I write code for a living, I love doing it, but I want to do it better.

I forget things, really important things.

Birthdays, meetings, anniversaries, names, outstanding bills, all fall victim to my absent-mindedness; nothing is safe. As programmers we have better things to do with our time, right? Why should we have to remember trivial things like anniversaries when there is code in front of us to crank.

Most of us coders don’t have a personal assistant to keep us on track, and most of us don’t conform to the basement-dwelling, cola drinking, RPG playing, colostomy bag wearing, nerdy stereotype (at least not all of the stereotypes). We are ordinary folk who just like as little distraction as possible while engrossed in some code.

So what to do, how can we still keep our heads in code while having as few untimely interruptions from the outside world as possible?

Over the past few years I have been gradually getting better at remembering and organizing things. By using widely available software programs and apps I have able to save face on several occasions now, but things are still not perfect.

This blog chronicles my attempts at learning, from current tools and practices, and from you, about what I am doing wrong and how we can do it better.

Left to my own devices I can be a lazy and unproductive programmer.

I am scatterbrained; forgetting meetings, birthdays and names.

I fret that I will forget important things and so try to deal with them as soon as I encounter them or just sweep them under the carpet.

Procrastination is a habit that I cling onto like a life raft when things start to get difficult.

I like to think of myself as a typical coder 🙂

BUT,

One redeeming quality that I do have is that I know that I have these flaws and recognize that they stop me from being a better programmer.

Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder.

Mason Cooley

 

I have been around just long enough to know that there is hope for coders like me. I know there exist tools, practices and tips that will enable me to shake the shackles of these common programmer traits and become a more rounded, confident and productive coder. This blog is about exploring these topics and getting opinions on what works and what doesn’t.
EDIT:

LOL! in the course of writing this post I found myself spending an hour [2 hours]: looking for an avatar, browsing Facebook and looking at a whole host of memes from quickmeme.com.