The panelists talk about their office setups, tools and workflows.

 

At one point in my past I decided it’d be really helpful to have multiple email addresses. It’s caused me nothing but intense pain.

Hey everybody and welcome to episode 63 of the iPhreaks Show. This week on our panel we have Alondo Brewington.

Hello, from North Carolina.

Jaim Zuber.

Hello, from Minneapolis.

Pete Hodgson.

Good morning. Good morning. Good morning.

I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv, and this week we’re going to be talking about our computer and office setups, the tools we use, things like that. And we might get into some workflow stuff because I know that a lot of that kind of overlaps. I’m kind of curious – I’m pretty sure we all do our development for iOS on Mac since that’s kind of the canonical way. I’m curious though, what models do you guys have? What do you use there?

I have the MacBook Pro right now that came out in 2012 – the first one. That’s been a pretty good machine to me, although I’m itching to upgrade now.

Yeah, it’s old now, right?

Exactly. I was in such a rush to get it when it was announced. I went and just picked one above the shelf that had 8 gig, not wanting to wait to order the 16 gig, which even now I wish I had 16 gig.

That’s funny. What about you, Jaim?

I’m using a MacBook Pro. I bought it in the last year; gave myself a bonus. I've written up all that. I definitely like having a laptop because I go to clients’ sites quite a bit, or I work out of a place downtown, so I can just take my box wherever I’m going. If I work at home, I do have a pretty large monitor – I'd get the Thunderbolt monitor set up – that works out pretty well. I don’t actually use my laptop as a laptop very often, but it’s nice to have.

Nice. What about you, Pete?

I think I’m going to sound like John Siracusa here. You know John Siracusa has that thing where he doesn’t have an iPhone – he has an iPod touch? Have you guys ever heard about that? Anyway, my main computer is an 11-inch MacBook Air [chuckles] from several years ago. I don’t use it for iOS development; I use it for development like Ruby and that kind of stuff. but I also have a MacBook something, something – kind of totally new, big MacBook Pro. Honestly, I don’t use it as much as my MacBook Air because I travel around quite a lot, and I really like having a tiny little computer. I’ve developed lots of really weird habits for working with, I guess, what’s relatively a tiny screen.

Nice.

It’s pretty common to have a MacBook Air as a dev machine. I mean if mostly apps we’re working on are not that large, right, so you can compile it just fine?

Yeah. It’s the real estate that kills you on something like Xcode. If I’m using them or the terminal or just a browser, then it’s perfectly fine. But with Xcode, if I find myself always kind of popping open and close all of the 500 little side things – that’s the thing [inaudible]. It was fine until the assistant thing – the split screen thing – came out. Because that’s so helpful, it became really annoying to have an 11-inch screen.

[Chuckle] Yeah. I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro. It’s the 2013 model, so it’s the latest model. I actually bought it refurbished from Apple, I think. I don’t remember for sure if I got it from Apple or somewhere else, but it’s been pretty nice. To be honest though, I switched between that and my 2000 – what is it – a 2009 or 2010? I have a Mac Pro sitting on my desk and I’ve used that for a long time to do mostly Ruby development and it’s worked fine for that, and that’s what most of my development is these days. But I haven’t had any problems running Xcode or anything else on it. Though I have been tempted, I have to say, to move all of my development stuff over to my MacBook Pro because it has a little bit nicer processor and about the same amount of RAM, and then I can take it wherever I want to go. I found that for some of the projects that I work on, I have to do some setup on my laptop before I can actually work on them. If I was just always working on the laptop, then I could just pick it up and go with it, so I’m kind of toying with the idea. I’m kind of curious – some of you guys mentioned that you use your laptop as more than a laptop sometimes, where you plug monitors and stuff into it. Do you find that that works pretty well?

I actually find that it depends on the type of work that I’m doing. It can be a hindrance in some instances where they actually shrink and the screen can be a distraction. I have a 23-inch monitor that I connect to – it’s not a Thunderbolt or anything. I do that mostly when I’m trying to do work with design and I can have the larger monitor with mockups that I’ve gotten from design and doing this. But when I’m seriously coding and have to do some debugging, I hedge down; I tend to disconnect and just use the laptop alone.

Well, that’s interesting.

It used to be really annoying to have multiple screens and then – not Mavericks, but the one before Mavericks – wait, no, wait, wait, it’s Mavericks where the fixed that. I think Mavericks was where they made the multi-monitor support not suck for doing multiple things full-screen. I think, originally, when I tried to do that, I generally don’t over-plug it into an external monitor, but when I tried that before it annoyed me so much that I just switched it to mirroring mode and just – I don’t know.

[Inaudible] about the way I work; it doesn’t work if the multi-monitor support is crappy.

Definitely, the full-screen support was definitely lacking on previous versions.

Yeah, definitely. It was nice when they made it so that you could go full-screen on both screens. I’m kind of curious there because as I said before, I have two monitors; they're up on these Ergotron monitor arms – I’ll put a link to those in the show notes. Anyway, it’d be nice to just set my laptop down and plug stuff into it and just run with things, and then like I said, be able to –. Sometimes, I just have to get out of the house; I get a little [inaudible] crazy. Because I work from home where the kids are being loud, and I’m just like ‘I just need a break’, it would be nice to be able to just unplug and then run out, but I haven’t actually tried that yet.

It works out pretty well. I mean, obviously, your windows are going to be the wrong size and stuff, but I know I’ve seen people do that pretty successfully. I think it wouldn’t work if you had a configuration of monitors, which was quite popular at my current client is a – what was dubbed the TIE Fighter that was like a big 27-inch [chuckles] or 30-inch display, and then two displays either side but sideways, like rotated to a portrait mode. So, you’re doing that and you’ve got everything –. What people tend to do is arrange it so that all of the terminal output is on one side and maybe a browser on the left-hand side, and then the ID in the middle. If you’ve kind of lovingly arranged all of your windows in just the right spot and then you unplug it, then it’s probably going to drive you a

little bit crazy. Maybe, I don’t know. There’s also this window managers that you can use where you use some gestures or some key combinations to, say, take up the right-hand side of the screen, or take up full-screen, or take up just the bottom third of the screen, that kind of stuff, which is useful if you’re the kind of OCD person that likes their windows in just the right spot.

Yeah. I’m one of those people. I actually use HyperDock. Do any of you guys use something like that?

