A few weeks ago, I got a lot of responses to the following tweet:

As I write this post, Twitter’s ever-unreliable updates counter is showing that I have 9,999 tweets. It’s time for a Twitter Timeout.

Why? I’ve found myself thinking too quickly, without depth, mostly in the form of 140 characters. I want to get back to my place, my blog.

I’m tired of playing in other people’s backyards, as it were. A large part of my interactions with the world are through Twitter and Facebook, two things I don’t own. My blog, my email. Those are mine. Until the Internet gives way to some bastardization of itself in the name of safety, security, or the God-forsaken “user experience,” it will always be mine to give and not at the control of some private entity.

So, I’m shuttering my Twitter account for a little while. I’m not sure how long, but I won’t be responding to any tweets or reading Twitter for a little while.

My contact information is amazingly public (it’s in the sidebar), so there’s no shortage of ways to get in touch with me. Feel free to.

This past November I participated in the PragProWriMo. For those familiar with the NaNoWriMo, the concept is similar. Commit to writing on a technical book every single day for the entire month of November.

I had been kicking around the idea of writing a book on Node.js and decided to use this as an opportunity to see what I had to say on the topic. Turns out that I had about a hundred and fifty pages worth of material.

I’m lucky enough that Pragmatic has agreed to pick up the book, so I’ve got a solid base to build out the tentatively titled Programming Node.js. This post isn’t a book announcement though, it’s about the process.

Why I did it

This past month was mostly for my own benefit. I was certain I could get into a rhythm and turn out a lot of material. My last book took a lot longer than I originally planned and came really close to not happening.

I’m not the first author to find himself behind schedule and feeling like there’s no way out, but it was the first time it happened to me. PragProWriMo was my chance to prove to myself that I could get some serious writing in.

Lessons learned

I’ve got three big take aways from this experience. First, the power of doing first, then talking about it. Second, the power of periodization in sports applies to mental tasks. Third, streaks are powerful incentives.

Actions build more than words

Earlier this fall I watched this talk at Ted from Derek Sivers about goals. The gist is that you shouldn’t talk up you idea, you should just do it.

Studies seems to show that you get the same mental reward from talking about your goals as you do for actually achieving it. I’ve had plenty of ideas fall flat after really talking them up, so I decided to try this tactic and see how it panned out.

That’s not to say I didn’t talk about it at all. I participated daily on the forums posting updates at where I was in the process. I did make sure to not talk about what I was doing though, it was just the end result.

I never made any grand announcement though. There was no blog post claiming I was going to write every day of the month or that I’d finish the month well over half way through a shitty first draft. I just did it.

Periodization: it’s for more than sports

The second lesson was more subtle, but obvious to me in retrospect. I could have written more on any given day than I did. I ended just about every day midstream, but that was fine. I left those ideas sitting there waiting to be explained.

Picking up where I left off was easy. There was no need to figure out what was next. I didn’t have to ramp up and there was no fighting that feeling of being spent. Like I said, this is obvious with the benefit of hindsight. It’s one of the core principles of training.

For those of you who don’t know me that well, I used to be a pretty competitive mountain biker. I spent a few years racing and one of those was spent all over the southwest racing at national events. I wasn’t amazing. I was consistent and faster than a lot of people, but I dove into the process of training. I picked it apart, tried to understand everything, and came away with what I believe is a pretty solid understanding of the fundamentals that underly training as an endurance athlete.

One of the main principles is that you never want to leave it all out on the trail unless it’s a race. You want to end each day with something left in the tank. It’s counterintuitive at first, but the reason is simple. You’ve got to ride tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day.

You get faster by slowly ramping up the pace and the miles, and rarely draining yourself down to zero. You can’t recover quickly enough to get the next ride in when you do that.

I made a conscious decision to limit myself to two pomodoros a day, or roughly an hour of time dedicated to nothing but writing. Keeping the commitment small was key to my success. It kept me from getting burned out and ensured that I was still enjoying the process every day without over doing it.

Keep it going

The final piece is the streak. Today marks the 42 straight day that I’ve written or worked on my book. I’ve spent the past few days converting it from ReStructured Text over to Pragmatic’s internal markup, but I count those as days of work.

