5 Alternate Uses For GMail

GMail is the ultimate email client. Humorously, the capabilities that are so great for email actually enable several other "features".

1) Note taking - Any time I think of something interesting that I may want to remember, I write myself an email with the subject starting with "howto:". A couple that I visit often are "howto: make SEO work", "howto: deal with meetings" and "howto: amuse users while they are waiting"

2) Bookmarks - I never could get into sites like del.icio.us. Something about going to another site to create a bookmark just didn't make sense. I tried to use the bookmarklets and the browser plugins, but nothing made sense. Then one day I searched for a note that I knew had a link in it because I wanted to find the link. That was when I started sending emails to myself with keywords in the email to help find the link.

3) To do's - To do's are just short lived notes. I almost always delete them after they have been completed. For some reason actual to do lists or to do list software (web based or fat client) just doesn't work for me. I have started to believe that I have to-do-list-ophobia. But if I send myself an email then I am impacting my zero inbox beliefs so getting that to-do email out of my inbox is a priority. Also, I am always checking my email so the to-do is always available, whereas if the to-do list is in software, I have to actively go looking for it. To-do's even have their own tag with the most annoying color combination.

4) File transfer - I can't count the number of times I have used GMail to transfer files from one computer to another. I have emailed songs, books and of course word documents. This "feature" may seem weak, but I would argue it is so strong that you don't even know it is is a feature. You just expect email to send files. Heck, when Gmail came out one of the first things people tried to do with it was put a file system on top of it. Of course everyone is using dropbox for this now, but I still use GMail from time to time.

5) Tell me about your alternate uses for GMail!

Why Ruby and Rails?

"Why should we use Ruby and Rails?" has been popping up at work over the last month. Managers are worried about retraining the Java developers. And the Java developers are worried about wasting their time on some fad. Here are my reasons why you should be using Rails to build a web site.

First, Rails is a web framework, nothing more or less. It claims to do nothing but allow developers to easily create websites. It makes hard problems trivial and impossible problems doable. It claims a 10x improvement in development time. That claim is VERY DIFFICULT to believe, so I will address it later with examples from my current project. Rails should be thought of as a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for web applications. Writing templates or views of web pages is eased with many helpers.

Think of scriptlets in JSPs, but terse code that makes sense. The helpers range from creating links to creating whole forms. All of this goodness is packaged up in an MVC pattern. Unlike Struts, which also claimed to be MVC, there is a single layer for Controllers; each layer is contained in its own directory. Another benefit is the directory layout is standard. If you know the directory layout, every Rails application will be familiar to you. This is a big benefit after you have switched to your upteenth Java project which has it's own directory structure, completely different from all of those that came before it.

Second, you get RESTful web services for free. I can't stress this benefit enough. When you use the generators for Rails you get the server side of a the web service. Building the client is trivial. Remember I said I would prove the 10x improvement in developer time? We are building an application which will have many clients. The clients are mostly Java, so a developer was assigned to write the client for the RESTful Rails application. He decided to write a parser in Java. This took a couple of weeks to write and test. And from time to time we find new bugs in the code.

However, we could have written three lines of Ruby that would have done the same thing. I literally implemented the same thing he had been working on for two weeks in 10 minutes. 8 of those 10 minutes were trying to find the documentation on what needed to be written (sadly when I showed him the Rails way he shrugged and said, I know how to do it this way and I already have this time spent on it. Maybe I should have explained sunk costs). 10 minutes vs 2 weeks, 10x improvement in speed might be an understatement. This isn't the only way Rails improves implementation speed. Writing database queries are a breeze.