No, I don’t.

It does a few other things – Hyperdock. It allows you to drag to the top, right, left, or bottom, and it’ll just take up half the screen or quarter of the screen. But the other thing that it does that I really like is I can mouse over the icons at my Dock and it’ll actually give me a window preview. If I have multiple Chrome windows open, it’ll show me both of them and I can just click on the one that I want. There are a few nice things that I like that I get out of that. Are there programs on your Macs that you just can’t live without?

One of the things that I use which I’m surprised not more people use is an open source tool called GitX. GitX is an open source thing, just like a visual git – graphical UI for git basically. It shows all of the commits, and you can kind of mouse around, and you can actually – it’s been forked into multiple different projects, and some of the more fancypants forks allow you to do most of the stuff that you would do from the command-line – actually in the GUI. So, you can create a new branch and rebase, turn to another branch and all that kind of stuff. I don’t tend to use the really fancy forks, but I just use it for browsing through my check-in before I check-in. I find it a lot nicer to be able to –. I’m kind of a little bit OCD about crafting git commits, so I want to go through a file and say ‘this is part of this commit, and this is part of some other commit’. I’ll go through and kinda drag in the files I want, and then you can go into an individual file and stage a hunks with that file and leave other hunks behind – that kind of stuff. It’s super useful to use git a lot and I’m not – I love git, but I think it has a horrible UI from the command-line UIs. It’s a pretty high barrier to enter sometimes.

It definitely takes a while to [inaudible]. I do most of my git work from the command-line, but it definitely helps to visualize some things, especially when you’re dealing with a bunch of different branches, and ‘here’s five commits in this branch, what’s the difference?’ I always forget, “Wait, how do I tell the commits, or how do I tell this part of it? What's different?” So, it definitely helps to have a UI. I use the SourceTree –[crosstalk].

[Inaudbile] I’ve heard of that’s really good. It’s very powerful; it’s got like a bunch of features.

Yeah, and I just click on stuff pretty much. I’m sure it has some great features.

It’s so true. [Crosstalk]

Sums up my life

[Inaudible] to move away from the command-line as much as I was using it.

That’s the Atlassian one, right?

Yes.

Yup. So you use that more often than command-line?

No, I still don’t use it more often than the command-line, but I’m using git lol less [inaudible] trying to do things; it’s just a better visual representation. I was an NSCoder one night and I was just harping about not wanting to use any visual tools, and someone gave me a scenario with gitflow where I became convinced immediately. I said, “Ah, well [chuckles], I probably should do this now because there’s a lot of branches here.”

Yeah. The other thing that I found that’s painful with git is when you merge and you have merge conflict, and so it has a nice UI for handling that. I've seen a few of them that gives you a little bit better visual representation, than the awesome, greater than, greater than, greater than, greater than [inaudible].

Do any of you guys have a visual diffing tool that you use other than just Open Diff or whatever it’s called?

Yeah. All I’m using is Open Diff and it’s less than stellar.

I know a lot of people rave about Kaleidoscope, but I’ve never brought myself to pay – I’m so cheap, because it’s probably like 20 bucks or something – but Kaleidoscope is the one that I’ve always heard of as being the most awesomest visual diffing.

I’ve tried Kaleidoscope. I’ve tried it last year and there were things that – I don’t remember exactly what that didn’t quite work out or wasn’t really that much better than what I was doing. After 30days or whatever, I just let it go and haven’t really used it.

I think I had the same experience. I think, honestly, I don’t [chuckles] – this may make me sound really arrogant – I don’t get merge conflicts that often. [Chuckle] Just stuff works. I honestly, actually, I think it’s because almost all the work I do is either me working on my own, in which case merge conflicts would be the sign of a troubled mind, maybe. [Laughter] And when I’m working in teams, we’re almost always doing just straight trunk-based development with pretty aggressively checking in on a regular basis, so I haven’t actually had to deal with merge conflict for a while. I think if you don’t deal with merge conflicts on a diffing tool, it’s less necessary. Or if you do less branching stuff, I guess a diffing tool is less necessary.

Yeah.

Yeah, I definitely support a commit-often strategy. So, the last person in – they have to merge it, so just commit as fast as you can. [Laughter]

Yeah, if someone says they’ve got a lot of stuff landing soon, you need to just have to get there first, right? You don’t have to beat the bay; you just have to be faster than –. [Laughter]

That’s right.

Yeah, it doesn’t always work out that way. I mean, sometimes, you have that big feature that you spend a couple weeks on, then so you keep merging master back to your branch.

So that’s why you should be practicing trunk-based development and not working on feature branches for more than a couple of days, in my very opinionated opinion. [Crosstalk]

Yeah. Ideally, yes. But it doesn’t always work out that way.

True. Does anyone use the git tools that are built-in to Xcode?

I do not.

The only part of that that I use – it has the little icons next to the files that tells you that it’s different from what’s in git.

That’s nice.

I know that it’s changed. [Chuckle] That’s about it. The rest of it, I just go to the command-line. I have seen a few people – in fact, I’m trying to remember where I saw them, but there are a bunch of command-line alias things where you can do tab completion and stuff, and it’ll do tab completion on branch names and file names and things like that. I’ll see if I can find those, but I’ve had them working on different projects with actually the same person, so I’m pretty sure I can find them, steal them from him.

You mean on like command-line or any –?

Yeah, on the command-line.

Yeah. Just like git bash completion.

Yeah.

Isn’t that like on by – I guess it’s not on by default, huh? I think a long time ago I set that up then it just always works, so I assumed everyone had that. [Chuckle] That’s like the most useful thing in the world if you’re doing git command-line stuff, is to be able to just to tab complete everything.

Oh, like a smart auto-complete for your git stuff?

Yeah.

How do you have that setup?

I think you can just include it in your bashrc file.

Yeah. Yeah. The thing that’s annoying about it is that depending on which distribution of git, which way you’re using git, you have to link in a different file. If you’re using Homebrew, the file is like gitcompletion.bash in /user/local/something. If you’re using the built-in one that comes with OSX, then it’s a different url or it’s a different file path and you need to do a bunch of spelunking around on your computer to find it. But once you’ve found it, you’re golden.

I’ve seen people actually just add it to their dotfiles and just put it in their home directory. They just copy it or sym link it, and then it just works.

Yeah, that would work. So, do any of you guys do source control on your dotfiles, like on your bash lc and all that kind of stuff?

