Book Review: The Checklist Manifesto

I recently picked up The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, recommended to me by rave reviews on Amazon. However, once I picked up the book, I felt like it left much to be desired. I was really pleased, initially, that it was a mere 200 pages. I reckoned I could knock it out in a week, and I was...

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Lessons From Building My First Website

I made my first website at http://searchgovernmentjobs.org/ a few days ago - it's at a thin wrapper around a government API that I found at http;//digitalgov.gov. It allows you to search the government API for jobs using queries, examples of which I've included on the search page. The results are all...

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The Power of Habit - So You Like Your Oreo Fix

This is another idea I got from The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg: a great way of quitting bad habits is to not get into them in the first place. Here's an example: Recently, I've been stopping...

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Working Better

For as long as I can remember, I've had Gmail, Google Voice and Google Calendar tabs perpetually open in my browser. However, after reading this article on Working Better by Paul Jarvis, I've decided to close the Gmail and Google Voice tabs in order to "Turn off every notification." This is a difficult...

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Discovering AngularJS

I've recently been pointed towards AngularJS by a mentor. At work, we typically use BackboneJS for our client-side framework needs. Since Backbone is so minimalist, over the past few years we've learned some (sometimes expensive) lessons and developed a set of best practices that minimize the pain...

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The Power of Habit - Willpower

I'm about halfway through The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg now, and ever since his note on Keystone Habits, the book has been dragging on for a bit. I'm going to ignore his ramblings on organizational...

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The Power of Habit - Keystone Habits

Continuing my reading today of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, I came across The Power of Habit's concept of "Keystone Habits." He presents this, in particular, in the context of organizational...

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The Power of Habit - the Habit Loop

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg is a book I picked up recently from my local library. At about 25% in, it's already had a decent impact on my worldview, and I think it promises to be a good read....

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Modifying the DigitalOcean django one-click project to use a custom directory

Hi all, I recently gave DigitalOcean a shot on the recommendation of someone at HackerNews. DigitalOcean has a lot of custom droplets, which are basically Virtual Machines, that you can use to set up a cloud server on which to host your website. I had been building a Django website that I wanted...

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