Productivity

Requirements

This article outlines my setup and workflow for writing documents using Markdown and pandoc. This is a workflow that I personally find natural and convenient. There are some very important limitations (discussed below), but I’ve been successfully using this workflow for quite some time and it seems to be working great.

Main requirements for my workflow were:

• plain text editing
• keeping track of multiple revisions
• collaboration with multiple simultaneous remote and offline authors
• support for multiple target output formats
• automated publishing (through an external build system and such)

Limitations

Note that publishing is a one-way process in this workflow. If you publish on a Wiki, then you’ll need to find a way to pull the changes from Wiki back into your “source” document. I’m using Git-MediaWiki bridge to publish/update articles to/from our corporate wiki. I’ve also looked into replacing MediaWiki with gitit which uses Git as a backend and therefore would have allowed me to push/pull to it directly, but presently the feature set is not complete enough to be a viable replacement.

It’s been six months since I switched to Dvorak. My current typing speed is 56 words per minute with the average error rate of 6.4%.

It is slightly slower than the 60 wpm I had with QWERTY just before the switch. And the error rate should be below 5% to consider my typing accurate.

Some might say that it’s a failed experiment—not only do I not type 40% faster than I did before the switch, as I hoped, my typing is also slightly less accurate.

A meditative piece in which I explore the notion of productivity as applied to the craft of a software developer (and other such crap).

Yesterday I spent twelve hours hunting down a most bizarre bug. I flipped through literally thousands of lines of code, I set dozens of breakpoints only to realize that those places were being hit hundreds of times, and it is virtually impossible to debug it that way. I tried everything I could think of, but nothing helped and by the end of the day I was totally exhausted and pretty much ready to choke somebody.