Yeah, I do.

Yeah, me too.

I do not.

The reason that I do that is that I wind up doing work on like client remote machines and stuff. This is much more of a back-end development thing, I guess. But the thing is then I can use something like chef, or I can just check out the repo and then run my install script that I have in there, and then everything just works the way that I expect it to.

I’ve tried something like that with my Emacs files. I was like, “Oh, I’ll put this in git so that I can have them backed up and if go to a different computer, I can just download it and I get all my stuff there,” which is pretty similar. But now every time I type git, everything in my home directory shows up and the list of files change or – [crosstalk].

I think the way that I do that is I have a git repo in a subdirectory, and then I have a little script in my dotfiles repo that installs sym links. When I’m on a new machine, or if I’m – like Chuck said – if I’m on some EC2 instance or something, I can – it’s like a two-line command to clone those dotfiles and then run, install, or whatever I called it, and then it will just sym link things into the right place and then you don’t have that problem.

Ah, here we go.

Yup. Yeah, if you look at mine, I haven’t installed .sh. My chef recipe for setting up my account actually goes and clones this, and then goes and runs and installs that .sh, so when I login, it just runs. It’s all set up and that’s what it does – it just symlinks the dotfiles over and stuff.

The other tool that I’ve played with using – and I’m not sure if I like it or not – is a tool called BOXEN, which is kind of taking all this stuff to the extreme where you use Puppet to automate the installation of all of your developer tools, on your developer laptop – so not on your production service or whatever, but on your local setup. We’ve tried that with our client and I like it, but I don’t totally trust it to use for my main personal machine. I’m fine with using it for pairing stations, but it’s fiddly enough – when stuff changes, stuff tends to break, so I’m not totally sold on it. It’s a very cool idea, though.

Yeah. My thing with something like BOXEN for development machines – I think if I was setting up like a whole bunch of, like you said, pairing machines, then it might make sense to you use that, or like I said before, something like chef or Puppet or something. But I generally use chef for the servers and then for development machines, I mean, I just pull in my dotfiles to configure the command-line stuff and the rest of it I more or less can just setup from the App Store app on the Mac, because it has most of the software that I use in there. Do you guys use an app to replace Spotlight, LaunchBar, or Alfred, or one of those?

I just use Spotlight – command space – it’s right there, so I get to most of my stuff.

Yeah, me too. I used to use – what was the one that was by the guy that eventually got – he went and worked for Google –. Oh, Silverlight. I used to use Silverlight for a long time and then at some point – wait, is Silverlight a Linux thing or a Mac thing? [Inaudible] CHUCK. No. It’s a Mac thing.

Ok. I used that for a long time and I liked it, and then –.

CHUCK. No, it’s not Silverlight. What is it – Quicksilver?

Quicksilver. Silverlight is something totally different. Quicksilver was the one I used for a long time. And then at some point I was on a machine that didn’t have it installed and I used Spotlight for one, and I was like, “Oh wait, all the stuff I do with Quicksilver, I can just do with Spotlight,” so I started doing that instead.

I've never tried anything other than Spotlight.

I use LaunchBar and I really like it. But it seems like Spotlight is becoming more and more fullyfeatured, so it’s able to do more and more of the things that I use LaunchBar for. At this point, it’s just more habit and the fact that I paid for it [chuckles] than anything else.

To some cost.

I’ve worked with some people who’ve got a really customized Alfred setup or something like that, and it does – it definitely looks like they’re very, very productive with it. It’s like “Oh, go to GitHub. Go to my GitHub account” and they kind of like hit five keys on the keyboard and suddenly their browser has launched my GitHub account or something. So, they definitely – I think if you put some care and attention into that tool then it seems like it could give you a bunch of productivity gains.

Yeah, I know that the change log for LaunchBar said that you can now write – I don’t remember what they call them, but they’re basically the little recipes for what you type in there to make it do stuff. You can write those now in four or five different languages. I’m pretty sure you can – I know you can write them in Ruby, and I’m pretty sure you can do them in JavaScript and a couple of other languages they added in the latest version, so whatever your language of choice is, you can build stuff out in them. Yeah, you could do all of that stuff. But at WWDC when they showed off the new Silverlight, it looked a whole lot like what – like a lot of these other [inaudible]. I think they kind of caught on to ‘hey, people are using these third party tools because they want these other features in it’.

I’m curious about what are people’s productivity hacks like. What are they using that gives you a leg up on getting stuff done? Do you guys have any tips?

I’m a big fan of the Pomodoro technique; I use it quite a bit. It’s really helpful for me because it allows me timeboxing, so I'm working on it and staying focused. I’m really distracted a lot of times, which is why I have to switch to single monitors at times. So, it’s all for me. It’s also to sort of get away from a problem because it’s really easy for me to get tunnel vision, and spending a lot of time trying to debug something. Now, I haven’t found a great tool for that. In fact, I’m actually working on creating one myself because the tools that are out there are great for timing, but they don’t really provide some of the additional features that I’m looking for.

Are you looking to kind of keep logging? Kind of keep track of what you have done for Pomodoro?

Exactly.

Yeah, that’s interesting. When you say you’re working on a tool, is that a Mac app, an iOS app, or –?

It’ll start as an iOS app, but I definitely would like to make a Mac app for it as well. With a tighter integration, I think it will be beneficial to users. That way, I can switch between tracking things on my iPhone or iPad when I’m out in a coffee shop to when I get back to my desk, or just having a timer. I’m not a big fan of having a timer unnecessarily going off notifications inside of the Mac when I’m working, again, because it’s a distraction. But [inaudible] because at some level I do need the distraction to let me know to stop working, take the break, and then return.

Yeah, makes sense.

Yeah, definitely yes. I’ve tried most of the Pomodoro apps out there and I don’t really like any of them. I use Focus Booster, which is a very simple flash app. It keeps time and tells me when I can take a break. But yeah – I’m looking forward to seeing what you’re working on.

Ok. I’d love to have you as a beta tester, actually.

Yeah. I’ve done a Pomodoro technique as well. I found that 25 minutes is actually too short a time. The interruption throws me off before I’m ready for it, so I usually go 45 minutes or 55 minutes for my Pomodoro, and then take a longer break, but again I haven’t found an app that really worked out nicely for me either, so I’d be curious to see what you come up with.

