November is National Novel Writing Month -

You try to write a novel over the course of 30 days. Which seems insane, but if you do 10 pages a day that's a 300 page book. If you sign up on the site it's got some peer pressure social tools to encourage you to keep going.

I'm tempted to see what I can do... I'll journal my progress if I choose to participate.



If you do sign up, please join the Buffalo region:

And add me as a buddy:

I have been trying to follow the principle of 'inbox 0' (background: ). Basically, you get to zero messages in your inbox at least once per day. Ruthlessly, if need be. It forces you to decide if you're really going to need to respond to something, to really think about how you're going to spend your communication time.

For a few months I've been using that system, and found it incredibly useful. Then a week ago I realized that the tyranny of my mail has always paled in comparison to the beast that is my feed reader.

So, I went through my feed reader and deleted all the feeds that update daily or that are only momentarily useful. I'm down to 60 feeds from over 200. The 60 that are left are the ones that update occasionally, and have a very high signal to noise ratio.

It was taking about an hour or two every night to sift through them all and get to 0 unread. It feels nice to be able to do that in 5 or 10 minutes today. I am missing out on some really awesome random information, but the good stuff that I really need to know still finds its way to me.

The downside is fewer random interesting links to post into the (e:strip) chat.

Don't ever dress your daughter up as Gallagher :)



Read all about it:

More work stuff - I need to fill my daily journal quota!

We've got our automated testing down pretty well at work, so on to the next step. We start pair programming every single day in the afternoons tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how this goes, if we can make a habit of it. It's the best way to learn.

( - pair programming )

We aren't going to do it full time, as the linked page suggests, but even part time should be very, very useful. I've learned to hate silo-style development. Everyone on a team should share ownership of every single line of code. There should not be anywhere that a developer fears to tread.

It's a little bit scary to work so closely with someone, the times that I've paired in the past - you have to fumble around and show your inadequacies, but it's worth it when you teach each other new things and hash out designs before they're halfway done. Code is easy to change as you're speaking about it and hard to change later.

The alternative - well, it is very nice to work alone and polish your work before you show it to other people, but it's just not as communicative in the end. I totally go off in the weeds when working alone.

We're going to rotate the pairs - most of the time it will be one Ruby expert paired with one former Fox Pro programmer who is learning Ruby, but is a domain expert in the software. It should be a good match. Everyone will work with everyone though, just to make sure we can all talk together.

Code reviews are coming, probably next month, too.

So the arc looks like -

Phase I - automated test suite: TDD and feature stories.

Phase II - pair programming.

Phase III - weekly team code reviews.

I love my job so much. I love love love it.

I donated $40 last night to the campaign to defeat Proposition 8 in California (Prop 8 will remove the constitutional gender-indiscriminant right to marry, and nullify existing same sex marriages in CA). I'm hoping that James and I can go there next year and get married. Either there, or Connecticut.

We are upstanding citizens, we pay our taxes, don't hurt anyone, and just want to be able to rely on the legal system to acknowledge that we can make decisions for each other in times of crisis. We're not trying to undermine other families. I don't know how we could.

Someone linked to this on Twitter, and it convinced me to donate:



Yikes. is the link, if you're interested in donating, too.