I probably could have spent a few hours over the weekend and knocked it all out in one sitting, but I wanted to keep a steady pace so I could keep the streak up. Today marks the 42nd straight day I’ve worked on the book and now that I’ve stretched it out this far I don’t want to see it go away.

Nothing here is new, though. These are all things that other people have figured out before me. This November simply put these things into sharp focus for me and the end result is that I’m half way through a book on a tool I thoroughly enjoy using and think more people need to know about.

For the record, I did miss one day in November. I didn’t write the day I gave my Pragmatic Guide to Git talk at Zendcon. I figure giving a talk is a good enough excuse for missing a day.

I talk with a lot of people about NoSQL. I’ve been following it pretty closely for about 3 years now. One of the things I often tell people who are trying to wrap their heads around the concepts of NoSQL and what all of the data stores mean is to go search for Justin Sheehy and his NoSQL East Talk.

Then it dawned on me, why don’t I just embed the video on my site? Makes it super easy for people to find (travisswicegood.com/tags/riak) and I don’t have to go searching for it.

So, here’s what I consider one of the best talks to date on NoSQL.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve accepted the senior position on the tech team at the Texas Tribune, a policy and politics news outfit based out of Austin, Texas. I’m helping them round out their internal tools and data processing starting next week (the 11th to be precise).

This means some big changes for me and my family. First, I’m moving to Austin. I love Lawrence, the quirky little town that it is, but it’s time for a change. Austin was high on the list of other places to consider (great cycling, big tech community, cool vibe, etc., etc.) so when this opportunity came up I had to take it.

The move is complicated by virtue of owning a house. For the first six months or so we’re going to split the house – me in Austin and Meg in Lawrence. I’ll be spending a week or so a month working from Lawrence so I can help finish up some of the random project on the house that we want to finish before we attempt to sell it. This works perfect with the Lawrence real estate market which peaks in April every year.

What happens to Domain51?

One question I’ve gotten repeatedly is what happens to Domain51? Well, nothing in particular. I’ve spent the last 5 months or so winding it down in preparation for a transition of some sort. Until recently, I didn’t know exactly what that transition was going to be, but I’ve setup all of my former employees on their own adventures and wrapped up the work for existing clients. So it will go back to being my placeholder for any random consulting I do and the legal owner of all of my personal code copyrights.

What about Lawrence?

Lawrence is one of the coolest places I’ve lived. While writing this post I realized that it’s the place I’ve called home more than any other place since I left El Paso years ago.

There are tons of great people here, the culture is great, the weather isn’t half bad (though 2010 hasn’t puts its best foot forward), and it has some of the best food in the world if you’re a vegetarian. I am truly going to miss this town and everyone in it.

Isn’t journalism dead?

Yup, that’s what is so exciting about the Tribune. They’re trying a different model, and helping them make it successful could set the tone for how journalism copes with the seismic forces that are causing it so much change.

The Tribune is adopting what I call the NPR approach to journalism. They’re organized as a non-profit. You don’t subscribe to a paper or some such, you become a supporting member of it. Interested in politics and policy in Texas? Then you need to visit this page for more information about how you can support them.

I am really excited about this move. It’s the meshing of the past year’s work in non-profits and politics into one gig in an industry that is in the mist of a massive shift. How could I not want to be in the middle of that?

My latest book on Git, Pragmatic Guide to Git goes on sale today! I’m really excited about this new book. It’s the culmination of a year’s worth of work on an entirely new format for Pragmatic Bookshelf.

From today’s announcement:

Last summer, Pragmatic author Travis Swicegood proposed a new kind of book covering the popular version control system, Git. We thought it was a good idea–so much so that we’ve launched a whole new series in this format. Check out the details on the series below, as well as Travis’ new book, Pragmatic Guide to Git, now available in beta.

Having a good idea is cool. Having a good idea that you can get other people excited about too is even better. I thought I was onto something interesting when I pitched the idea to Prag, and so did everyone else there. A year later and here we are with an entire new series lined up.