How many of those long Pomodoros can you put together?

I can do three or four. But like I said, if it’s a 55-minute of 45-minute, it’s a ten-minute break instead of a 5-minute break, which is also about what I need to get up, walk around, find some food, use the bathroom – whatever I have to do,

Yup. I think it’s a very common critique that 25 is too short. You sit down to work for 25 minutes, you’re in a bit of a problem; your timer goes off; you’re supposed to take a break. After 2 or 3, it’s hard to maintain that focus because it’s [inaudible] to get on Twitter, or check email, and stuff like that. So, over a whole day, I’d stick with 25 minutes. But I see definitely where people are coming from where you get to the first one and you’re like “I just want to keep going. I just want to keep going.”

Yeah.

Yeah, I've actually taken an approach almost like some of the workout programs where you do varying – like circuit training – and I vary the sessions. I try to tailor to the type of work that I’m doing, so I’ll do a longer session when I know I need more dedicated time, but I do sprints as well, like 20-minute sprints when I’m trying to really get something done especially when I need to sort of not go [inaudible] something and I have to force myself to – just like I set that limit so that I can get it done in that time constraint. I’m usually not successful, but it does allow me to at least not spend a lot of time overthinking certain things when I’m working on something.

One other tool that I’ve used – I've used it as a timer, though it’s not designed to be used as a timer – is focus@will, focusatwill.com. It’s kind of – I don’t know what to call the music there, but basically it’s just music with a certain tempo and they have a whole explanation of all of the neuroscience that goes into the music that they play and why and how it’s supposed to help you focus. It has a timer in it; it’s like a sleep timer – you tell it when to turn off after 25 minutes, and so sometimes I’ll do that. I’ll set it to 25 or 45 minutes, and then I’ll hit play, and then I’ll just work until the music stops. The only way that I really found that it works well is in the browser. They do have an iPhone app, but unless you have like a really solid connection to the internet – if I go work at the café or something, it doesn’t really work all that well; the music’s choppy and stuff there, but at home on my machine here, it seems to be fine. So I’ll do that, and then I’ll just get up and do whatever I need to do, and then I’ll come back and I’ll hit play and I’ll do another session. It helps me cut out the distractions, and I’m not sure why that is because I don’t turn off Twitter or anything.

That might be something that I need to think about but –.

I’m curious about the musical aspect to that, because I know some people who are pretty divided along the lines of not listening to things – podcast or music or whether they use them – and I tend to have music playing, particularly with a timer; it’s in the timer. I have actually at times just use the timer instead of a clock app and have it interrupt the music so it gives me that shock of being used to hearing some nice sounds.

Yeah. I think it depends on who you are. Sometimes, if it’s not too mentall-taxing, I’ll turn on a podcast and listen to it while I work.

I used to do that, but then I found that I just don’t listen to the podcast; it’s just totally there as background noise. I think it might actually help me concentrate or help me do something with working, but I always end up frustrated because I feel like I didn’t actually listen to the podcast.

Yeah. I've encountered that as well sometimes, and I’ve had to shift certain podcast that I listen to depending on the person’s voice. Like John Siracusa – it’s not really conducive to [chuckles] to focusing, but it’s great for doing non-programming tasks.

Yeah, listening to someone talk while I’m trying to code – that wouldn’t work for me at all. Actually, I really listen to the music while I’m working. A lot of times, it’s just white noise. If I need to drown out some external sound, I’ll just put on a white noise generator, like from Spotify. Or maybe classical – something like that where it’s just going on the background. It can take a little bit of attention, but anything with words – I’m listening to the words and the music and getting distracted.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that they can’t listen to music with vocals. If they're on a really tricky problem, they prefer – even the lyrics in a song can distract you from focusing on the problem.

Yeah, I get that a lot. But if it’s brainless work, then it doesn’t matter. But if you had to think through a problem, then I need to focus.

You should just try and find more brainless work and then [laughter] try it. That’s what I’m doing.

For me it just depends on how I’m feeling and what kind of workflow I’m in. Sometimes, a podcast’s just perfect and then sometimes, I need something more like focus@will. I also find that it’s harder for me to focus at the beginning of the week, but once I get into the routine of – I've put in a few hours on client-work or on my own projects, then it’s easier for me to get into a groove. Focus@will is usually my tool towards the beginning of the week, and I’m listening to podcasts towards the end of the week, because it’s not as hard for me to get into the rhythm.

That’s a good point about finding time for additional projects, because when I’m doing work for my job, I find it –. I’m sometimes distracted by a side project, so if I can get a couple of hours in earlier in the week just to keep that project moving forward, it’s a lot easier for me to switch back because I feel like I’ve accomplished something, and I don’t worry about what’s sitting back there in the queue, waiting to get done.

Another benefit of the Pomodoro: it helps you focus and timebox things. So if you want to work on something for an hour or two – you can do that.

I’m kind of curious, where do you guys work? Do you work at home? Do you work in an office? Are there tricks to being more productive in the office or at home?

I’m a big proponent of movement; I'm sort of nomadic by nature. I like to be in different places, whether it’s a city or a different location. I spend most of the morning working here in my home office, and usually by midday I go to a Starbucks or something – a place where I can work for an hour or two, and then I’ll relocate. I may go to another place; sometimes, I’ll spend an afternoon at a sports bar just sort of non-mentally-taxing work, and then back at the home office, so it gives me a bit of variety. It allows me to get away, get up from my desk, too. I started carrying those speedometer apps in my 5S, and I realized I was not moving, so I definitely had to start taking action to get more mobile and take more steps during the day.

That makes sense. What do you look for in a place that you get out to go work at?

Usually, I just need a large table and I wear headphones to drown out any ambient noise. I’m not really worried about conversations, although sometimes I’ve been in – I’ve worked in a few coworking spots where other company’s conversations are really distracting. The other thing is typically a variety of types of seating, because I also like to alternate between sitting and standing during the day. I have a standing desk at home and I also have a sitting desk, and I alternate between those two as well. Again, I just want to – I find it the more that my body physically has something to engage it [inaudible], the better I am at focusing and getting things done.

What kind of a standing desk do you have?

My old standing desk is just a sewing table I got from my mother and some milk crates, with two [inaudible] that I’ve created to a variable height to set the monitors and my laptop on. I’m actually building one; in fact my pick – one of my picks this week is a plan for a standing desk from parts I got from IKEA. It looks great; it’s a great looking desk, so it’s one of those things that will make your home office look really snazzy.

