Nimble Gecko

Sometimes you come across a job ad and think:

Man, that’s a totally awesome role, and the technologies are just right – all the spanking new, koolkids tech, none of those yesteryear’s spaghetty-code-promoting proprietary technologies; and the project sounds way too rad – an uber social-geolocation-photosharing crowdsourcing app for neo-hipsters.

You have surely seen some crazy people around. A dude walking down the street and yelling uncontrollably and unpredictably. Or that old lady on the train - she always seems to argue with somebody invisible. Man, you tell to yourself, it must suck being those guys. What a mess must be going through their heads all the time!

Even if you change jobs often, having an interview can be a stressful experience. No single interview is the same, and there's always plenty of things to throw you off the track even if you're a seasoned job hopper or a contractor.

There’s plenty of app reviews on the net. Productivity this, getting things done that. But those focus on the features primarily, and not on the long-term impact on one’s life. Nothing like longitudinal case studies that my inner nerd loves. So I’d like to list here some apps that I’ve been using for a while, and managed to change my life for the better while doing so.

Job search often takes a lot of time and can be quite unpredictable - you never know how long will it take this time to find a job. That is especially the case when you have to deal with an extra layer of "insulation" - headhunters/recruiters.

Google Analytics lets you to specify up to four arguments when tracking an event: Event Category* (text), Action* (text), Label (text), Value (number), Interaction flag (true/false).

* denotes a mandatory argument.

I've been manually tracking the number of .NET/C# jobs in Melbourne for some time now. I could've automated it, probably, but it was easier to do it just by hand - it took only a couple of minutes every day anyway. So I thought it wasn't worth it. Although I love automating things like that (sometimes even overly so), I still hesitated.

I just finished watching Patrick McKenzie's presentation "Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It". There's quite a bit of good new stuff in this presentation that is based on his personal, hard-earned experience.

Working for the last several months from home I haven't been to the Melbourne's CBD. As it often happens, taking a break from something - be it a certain type or place of work, exercise or a relationship - anything really - helps to put things into a perspective and look at it from a different, if you like, angle.

Reading Hacker Monthly (#26, "Why you’ll always think your product is shit") I just had this thought. When you look at something you created, say a program, a site, an app or a blog post, and if you don't think it lacks something in certain areas or that it can be made better - you are not looking hard enough. Or maybe you're just resting on your laurels.