Here’s the quick description of the new book:

Need to learn how to wrap your head around Git, but don’t need a lot of hand holding? Grab this book if you’re new to Git, not to the world of programming. Git tasks displayed on two-page spreads provide all the context you need, without the extra fluff.

David McCandless gave an excellent TED talk on visualization of data. The take-away quote from this was:

Data is the new soil

I love that line. Data gives rise to new ways of understanding something. Presenting something spatially gives you the ability to put it in context more quickly than trying to explain the context.

Take 20 minutes, this video is well worth the time investment:

A few years ago I switched to an old fashion safety razor and haven’t looked back. The latest entry into the razor market has reaffirmed my decision as the right one.

The new Pro Glide from Gillette only costs less than $10 to purchase. Good deal, right? Nope. The replacement blades cost $3-$4 each! Assuming you get a few weeks out of each blade, you’re looking at paying between $6 and $10 every month to use this razor blade.

It’s a great deal—for Gillette.

I use Merkur razor. I paid a lot, comparatively speaking, up front but I can buy better quality razors for less than $0.75 each. They last a lot longer and I end up with a much better shave.

I view the trade-off here as the same one you have to look at when deciding what framework you choose to develop your code in. There are a lot of frameworks that provide a lot of help getting off of the ground. It almost seems too easy.

Write your on custom blog in 5 minutes? Sure! Want to have a RESTful API? Add a couple of classes, some new routes, mark as complete.

Look at the framework and read some of the comments from its detractors. Those complaining generally have one of two problems:

1. They’re going to complain about anything, they’re just ranting. Ignore these people.
2. They’ve hit a legitimate pain point in the framework where they deviated too far from the intended use. Pay attention to what these people are talking about.

If you’re application is significantly complex, no off-the-shelf framework is going to do everything you need it to. Some frameworks may even get in the way. Make sure you realize the trade-offs before you commit.

What makes a good framework?

The best ones serve as scaffolding—in the original meaning.

… a temporary structure used to support people and material in the construction or repair of buildings and other large structures.

Put another way for software development:

… helps you ramp up quickly, then gets out of the way.

Historically, frameworks manage the first part of this well. That’s where they shine. It’s the last part that they’ve had a problem with.

Django manages both of these well. My one complaint with it is that it manages the latter part better than the first. There’s a lot of boilerplate needed to get started, but I can live with that. When my applications outgrow Django, removing Django from the equation is easy with one exception.

Models.

Models are like your razor’s blades. Without blades, your razor doesn’t shave; without models your application doesn’t have any data to work with. The fix I’ve found works best for me is to keep my models then and put all of my logic for operating on them in other areas of the code base.

This separation helps me keep my business logic portable. I might be using the cheap route to get started, but the heavy lifting goes with me if I decide something else is a better fit.

Good, or bad? Jesse Schell envisions a future where every aspect of our daily lives are rewarded by corporate gaming overlords.

Honestly, how different is this than the current frequent shopper cards? Our rewards aren’t points (at least all of the time), it’s lower prices. A lot of our credit cards are already points based. “Get a million points, fly anywhere.”

Yesterday (essentially), I woke up and decide to stir the pot a little bit. I had come across this post while looking into the company behind MapBox. As I noted, I do this to get a feel for what the company is doing. What technology is important to them? What do they value? Are they funded, and so on, and so on.

That particular job posting rubbed me the wrong way, however, because of it’s emphatic no telecommute policy, with them going so far as to call attention to it with a bold font. To automatically shut the door to any potential employee who might be an amazing fit, just not in their particular office seems extremely one-sided.

I woke up ready to write, and did. Before writing my first book, my post would have been rather mellow. I would have presented the case, but not gone quite so far in making my case. This post, I decided to let it rip. Companies that didn’t allow telecommuting don’t get it, end of discussion.

And boy did it work. Nearly 90 comments—between Hacker News and my blog—later, I’m still amazed at the fervor with which both sides attacked the issue. Almost to a T, no one was in the middle on this. Everyone had an opinion. They loved it, or they hated it. Everything from management types saying how their teams wouldn’t be the same if IRC was their only interaction to people with severe social anxiety talking about how telecommuting affords them the opportunity to deal with that anxiety by focusing on their job, not their proximity to people.

