EC2 teaches bad habits: I almost shutdown a remote non-EC2 server when I was done using it –Eric Hammond on EC2

I like to spend my winter holiday thinking about the year, and what I didn’t do enough of. Next year, I hope to:

1. Write more. Not just web fluff and links (which is fun), but more real fiction and non-fiction. I love to write, but life and complexity just keep on getting in the way.
2. Do more creative stuff. I have an artistic side, but the geek in me naturally suppresses it. I need to learn better balance.
3. Learn more healthy habits. I love good food, I grok nutrition, and I enjoy exercise. I need a bit more of each (and less of the crap).
4. Learn Ruby/Rails well. Last year I polished my C#, Javascript, and Php skills (as well as time spent with SQL, CSS/XHTML, etc.). This year I need to at least know why Rails isn’t for me. So far I’ve only spent a dozen hours with it, which isn’t nearly enough.
5. Focus. Life is noisy. Work is noisy. Learn to deal with both: I will overcome the chaos.

One thing I like to keep in mind with resolutions is that sometimes a year isn’t enough. Life is a garden, and sometimes crops fail. The key is to keep doing healthy things, and remember that growth takes time, practice, and effort.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers. A long-ish essay in the spirit of the classic Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Carmack’s Cell phone adventures I am a big proponent of temporarily changing programming scope every once in a while to reset some assumptions and habits. After Quake 3, I spent some time writing driver code for the Utah-GLX project to give myself more empathy for the various hardware vendors and get back to some low-level register programming. This time, I decided I was going to work on a cell phone game.