Alondo, you got to send pics with the home-made one. That sounds awesome.

Yeah, I want to see the milk crates. [Crosstalk]

[Laughter] You don’t want to see the milk crates version.

A bunch of folks at my office, they would build standing desks by just putting a shoe rack on top of the tables. They had this crappy kind of like [inaudible] shoe rack, with a 27-inch iMac in the middle making it sag. [Laughter]

Wow.

Yeah. So then, of course, the solution to that was to take a kind of coke and put that underneath to act as support. But it’s a little bit too short, so then you had to take one of the other standard-issue snacks that are in the office. I can’t remember what it was, but you put back underneath the can of coke, and that holds up a 27-inch iMac. It’s a perfect solution. I’m surprised there isn’t a blog post about it that I could link to.

I have a standing desk here, and that’s another part of the draw for me of using the laptop for everything; because I have a Mac Mini over on the other desk, so again, if I move over, I have to pull and update and do whatever I have to do to make it all work over there if I switch desks. So it’d be nice if I could just grab the laptop and just go stand over there instead of sitting over here, because I could just continue to work.

I think Marco Arment might have everyone beat with a Coca Cola can standing desk. There will be a link in the show notes.

Yeah.

I got to see this.

As someone who pair programs most of the time and someone who doesn’t like standing desks, I have to admit, I think that standing desks are the bane of civilization. [Laughter]

Oh, wow.

No, I’m exaggerating, but I don’t know – I just can’t get into the whole standing-all-the-time thing. I get way too antsy, like I stop wanting to walk around and I just have a hard time with it. So if I’m pairing with someone who does like standing desks, then it ends up with me just kind of being antsy and wandering around  or –.

It definitely takes some getting used to. We’ve actually had a few people at the office who have gotten a treadmill desk. I tried to hook up my laptop to an exercise bike and for a week or so just to try to ride, but I realized that riding an exercise bike and coding are just not sympatico; it just doesn’t really work well.

I think the treadmill desks work a little bit better just because, at least, your upper body isn’t moving a lot because you don’t turn it up very fast. But yeah, I’ve been tempted to try that.

In one of the Ruby depts [inaudible] he does it every day; he’s logged thousands of miles, but the bike is swaying so much, it’s not just productive.

Yeah, I tried a rock-climbing desk, it didn’t work. [Laughter] I’m not sure what I was thinking.

Very nice.

I want the opposite of a standing desk. I want to lie down on my back and have the monitor just kind of levitating in front of my face desk.

There you go.

Isn’t that what Chuck has? He’s kind of laid back if you put him on video; [inaudible] laying back, you know. [Crosstalk]

I have a Herman Miller Aeron chair – I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, too. Warning: your pocket book won’t thank you for buying it. But it is a very, very nice chair. I would have either my legs going numb or back issues sitting in the chairs that I had before, and this one I’ve had for what – a year and a half, two years – and I haven’t had any issues sitting in it. And it’s completely ergonomic – it totally adjusts to everything, but yeah, I have itsetup so that it lays back. I’m not sure – maybe a 20 or 30 degree angle leaning back, then I position my monitors up so that they’re kind of eye level so that I don’t have to hold my head up in a weird way to see them, or to look at them and have it feel natural. And that’s where this Ergotron arms come in.

Oh, you really have implemented my idea.

Well, not quite. I’m not lying down, but I am leaning back quite aways; but it’s really nice. It’s really convenient, so if I hooked up my laptop to this, I just plug it in and leave the monitors where they are. But I also have the headrest, so it just props my head up at the proper angle, and then I don’t have like weird neck pain or anything. It’s important to me that way as well, because I tend to get tension headaches. My tension headaches originate with my – it’ll start at the base of my skull and work its way up at the back of my head, and it all ties in with my neck muscles. I also have a condition in my jaw called TMJ, and that also feeds back into that. So, if I’m clenching my teeth or anything like that, I tend to get just awful headaches. The fact that I can position my head and kind of relax tends to alleviate that to some degree so that I don’t get the headaches as often.

That’s nice. I’m definitely due for an upgraded chair. It’d be a good investment.

Yeah, well they come with a 20-year warranty or something on Aerons. It might be a 12-year warranty, but for an office chair that’s pretty awesome. And mine – I don’t know how big anyone is; if you’re taller you want to get the large one; if you’re bigger around you probably want to get the large one. Mine’s the medium-sized one and it fits me just fine. I’ll put links to that and the headrest as well.

So, Chuck, you and I work on home offices or things like that. Pete and Alondo – they’re up and about. What are some tips for getting the right working environment when you’re kind of up and about, either at client sites –? Or Alondo, your employer, if you go out there, do you have tips for getting your setup reasonable?

I’ve done so many different setups. I love co-working spaces, but you have to really be careful with the space. I would definitely say if you can plan ahead, you really want to have franchises that you prefer. For instance, if you’re really comfortable working at Starbucks or – Panera Bread is a place that I find a lot when I’m on the road that is a great place for me to work. Co-working spaces are so varied that some of them have privacy areas, and some don’t, so you may want to check them out online. I tend to look at a few – I look at the websites, check out the spaces, and determine if it’s going to work for me if I’m going to be in a particular city. I’m rarely working in that mode when I’m at the company location in Boulder. We’re typically just having meetings so we’re in cabins and things like that, so it’s typically not an issue. It’s just a matter of if there’s a desk in a room or we’re basically around each other for a long time. But I would definitely say if you find places – franchises that you like – particularly –. I don’t want to over-publicize Starbucks but anyway, you get the free Wi-Fi. But if you have a Mi-Fi, of course, that doesn’t matter. I’ve tried McDonald’s and even Dunkin Donuts as well as a few other places, but again, it’s the seating more than anything else. You have to get a place that’s comfortable, that’s not too crowded, and somewhere that’s just [inaudible]; you have to find locations that you’d like. I haven’t found any resources where people rate these places for working at all, but that would be a great idea if someone did, where you could sort of do a little bit of reconnaissance before you work in a particular city to find the best places to get work done.

Yeah, that would be nice.

There was one of those in San Francisco for a while – the San Francisco Ruby Users’ Group – because they tend to be very itinerant. There was someone who started one of those, and actually, a bunch of people got really mad about it because it’s kind of like a secret [inaudible] spot. If you find a good co-working space or a good café, you actually don’t really want half of San Francisco showing up with a freaking laptop. [Laughter]

That’s funny.

