Archive - Dec 2011

Date
  • All
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
  • 16
  • 17
  • 18
  • 19
  • 20
  • 21
  • 22
  • 23
  • 24
  • 25
  • 26
  • 27
  • 28
  • 29
  • 30
  • 31

December 27th

Domain-Driven Design in 2 weeks!

Submitted by Eric Gerlach on Tue, 12/27/2011 - 22:20

Last year, Darcy got me into the local Agile Book Club, which was reading Domain-Driven Design at the time. Lately, the book club has been stalled. I think the book is too technical for many of them to read and discuss casually. Which is a pity, because it’s a really good book that gives good insights into developing software around an expert domain (something I’m now doing in my new role at TribeHR).

So I’ve decided to read the entire book cover-to-cover as quickly as I can, and I’m going to blog about it here. I think I’ll be able to get half-way done the book by the end of the year, and then do the other half before I have to return the book on the 15th (I love libraries… one thing I’ll miss about the University).

I’ve already read the first half, and I can dedicate hours per day to it so it should go quickly for the first while. Wish me luck!

December 25th

Exercising victorious! Next week, sleeping!

Submitted by Eric Gerlach on Sun, 12/25/2011 - 18:05

Merry Christmas everyone!

I have good news! I have successfully built a habit of exercising over the last 46 days. It was supposed to be 45 days, but I forgot to tweet on day 45, so I didn’t notice that I had passed the 45 day mark until after I had exercised on day 46.

The habit is pretty well ingrained at this stage. Starting around day 25, it became more of a compulsion. Now I barely think about it before starting. I call this a huge success. In fact, today Alex and I agreed that we’d sleep in. I got up at 9 to feed the cats, and it was hard for me not to start exercising at that time.

Given how well it went, I’m going to start a new habit on January 2nd, getting to bed on time. Here’s how it’s going to work:

  • I will have an alarm set on my phone for 10 pm.
  • When the alarm goes off, I will get to bed as quickly as possible. If I’m not at home, that means I start going home immediately.
  • Before 6PM on a given day, I can exempt myself from the alarm by tweeting on @egerlachhabits. If I do that, I must turn the alarm off and set an alarm for 6 pm the next day to remind me to turn it back on.

So, here’s the full plan:

  1. Timeline: January 2nd until February 15th.
  2. Trigger: 10 pm alarm on my phone
  3. Habit: Get to bed as quickly as possible.
  4. Obstacles
    • “I just need to finish this”
    • “I’m in the middle of watching this”
    • “Alex won’t be going to be for a bit”
    • “Five more minutes won’t matter”
    • “I really need to get this done for tomorrow”
    • “I don’t need to be up early tomorrow”
  5. Support structure: Primarily, it will be my wife. She’s the one whom I’m with every night. I will be tweeting about this on @egerlachhabits, though, so if you want to follow and ask me why I’m not in bed yet, I’d appreciate it.
  6. Feedback: This will be a tough point, because I won’t get much. It will be the absence of negative feedback (being tired in the morning) that will be the most beneficial. I will be building on this habit though, and that’s where the positive feedback will come in. I think I’ll restrict myself to playing Scrabble for when I’m in bed. That will work.

This is going to be a tougher one for me. I’m really good at procrastinating going to bed, and there’s no inherent, immediate positive feedback. I’m going to have to build my own positive feedback. But I think I’ll be able to manage it. Follow @egerlachhabits on twitter if you want to find out how it’s going.