Anthony Panozzo's Blog

I can assure you that people believe you have skills that you don’t actually have. They also don’t know about some great skills that you do have. These phenomena are a result of personal marketing efforts–whether intended or unconscious.

Owning concepts

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout contain a few laws that I’d like to highlight:

• The Law of Exclusivity: Two companies cannot own the same word in the concept’s mind.
• The Law of Leadership: It’s better to be first than it is to be better.
• The Law of the Mind: It’s better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.

Now consider the following categories and who pops into your mind:

• a giving person
• a great programmer
• a do-it-yourself mechanic
• a politically liberal or conservative person
• a talented artist
• someone who sells things online
• someone who is in fantastic shape

My experiences

Generally I can think of only a person or two for any given category. I don’t know why this is the case. But not knowing the reason does not stop it from being a useful thing to know about.

The four noble truths in Buddhism are, approximately:

Life is suffering. The origin of suffering is attachment, due to ignorance. The cessation of suffering is attainable. The eight-fold path leads to liberation.

I was coding happily along, and realized in a flash of insight that this applied to what I was working on.

In coding, suffering comes from:

• not being comfortable making a change because you don’t quite understand how the system works
• working hard but realizing your code is still buggy
• a client being less than impressed by “a change that couldn’t break anything”, but did
• not being able to refactor because you can’t see all of the implications
• wondering if this ever really worked at all
• having that bug pop up again, although we thought it was fixed
• not delivering with quality and on time

The Four Noble Truths of Coding

Coding is suffering. The origin of suffering is attachment, due to ignorance. The cessation of suffering is attainable. The path of executable specifications leads to liberation.

Have you ever scheduled something and then remembered you had another appointment? Have you ever had a big block of time or energy and wasted it, neither resting nor accomplishing anything?

Earlier this year I started a new near-weekly ritual. I used a tool that I found useful in college for busy weeks. The fold calendar is a way of quickly visualizing a week and using it effectively. Here’s what the daily entries might look like:

Basically, it lists the events of the day in chronological order, with times if I have them. It lists the main project that I want to advance this week and a couple of smaller tasks that I’d like to get done. For context, I list the big things that are happening next week as well.

Why is this useful?

This tool is useful because it:

• helps visualize and use chunks of time
• helps with being spontaneous
• helps with being organized
• helps budget time and energy

Skip down to the last section to learn how to build your own calendar, or keep reading for more context.

Ultimate Website

My biggest accomplishment of the year so far has been creating a new website for Ultimate (Frisbee) in the Indianapolis area. I got a basic concept going one Saturday morning, took feedback and talked to stakeholders, and then made a final version with the help of others in Indy. Notable improvements include:

• pictures from Zach Dobson, a professional photographer in Indianapolis, on the front page
• maps of all the fields that are used for pickup games, with up-to-date information about when they are played
• integration with a league manager that has online signups, payments, and Google Maps support to show where fields are
• live streaming of the 2010 Indiana Ultimate high school championships on June 20th

For comparison, you can check out the old site. I’m really happy that people helped out and offered suggestions and improvements to the site. This project is on autopilot now.

When you have something like

// connect to database
code
code
code

This might be an indicator that you can extract the code under the comment into a separate method to make things clearer and more modular.