Yeah, there was like this whole little tribal war of like “Dude, you can’t tell anyone about that place on 6th; it’s been my secret for four years. I’m so productive there and now, there are all these hipsters with MacBook Air. [Chuckles] I want to be the only one there.”

I liked it before it was cool, though.

Yeah, exactly. I want to pull up the ladder as I climb into the tree house.

Yeah. One of the things that I found with co-working areas is that – I tend to go to Paradise Bakery, which is actually owned by Panera Bread out here in Utah; I just go sit in a booth, they're pretty comfortable and I can pull the blinds down and stuff. Alondo already talked about putting your headphones in and things like that, but the co-working spaces – I found that some of them are better than others as far as being interrupted, which is a problem that I found when I worked in an office. People come up”Hey, I’ve got a question” or “Hey, what about this?” and working from home, you don’t get that as much. Most of the co-working spaces that I have worked in that I liked – they had the headphone rule. If you have your headphones in, it means don’t bug me; and if you don’t have your headphones in or you have some other indicator on or around your desk that says “Hey, go ahead and ask me a question,” then people can come up and interrupt you. That way, you can signal the people ‘hey, look. I’m trying to heads down and get some work done’.

I actually have those little [inaudible] things they put on the table at the Brazilian Steakhouse. [Laughter] You just have like a green light, yellow, or red.

Yeah.

“Ask me questions” and the other one is “go away.”

I’m your enemy, Chuck. I spend most of my time going to my clients and telling them to take their headphones off.

[Chuckle] I’ll tell you that when I worked in an office, that was like the only way to get things done. I put my headphones on, and I made sure the big headphones to go over my ears, so that it was very clear that I was listening to something. Unless it’s an emergency – people would get dirty looks or I act like I was really unhappy about being bothered; because it would happen every ten minutes.

Yeah, you have to set the tone. You definitely have to make sure that people know that boundaries are there.

Yeah, you need the balance; you need collaboration. You need to talk with your team members here, not spending all your time focusing on writing the wrong thing, right? But you can’t get any work done in ten-minute sprints – any real thinking done, so you have to get your collaboration time, then go off somewhere in your little bear cave.

[Inaudible] with me now. I've worked with another iOS developer and we just tend to have calls or ping someone. We use a tool called Slack for our chat, and we’ll just ping each other and say, “If you got quick sec to do, we’ll stand up.” I mean, hang out or something and we can just talk through an issue. In fact, we’ve done two this morning. They usually doesn’t last long – five or ten minutes to talk through an issue, separate, and just go back to doing what we’re doing.

Yeah. I’ve been using Slack for the past week or so with a new client, and it’s working pretty well when you can kind of group up to whatever topic you want to discuss. If you’re working on a feature with one other person or two other people, you can have your little private channel where you can put up the bat signal and ask for help, or get questions and guidance.

Let me ask you a question about – because we’ve gone through all of these tools. Have you tried other ones before you settled on Slack? It seems like every six months we’re using a different one.

Most of my work is just Skype; open that and that works fairly well, at least to the point where I wouldn’t go with the full service unless it was a big enough company where that was kind of a constant problem. But I’ve been pretty happy with Skype.

My client is currently using Flowdock, and you can setup different channels and things like that. I

also work for a company that just use the IRC.

Okay.

They all have their pros and cons; it really just depends on what you need.

HipChat’s the other one I know people are fans of. I think Slack kind of ate a bunch of HipChat’s lunch.

We switched from Hall. We were using Hall up until about two months ago.

I think the thing that made Slack kind of blowup so impressively in terms of adoption is just it’s super low-friction to get started with. Like someone adds you, or someone sends you some link, and then two minutes later, you’re in a bunch of rooms and communicating with people. I think it’s very impressively low-friction. And they wait until you’re hooked, and they’re like ‘Surprise!’ [Laughter]

Speaking of tools, what do you guys use for task management or project management?

Hoo! Ok. I use multiple – we use ScrumDo for work, but I also use Pivotal Tracker as well; I'm a big fan of it. I’ve used Rally on several client projects, but it’s just a bit heavy. I mean, there’s some great features in there, but it’s so much to know how to use and to take full advantage of. I’ve found Pivotal Tracker, and even Trello for smaller projects with fewer collaborators, worked really well.

I feel obliged to plug my company’s product [chuckle].

Go ahead.

ThoughtWorks have a thing called Mingle, which is somewhere in between maybe JIRA and Trello. It’s actually been around for a very long time, and it’s like – it’s the thing we built because all the things that are out there weren’t quite what we wanted, so we built our own. I actually really like it and it’s quite easy to get started. It’s ridiculously customizable; maybe a little bit too customizable, that you can spend your entire day just fiddling around with it, but it’s good if you’re a fan of extreme programming, or Scrum, or kind of Agile, Kanban-y, Lean type stuff; it works out pretty well.

I work with so many different clients that I don’t really settle on one. I use them all for the month I’m working with this client. A lot of my clients are small companies that don’t really have a fulldevelopment team where they have these tools, so I end up just doing things by hand – keeping track in Evernote.

The one that shows up the most for me is JIRA. I’m the same thing where I go to a bunch of different clients, and it’s a different thing with different clients. The most common one that I see is JIRA. Actually, the most common one I see is a wall with some sticky notes on. [Laughter]

That is not a bad way to go, I have to say.

I mean it’s great as long as you don’t distribute it. If you don’t have remote people then I would do that every time; I would not use software to solve that problem.

It’s good if you have a local team, but if you have like all in one room, you have scrums all day and you can’t actually get into the scrum room to look at your notes, you’re like, “What did we decide we wanted to do?” “I don’t know. We can’t go in there for another two hours.” [Crosstalk]

Yeah. We just got moved from one floor to another floor and they wanted us to put all of our walls in a shared space, like ‘oh, we’ll just put them all in the same place’. Well, the whole point of them is they’re supposed to be right next to the team, so if we have to walk somewhere to go and see them and someone else is there, then it’s defeating the purpose.

Yeah.

At the office, then you can reserve time to go see the office to go to the scrum board. [Crosstalk]

I worked for a company – they put all of our stuff into a Gannt chart and then printed it off. Then they put it all the way down a 50-foot wall; and it really went down the whole wall. [Chuckle] This is how we’re going to get all of this done. We’re just like, “Ok, guys!”

