Productivity Tip: Folder Names

I want to be productive. I like the feeling of GTD. I believe that even small things make a difference in productivity. For example assigning a keyboard shortcut to the calculator application. I don't use the calculator very often, but when I do, I have this warm and cosy feeling that I saved one or two seconds to open it. I'm always assigning keyboard shortcuts. I have been doing it since the early days of Windows 3.1.

One trick I found recently is to name folders beginning with different letters. For example some time ago my main work folder contained subfolders article, code, community, posts, presentation and resource. To speed up folder switching I renamed them to article, blog, community, develop, presentation and resource. Now all folders start with a different letter. Each folder is uniquely accessible by pressing a single key in explorer or any navigator. The same is true for drives.

Finding names can be difficult. They should describe the files inside them. If I don't find a proper synonym or word in a different language, I don't change it.

GeeCON 2010 in Poznan

I'm quite late with this post. Most people have already commented about GeeCON. Well my posts are never real time. The fact that I was working on my "Code-Cop's Codes" project, converting all my repositories to Mercurial and writing a presentation on knowledge management tools used in software development meant I couldn't get it done earlier. ;-) Still, I definitely want to share my experience of visiting GeeCON 2010, which took place in Poznan over a month ago.
The quality of the presentations was excellent. I really liked all of them. This was the most important thing to me because I went there to see the presentations. I didn't care whether the Wi-Fi was slow or if the food was not particularly tasty. I attend conferences to see new things. (Well the food was nothing special, but who cares?) I have attended other conferences before and there were usually a few presentations that were boring or not very good. However, this was not the case with GeeCON! I was pleasantly surprised. Kudos to the GeeCON team and all the speakers. You did a great job.

Presentations
I will not go into detail about the presentations, but there are some things that are definitely worth mentioning:

• Stephan Herrmann talked about Object Teams. It looked interesting, and seemed to be a mixture of anaemic service graphs, rich domain models and aspects. (Stephan, please forgive me for that noob explanation :-)) Fortunately, Stephan is able to attend our upcoming Eclipse DemoCamp. I am looking forward to hearing a more in-depth explanation and getting hands-on experience.
  
  
• Staffan Nöteberg explained the Pomodoro Technique. Despite the fact that it was about a technique that can be used to cope with interruptions, his presentation was hilarious. I was roaring with laugher when he pulled a Teletubby out off his rucksack to represent the project manager. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a pomodoro kitchen timer...
  
  
• Dawid Weiss from Poznan University of Technology gave us an insights into Java in high-performance computing. Instead of slides he used one huge image to show all his content and moved, panned and zoomed around the entire presentation. This was quite a dynamic way to do a presentation.
  
  
• Towards the end of GeeCON, Bruno Bossola talked about object orientation for non-believers. Why for non-believers? This was because he was mocking us (the audience) all the time, which earned him a few laughs. He was really funny, and he was right: Persistence and frameworks are not that important. However, requirements and domain models are. In a nutshell, proper object oriented analysis and design are relevant. We have forgotten what OO really stands for.

Upcoming Eclipse DemoCamp

After all the work I put into last year's DemoCamp, I promised myself I wouldn't organise another one in the near future. Well, it didn't work out like that. Michael persuaded me to organise another one. So, the second Vienna Eclipse DemoCamp will be at the end of June.

Show Me Code - No Slides - No Suits ;-)
We plan to have a different style this year and want to create a more in depth and personal experience. Instead of fancy slides we want to do some live coding, guided by the presenter's vast knowledge of the topic. Hopefully things will run as smoothly as they did last year.