“Don’t wait until the slaptree’s fruits are ready to harvest”, my mom used to say when we misbehaved with my brother. Naturally she meant that if we didn’t cut it out, she would introduce us to another term, one that can turn our cheeks red.

It’s never going to work, telling kids about an awesome tree that they’ve never seen to make them stop doing something. Now we misbehaved twice as much just to learn more about the slaptree.

Soon enough, we learned that things that sound well might not be as good after all.

And, much later, I’ve learned about the power of stories from a different perspective. My first editor told me to always start the article with the most important thing first. “People read news to be surprised”, he said, “when something happened is usually the least surprising piece of information you can start with.”

Most of the news you read in papers are the same across the media: the facts are facts, there is little room to change them without being inaccurate or head-on deceptive. What you can do however, is to look for the most interesting pieces and build the story arc around those. That’s how the Financial Times can be so different from the Daily Mail while the facts remain pretty much the same.

Whenever you say that your product is just the same as any other competitor’s, you’re probably right. But that doesn’t mean that your story has to be the same as everyone else’s story.

There was no plural for the word “priority” in the beginning of the previous century.

Now, I’ve heard this from a friend and the claim doesn’t actually check out to be true, but he has a point.

When everything is important, nothing is important.

Multitasking is a myth: when we think we are good at it, we really are just good at switching between tasks very quickly.

Focusing on multiple things at the same time is therefore simply inefficient. You can memorise two poems easier if you learn the one first and then the other one. Any other method — like memorising the first verse from each poem and then do the rest –, would take you longer.

This year I’m trying to pick up a few new habits. Probably too many of those in fact, but the top three were: do sports regularly, eat healthier and write more often. Building new habits requires a lot of attention, and it’s even more difficult to keep track of many at the same time.

I attribute the so-far high success rate to be able to focus on one habit at the time. For example, it was easy to start with a new sports routine: I only needed to make sure the time slots are set and blocked out, and everyone involved in setting my schedule knew about it. It was a drag at first, but a couple of weeks in I woke up on a Wednesday and couldn’t wait to swim — that’s when I knew the habit is set.

Swimming organically brought changing my diet habits too, because you need to eat something before jumping in the water, and you can’t just eat burgers after a good workout.

It’s actually quite fun how much technology didn’t help with these habits: if anything, all the apps I’ve tried were just distracting. In the aftermath it’s not a surprise, just look at the two most popular habit apps: Balance and Coach.me. How many features are there!

Tracking progress is fun though, and I’ve followed a simple method that I’ve learned from my girlfriend. She would put tiny checks in her calendar for the dates she went to the gym.

Without having a physical calendar, I just drew the days of the month on my blackboard and crossed them out whenever I’ve done sports. Something like:

[01] [xx] [xx] [04] [05] [xx] [07]
[08] [xx] [10] [xx] [12] [xx] [14]
etc.

Maybe someone can show me an app for that?

To open a jar, says my crossfit trainer, you don’t use your fingers. The muscles in the hand are tiny and weak, they are used to do fine things like fiddling around with the pen. Opening the jar, however, is not a fine thing. You need power for that.

The most power would come from the bigger muscles, like the shoulder ones. To open the jar therefore, you grab the lid and hold it tight — that’s the only thing you do with your fingers –, then start turning the lid by rotating your shoulder and elbow, while keeping the fingers straight. You’ll have the jar open in no time.

You lift weights the same way: instead of using your back and the fine spinal muscles, use your core and legs. Those are the strongest muscles in the body, which means you can use them more effectively and impose less opportunity for injury.

Marketing goes like lifting weights.

To oversimplify for the argument’s sake, sales and marketing are for introducing a product to an audience. You find a target group first, and then explain to those people how you can improve their life through a single purchase.

Working on headlines and advertisements, experimenting with messages and formats are the fine muscles. Most of the time they get the job done — in the end of the day, you can open the jar the wrong way too –, but there are stronger muscles out there.

Heavy lifting should be done by the product you’re trying to sell. The sales department will have an easier job if it’s already obvious who will use the merch, when, and what for. Marketing really shouldn’t waste their time on explaining simple things: they should be able to explore new appeals and play around with fine details in messaging.

Don’t skip leg days: build the product so that it’s obvious what it’s for — just by looking at it people should be able to tell what they can do with it.

You’re done when they also want to use it right away.

We had lunch with a friend the other day, the bill came at $18.2; we were to split it in half, as usual.

I was looking at the bill and had this tingling feeling in my stomach.

It’s $18.2. With ten percent tip and rounding to the first decimal it’s $18.2 plus $1.8, exactly $20.

$10 each. We both had a tenner prepared.

I felt like the monkey that just solved a shape-matching-board.

Perfect lunch that is.

Pretty heartbreaking when the project we inherit from its previous devs is not covered by version control.

(By the way, this post is a quick help on how to hire developers rather than a techie rant. It’s safe to continue even if you don’t yet know what version control means.)

First of all, the way I encounter these projects is when a new client comes to us and says that they wanted to finish a project or add a feature to their app, but the original developers had disappeared. The client usually has the latest code, but has never even heard of such thing as the repository.

Not having a repository is not a disease.
It’s a symptom.

Version control can do wonderful things. It gives an overview to who, when and what changed in the source code. Whenever the developer is ready to add some changes to the app, they put those changes in a package, add a description and submit it all. A repository then contains all the code that belongs to the app, together with a human-readable table-of-contents.

Let’s pause here a bit. One look at the repository, and you can tell exactly how much the developers changed in the app’s code. It’s not necessarily enough to establish the exact hours they worked on the app itself (it doesn’t say much about the time spent on server setup for example), but, it’s certainly great insight into what’s going on with the project.

If no one touched the code for weeks, half of the features are still missing and the deadline approaches, it’s quite unlikely that everything is on track. Knowing about this well in advance is the only way to act in time.

Asking for the repository access helps with choosing the right developers as well. First, some companies are not using version control themselves, or just don’t want to provide access to it. Feel free to discard them altogether.

There will be software houses that give you access to the repository only at an extra charge. That’s fine: they acknowledge that they won’t be able to cheat with the time sheets, and it’s only fair to adjust the price accordingly.

One more point to this is that software houses like to get paid by the hour, but the hourly rates don’t provide enough insight into how good the team is. The difference between a good developer and a bad one is day and night. With the wrong team you end up getting next-to-nothing done, and spend extra hours on fixing bugs, testing and maintenance. You will almost surely be required to pay for those extra hours, which, in the end of the day just means to pay for the developer’s education.

Well, at least someone has to.