That’s how you make it happen. Once you’ve printed it, that’s reality, right?

That’s right, it’s on paper. I have to say, I’ve used Pivotal Tracker and liked it. I've used Redmine for a while, and I liked the fact that I could customize at some because it’s written in Ruby on Rails. But I’ve kind of settled on Trello – somebody mentioned Trello. For my business to-do’s, I’ve actually been using RedBooth, which used to be Teambox; it’s just kind of nice – a little to-do list text for tool.

Yeah, I will say that it’s a great, visceral feeling though when you have that physical board where you move something over that you just don’t get from dragging a card.

For sure.

Jaim, I’m a little curious. Do you use a CMS for your business to keep track of leads and stuff?

I don’t.

Or CRM. Sorry.

Like customer relationship?

Yeah.

I don’t, really. I was thinking about saving like a wall on my office with kind of leads and things like that. I don’t have a formal process for that, But I’ll keep things in Evernote and I'm just going to list the things I want to accomplish this week, get estimates or whatever I want to do, and I’ll just keep tracking stuff in Evernote. I have my little, kind of homebrewed system. I don’t really have enough stuff where I lose track of people that want to give me money, so it hasn’t been a problem yet.

Yeah. I use a blend of Office Autopilot, which is the CRM; and RedBooth to do that stuff, so –.

Office Autopilot is also not a cheap solution.

There are definitely lots of very cool SaaS apps that you can do to help modify those things. Lead generation keep in track of your contacts. I just haven’t really hit the bullet on any of them.

I’m curious about that, Jaim, because I’m a big fan of Evernote, but  I never thought about using it beyond note-taking. I have all these notebooks and I just take lots of notes and I cache lots of things, and that’s great so I can go back and search tags and whatnot. But it sounds like you got a little more extensive workflow with git.

Yeah, a little bit. It’s not really extensive, but if I have takeaways from a meeting, I have those in a

certain place so when I happen to call the client, I go to that notebook with the takeaways that we had from the previous meeting just to keep track of it. It’s not like I have 20 clients at once, so it’s just me and just getting my head in the right space.

Evernote also has some tools for that. There’s Evernote Hello, which you can use to get people’s information and pull all that stuff together.

I’m definitely not using Evernote to its fullest potential.

What is Hello again?

I’ve seen it used as kind of a contact form so people can fill in their information, and then puts it into a note for you in Evernote. But then, it also does some work to tie different notes to that person’s record and stuff like that. I’m not completely familiar with all of the features, but I did try it out.

Very nice.

So, what about design? Do you guys use particular tools to get design done for your apps?

I have to say, that’s a definite place where I’m lacking in both experience and a toolkit. I’d love to hear what other people are doing.

I have someone else do that stuff for me. [Laughter]

That’s my solution.

+1. Okay, I think we’re all agreed.

I am curious, though. Do you guys tend to do – like you do the layout in interface builder or something like that, then you hand that off to somebody so that they can pretty it up, and then you just go back in and put the design in place, or do you have somebody design it up front, and then you go and build it?

I think someone who designs interfaces would be justifiably be a bit offended at their job being prettying it up, right? Like, their job is to build a useable interface, so I think that it normally means they want to talk through what’s the task the user’s trying to accomplish, and then build an interface that helps to accomplish that task and it’s also delightful and all of those other kind of hand-wavy designer words. Normally, I think it works out best when you have someone – an experienced designer or a usability designer or an informational architect or another – all these other two-letter acronyms who goes through and builds the experience, and then hopefully paired up with a developer, so the developer can say “Hey, that’s going to be really hard to do. Can we do it this way instead?” You know what I mean? That’s where I’ve seen that fall down is when someone throws a huge stack of pdfs or Photoshop documents over the wall to you, and say “Hey, look! I made this delightful experience” and it’s like, “Oh, wow, this is going to be really hard to build” just because it’s so simple. There are a few simple tweaks you could make and it’ll be way easier to build, but because there wasn’t any communication between the two people, they ended getting a bunch of work for no extra value. [Crosstalk]

Right.

Yeah, [inaudible] have that be at least part of a collaborative process. [Inaudible] person designer, say, “Hey, I’m thinking about this” and you can get back to like “oh, this is cool, but for a tenth of the time, we could do something like this and that may be enough,” and generally it is enough if they’re ok with it.

That’s the time when you see the interface designer guy approaching you – you take off your headphones? [Chuckles]

Yes.[Crosstalk]

Zing!

You just made my work so much easier. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury working with a fulltime [inaudible] person very often. A lot of times, I’m kind of going through that stuff, so it does help to have someone with a good design sense go through and –prettying up is not the best word for it, but having it look nice, having it look professional, presentable – something that people would want to use versus my brute force interface builder skills.

Yeah. That’s what I meant where a lot of times I’ll get in and I’ll just make something functional. In other words, all the buttons are on the screen [chuckles]; you can do the stuff that your app’s supposed to do, and then somebody will come in and actually make it so that somebody will want to use it be that that they rearrange things, they add a few transitions or screens, or whatever to your overall design and stuff like that – pick some colors, a good background, and make it pleasant to look at and nice to use. But I’ve also seen it the other way where you effectively – you get a design where it’s – here’s the Photoshop or here’s the whatever file, and this is what it’s supposed to look like. When I click here, this is what it’s supposed to do, and not click the tap or whatever, and then it works out that way too.

When you’re working with clients, do you typically have a designer that you work with on a frequent basis, or is it something that the client provides?

It depends. Sometimes, they have the design in-house. Sometimes, they have a designer they’ve already worked with. Sometimes, they don’t want to think about it, and so it’s, “Hey, who do you know, or do you have somebody on your staff that can do it?”

Yeah. It’s a little tricky bringing a designer along with you because you have no idea what the client likes or what they’re going to want out of the app. It’s such a personal thing – there’s kind of a design sense.

I’ve been wanting to sort of learn more about doing it because I have a few apps of my own, and really tired of shipping programmer arts. So it’s one of those things where I definitely either need to establish a relationship with a designer I can work with, or just get better; but there’s a time constraint in the latter.