Rails comes with its own Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tool called ActiveRecord. Similar to Java's Hibernate in functionality, ActiveRecord improves development by making complex is easy. Rails provides generators to create scripts to create tables in your database of choice (support for many databases is provided including MySQL and Oracle). The generator also creates a Model class for each table you have in the database. The Model class is where you write the code for business logic and any methods needed to access the data. Except, you don't need to write much because Rails provides many access methods without the developer needing to write any code. Rails also helps by providing helper methods to create relationships between objects. ActiveRecord provides support for one to one, one to many and many to many relationships with just a single line of code in each Model class or two lines of code in each Model class for many to many relationships (technically you can do many to many with one line of code in each Model class in the relationship, but that method has been deprecated in favor of the more flexible two method approach).

The last time saving feature of Rails is that you can use Ruby gems in your web applications. Gems are like Java's jar files, they are packages of code that can be thought of as a library. Gems easily support dependencies so having a Gem that requires ActiveRecord is easy to create, which means you can create Gems that natively work in Rails applications. Need a User object in your application? Download one of the many authentication gems available on the web. Find the one that suites your need, install it and you are ready to go. Need to upload files? Install a file upload gem. This capability is available in Java applications too, but for some reason they are more complex.

Finally, Rails is a simple and easy way to get a web application up and running. A developer can finish a week long Rails course with enough fundamentals to be ready to go write a Rails application.

Happiest Now

I can say that I am the happiest right now than I have been in a long time. How long? Since I got married long. Don't get me wrong, I have been happily married, but right now things are just awesome. Why? Some people say that happiness is related to community. Right now my community is pretty spectacular.

Family is near by. I talk to my dad daily, my little brother at least once a week, usually more. My kids and I have daily conversations. And my wife and I have been growing as a couple for the last 5 years, the relationship just keeps getting better every day.

I have a bunch of close friends. This is actually a new thing for me. My wife and I talked about moving back closer to our families, and I ended up not wanting to. Why? Primarily because my friends are here. I have work friends and gaming friends and old friends and new friends. And most of the world doesn't understand that this is a new thing for me. It is almost like Christmas every day. Growing up we moved, alot. We moved so much that in 12 years of school, I went to 9 different schools. Which means I had new friends pretty much every year. The years that we didn't move just happened to coincide with the years that I would change schools (going from elementary to middle school). So now, I have friends that I can say, "remember that time ** 9 ** years ago?" and they can say, "Yeah, that was great". Most people in this world have experienced that by the time they are 18. It took me until the age of 36 to have that happen.

My work life is stabilized as well. I am with a good company, that I trust, and that appreciates me. This is new as well. Looking back at that last paragraph I wonder if there was something wrong with me that caused me to jump companies every other year, because that is exactly what happened. The longest I was ever in one place was 2 years. I was never taught how to be planted. The people at my company are great. The company isn't just stable, it is growing. In this economy that is huge.

So, between my family, my friends and my work relationships, my community is pretty strong right now. Which means, I am a happy man.

Getting Creative

My son and I were having a conversation about some of his writing the other day. I told him that he needed to be more creative in his writing, and one of the best ways to do that is to give yourself constraints. Here is a great article about why constraints are a great way to get creative:

Next, creativity is all about connecting things. It is about knowing x and knowing y and then figuring out that if you put x and y together you will have something awesome. Often x and y are completely unrelated, but just knowing them helps. That means you have to start to learn lots of x's and y's. And they don't really need to be anything in particular, just... learn.

Open your mind to consuming information. And practice. Then put yourself in a position to create something and then CREATE! And do it by giving yourself constraints and using things that you already know.

Improved Office Arrangement

I propose that office arrangements should be re-arranged. Currently the bosses sit in offices and the workers sit in cubicles. Managers are always talking to each other, so if they sat in cubicles it would facilitate communication amongst managers. Also, putting the developers in offices would allow them to stay in the zone because they would have fewer distractions.

Managers say they need offices because the meetings they have require privacy, but I imagine that if those meetings were held in the open more collaboration would happen. They say developers should sit in the open because they need to communicate, but all of the times that I have ever "communicated" I was with a manager.

Who knows, projects might show up on time for a change.