I like to mine the edges of the conversation to get the bigger picture. My post emphasized the importance of taking a stand. Had I not been so opinionated, I doubt much interested would have been given to the post.

Honestly, the post is a little harsher than my personal opinion on the subject. Companies that start the conversation with prospective employees by outlining the things they aren’t going to stand for are starting off on the wrong foot, but beyond that I realize that telecommuting does present challenges in some environments and some companies—at their loss—aren’t willing to try to overcome those challenges.

A few months back a recruiter—the flaky kind it turns out—was talking with me about a gig. I was honest that I wasn’t looking to move, but for the right opportunity every thing was on the table. I told him:

I want to be up front with you. I’m not looking to move, but I’m not ruling it out. All I ask for in return is that you approach this with the same open-mindedness. Let’s continue the process, see if its a good fit, then figure out if we can make the logistics work.

Needless to say, they didn’t. Companies, particularly in the tech space, are asking their potential employees to take a chance on them. Companies are taking a risk too, but when companies expect the employees to be the only ones giving (broadly disregarding monetary compensation from the companies for the moment), they set the wrong tone.

A few years back, I’m not even sure when, I started looking at job postings of companies I found interesting. The point wasn’t to find a new job, but to understand the company a bit more.

You can almost always discover what technology a company is using if they’re hiring. I found out Plurk uses Python through this method, that Twitter hasn’t given up on Ruby, and even when it doesn’t make sense Washington DC shops still use Drupal.

That last company is what gave rise to this tweet:

They’re pretty blunt about telecommuting, actually. Going so far as to say “[i]t is not ok to telecommute.” The emphasis is theirs (as seen in this Skitch). This gives me a couple of possible explanations:

• They’ve been burned in the past. They hired someone on who misrepresented himself, his abilities, his capacity, or all of the above. They feel that they gave it a try and it isn’t for them, so they’re not going down that road again. This is the most generous possibility.
• They don’t have their heads screwed on right. They live in a “constantly evolving and fast-paced” environment (as seen on other job postings) which translates roughly into we can’t control our product team, our CEO, or worst, what our sales team promises, so you’re going to have to sit by and wait for the hour-by-hour priorities. Communicating them by any other means than directly from our mouth to your ass, sitting at a desk waiting to turn our ideas into money via that magical electronic device in front of you is too inefficient.
• A slight variation of the previous option is that they lack the confidence in their abilities. They have the vision, the product specs are nailed down, but they don’t know if they can convey them without “reading” the other person.
• Finally, the last possible option is that they’re so out of touch with reality that they believe the only way for work to be done is with “asses in seats.”

Of these options, shy away—no, run, very quickly, away from the 2nd and 4th. Those companies don’t get it. The other two provide some hope, it’s up to as to whether to stick around (or start) and find out.

Companies that don’t allow telecommuting, especially companies that are up front about it, don’t get it. Telecommuting is no longer a technical challenge. Reliable high-speed Internet is ubiquitous at this point. I can see adding that as a requirement to a job posting, but not where you’re located.

With the technical out of the way, that leaves only the social aspect of the company and the position they’re hiring for. I get the culture that requires someone on site. I also realize I’m not interested in working for a company with that culture.

It’s the culture that specs and requirements are fluid based on the latest hallway session. It says interruptions are a part of the day that you should be used to—we like to chat a lot. It’s the we don’t have any realistic metrics to use to judge your performance, so we can only know if you’re doing work by whether or not you show up. That last one has worked so well in the past.

The world’s a big place. There’s a lot of developers in it. There’s even a few kick ass ones. Most of those don’t live near you—even if “this position is located at our offices in Palo Alto,” which is another euphemism for no telecommute. By being up front about telecommuting not being and option, you’re telling me that company comes first (we go to the mountain). Hiring someone good is important, but hiring the best you can afford isn’t.

A company that doesn’t go out of its way to build the best team possible, regardless of where they’re located, isn’t a company I want to work for. It’s a matter of priorities. I’ve got mine straight, they don’t have theirs.