Yeah, one thing that I’ve also done – I have a friend of mine that he’s done a few logos for me. Usually what he winds up doing is he’ll send me the logo along with the color scheme that goes with the logo and the fonts that he used – if there’s text in there – and that’s usually enough for it to look ok with just what I’m able to do. And then from there, I have a few designer friends that will just give me pointers, and so I can sit down and I can say “Hey this is what I’ve done. Do you have any suggestions about how I can make it look a little bit better?” A lot of times I get free advice, but at the same time, it’s on the level of something that I can fix on my own.

It’s a really good idea of getting the color scheme and the fonts – that’s really helpful. One of the challenges I have is trying to determine a lot of times sort of what would go best [inaudible].

So if you haven’t designed the icon, then you can get all the other information from them for that.

Okay.

I’ve always found that design is very much like of a dark art. I understand that there’s loads of theory and smart stuff behind it, but I never really – I kind of felt like I was on the other side of the wall. Just recently, I have a Code School membership, and I did the Code School course on fundamentals of design, and that was actually really helpful for me. I don’t think I’m going to be designing anything well anytime soon, but it does mean that I can kind of understand – I have a little bit more empathy for designers now, and I kind of understand a little bit some of the theory of how they work, like color theory and why fonts are important, why there’s a difference between different types of fonts and grid systems and all that kind of stuff, so it’s worth it. If you’ve got a Code School membership, it’s worth watching. Some of it felt a little bit silly to me, honestly. The exercises that you do as part of the course felt a little bit silly, but I think that’s because I’m not a

designer and I just don’t have that mentality.

I found talking to designers and working through some of the books and things that I’ve read, that design is a lot more scientific than I thought it was. I thought people just looked at things and you had to make it pretty; but there’s a lot more to it than that. I think that a lot of it just comes down to practice as well, kind of like programming where you kind of get an eye for ‘this is how the code should look; this is how this problem should be solved; these are some patterns I’m going to use; these are some techniques that I’ve developed that worked well under these circumstances.’ I think designers are kind of the same way. I mean, to a certain degree, I think there’s some fundamental skill involved that you either have or don’t; but I think any programmer can pick up at least the basics. They may not make great designs, but I think they can learn how to make good design and learn at least what the concepts are behind it.

Which goes completely out of the window as soon as you put the app in front of the users [chuckles], unfortunately. I don’t envy a designer’s job at all, UX.

Well, but that’s the other thing, right? If you get into things like lean startup and stuff like that, that’s what they encourage you to do: put it in front of your users and see what they do with it. And that’s really where, I think, you’re going to get the most out it anyway. Having a great design will give you a leg up; you won’t have to learn those lessons per se, but yeah – you definitely won’t know for sure until you see somebody using your app. Alright, we’ve been talking for a while. Should we get to the picks?

Sure.

Alondo, do you want to start us off with the picks?

Sure. Okay, so as we we’re talking about workflows and setups and things like that, one of the picks that I have is for the desk that I’m building. I’m using parts from IKEA; I actually drove across the state because the closest one is four hours away. I picked up the parts I’ll be assembling in this particular standing desk pretty soon. It’s a much better organized standing desk than the one I built with milk crates and what-not. So that’s the first pick that I have. The second is a really good article. It provides a nice overview for the iOS privacy updates from Luis Abreu. It’s a blog; it just talks about the different APIs and the privacy updates there and things to think about. It’s coming from a designer’s standpoint, but it’s still really informative and a great post. Then finally, I have a drink. I’m a big ginger ale fan; I love beer, but I also love ginger ale. And being from Atlanta is a great local company called Red Rock, and they have this just incredible delicious ginger ale. But I will warn you – it is strong, so if you are used to drinking Canada Dry or something like that, this is really, real ginger ale, so be prepared.

Like a really spicy –?

Yeah, it’s got a little kick to it. You can get it shipped; they will ship it to you and it is absolutely delicious. So those are my picks.

Awesome. Jaim, what are your picks?

I’m going to have one pick. We talked about tools that we used. I wasn’t thinking about one; I use this so much that I don’t think about it. It’s Rapportive, which is a plugin for Gmail. If you get an email in your inbox, you click on it, and on the side panel, you get the user’s LinkedIn information – Twitter, Facebook. If you're interacting with someone that you don’t really know, you could say, “Oh, they’re on Twitter,” so you can check that out. It’s just a way to account or organize your email and find out more about people you’re actually emailing with. I’ve been using it quite a bit and it’s nice.

That’s my pick – Rapportive.

Very nice. Pete, what are your picks?

I’ve got a ton of little tools, so I’m just going to read them all and provide links. Command-line tools – ack is a better version of grip; hub adds some extra GitHub specific features to git, so you can say like, ‘hub, clone a specific GitHub repo; tree lets you see the tree structure of your directories; tmux is awesome; xctool – I think I picked before but it’s like a better version of the Xcode build command-line tools; s3cmd is a really nice way to push stuff to s3, which I use a lot because I do a lot of static site hosting on s3; and cloc.pl – C-L-O-C (dot) P-L – is a pearl utility that will count the number of lines of code in every language I know of pretty much. Those are my command-line tools. One not command-line tool is MindNode Pro. I’m a big fan of mind mapping. When I’m thinking of things, when I’m like coming up with conference talks, or blog posts, or ideas for things, MindNode is a nice way to do mind mapping with a computer rather than with a pen and paper. I think I’ll stop there. I could keep going; I’ve got a long list here, but I’m going to stop.

Very nice. Well, I’ve already been talking a little bit about my pick this week. I’ve been putting everything into Redbooth, and so I’m going to pick that. They also have a plugin for Gmail; it’s a

Chrome plugin – it’s not a like a direct plugin. I found that a lot of the tools that I use these days for Gmail are Chrome plugins as opposed to actual plugins for Gmail itself. Another one that I use is Yesware, which is – it integrates with your CRM, and it’s pretty handy as well. Then we talked about git management tools, and most of the development I do is actually in Emacs because most of the development I’m doing is Ruby and not iOS, though I am doing iOS stuff. In Emacs, I’m using Magit mode – that’s M-A-G-I-T mode. I’ll put a link in the show notes as well, but anyway, I really, really like it. I wind up doing all of my git management stuff kind of streamlined into my development process. Anyway, those are my picks and I guess that’s it. So, next week we’re going to be talking about Viper with Conrad Stoll and Jeff Gilbert. Other than that, thanks for listening. We’ll catch you all next week.