Fellow Yahoo! Developer Blogs

James Broad — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:15:46 +0000

Here is a compiled list of blogs of web developers at Yahoo! that I work with or at least close to. A real treasure chest of knowledge amongst these fine blogs.

A few notable ex-Yahoo! developer blogs include:

Exploring personal task execution efficiency

James Broad — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:10:57 +0000

Having attended a talk by Jason Fried from 37signals at south by southwest, i managed to feel completely inspired by what was spoken and how it was spoken.

What i took from the presentation

It all finally hit home, the message that Jason and 37signals were trying to make; keeping things simple. I realise things should be simple anyway, just having it spoken, made a whole lot of sense, and the general idea is to avoid over-complicating tasks. As humans we strive to make our lives more efficient, but in the process we inadvertently make more distractions resulting in a poor productivity.

Getting things done for me is a hard task. My process in doing things usually involves first thinking:

Is there is a better way of doing something?
If i do not find some magical batch task solution, i will usually ponder on the best way of tackling the matter, again taking up time that could otherwise be spent doing stuff.

Why is this, man it gets annoying as i like to see results, and fast!

Tapping into my thoughts on task execution efficiency

I set myself some kind of mental note now (not a todo/task as that would be too constrained and definite), to try and hit the task on the head and get it done. This is the only way i managed to get this very blog live, by just doing it, instead of worrying on the design, the mark-up on the front end, the way i will market it etc… Its here and it may or may work but at least it got done.

Moving on from the talk

One of the subjects covered in the talk was to avoid certain things, such as avoiding talking to people, which can be considered a distraction, but instead use email/IM/etc. to leave communication to a passive mode, to allow productivity. This is a hard task and i think if taken to literally, could be bad for picking up inspiration, relevant information, and not forgetting you may be conceived as a recluse!

I will do stuff, i will create those apps that i have been meaning to release, i will blog more, i will get more stuff done at work, or maybe not?

My blogging adventure starts here

James Broad — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:31:26 +0000