Coding, Writing, and Organizing: Connecting Worlds

I’ve been re-reading The Organized Writer by Antony Johnston over the last few months. I love the book and the system it describes for focusing on writing by organizing away all non-writing (and writing for that matter) concerns. Of particular interset to me is the concept of never losing an idea. The author advocates for carrying a small notebook (or a phone or PDA) to jot down ideas as the arise, then reviewing those ideas later in the day. To me, this is genius!

There was a problem, however. Try as I might, I’ve been unable to stick to the rigor required to write down all my ideas as they occur to me. I’ll decide I’ll remember it later, (I won’t); I’ll decide to try extra-hard to review my notes at the end of the day, (I didn’t); and so on. The author of the book says that the reader should use whatever tool for writing and reviewing notes that they find to be the most useful. I loved the idea. I just couldn’t find the tool for me.

Then, I saw this presentation that I’ve written about before. It suggested working on personal projects in the same way I already preferred working at my job: issue tracking (via github in this case), changing one thing at a time, and documentation. It was revitalizing. I immediately setup three new repositories. Things got done more quickly on my projects.

Then, yesterday, it happened! I reached into my back pocket for my little paper notebook to write an idea into. It wasn’t there. I’d left it on the table next to the ham radio I was copying Morse code from.

I sighed. I reached for my phone, resigned to writing a note into Google Keep that I knew from experience I’d never look at again. Still though, practice makes perfect, follow the methodology. And then, as I was scrolling through apps looking for Keep, it hit me:

Open github instead!

I wrote the idea up as an issue in the project it pertained to, (The Organised Writer also advocates for organizing thoughts according to projects). It was easy! I’ll remember it! I’ll track it! I’ll work on it more! The connection of my two worlds—writing and programming/making—has created a much better, more positive workflow. Is this all just a one day high of connecting somewhat disparate parts of my life? I hope not; I hope it lasts. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Comments

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in...

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:...

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog