a lot more precautions than "don't use Gmail".
See http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe..., which is specific to g-mail, but the same rules apply for other products that store user information. There is a whole team that works on this to monitor the process and help product teams implement the policy.
Deleted messages are wiped within ~60 days. The delay is needed to ensure that all copies of the message are deleted, including those that may be on tape.
Seriously? So you reuse all tapes after 60 days? That wouldn't be a smart thing to do if you really care about retention, and I don't mean solely retaining deleted mail, but just retention of data in general. Regardless of stated policies, I don't believe you. Business critical data like that would not only be stored for 60 days- not in Google.
> Seriously? So you reuse all tapes after 60 days?
I didn't say that.
Someone stated that it was well known that g-mail never deletes data. I posted a quote from the privacy policy that contradicts that. I also said (a few threads back) that there is a team of people whose job is to work with product teams to make sure they are following the policy.
I've worked at companies where the publicly posted policies had little-to-nothing to do with how the company really operated.
That has not neen my experience at Google. Handling user-data properly is taken very seriously. A significant amount of effort (and money) is expended making sure of this.
I can't control whether or not you believe me and I can't go into too many details or share too many war stories. I'm an engineer that has worked at both the bottom of the stack (building the hardware that runs in the data centers) and at the top of the stack (a large user-facing product) and I can tell you that I have many first-hand experiences where protecting user-data was prioritized over other concerns - often at non-trivial cost and effort.
A few stories to illustrate:
1. I had a few friends that made it a point to learn a new technology every day of the month and blog about it. In the end, the friends had learned quite a bit, and even though they only had cursory knowledge of the subject, the structure allowed them to succeed at their goal to have a more general knowledge in their discipline.
2. I have another friend that started writing an application with the point for it to be the central product of a great new startup. This friend is not only intelligent, but very capable in the whole stack, self-organized, and I would have expected him to succeed. However, he lost interest in the end before go-live. there were competitors, and I think he lost the vision that he had in the beginning. He could still finish the product, but now he has another job. I credit this to lack of structure, which is not his fault; I've gotten no where near as far as he did on a myriad of ideas for products.