Bizness on Rails, Part 1: Why Rails is so Wicked Awesome

On March 3, 2009, Sandro and I gave a presentation at the University of North Florida, for a meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery.

The talk is split in two: the first half covers why Rails is so wicked awesome, the second half covers The Hashrocket Way, our company's not-so-secret, but oh-so-tasty recipe for Agile process management.

Here's a video of the first half. The second half will come out later, parceled out as a series of short-form videos covering Hashrocket's agile processes one-by-one.

Thanks to ACM and UNF and super-nice guys, Giancarlo Wieser and Jason Monsorno, for hosting us!

The Way I Getting Things Done

On January 29, 2009, I spoke about my own special productivity sauce at the Refresh Jacksonville Pecha Kucha Night. Pecha Kucha is a rigid presentation format: twenty slides, twenty seconds each. Talk about embracing constraints! Definitely forces you to get to the point and sit back down. This was my very first Pecha Kucha talk, and it was fun as hell.

In general, I cover the what applications and particular techniques I use. The last part of the talk covers the importance of guarding your attention for focused creative work, and firewalling big blocks of time for the big important areas of your life.

Topics Covered

• David Allen’s Getting Things Done
• Things for Mac
• Things for iPhone
• Inbox Zero
• mail folder organization
• ping pong
• iCal calendar organization
• Spanning Sync
• Quicksilver

Thanks to Jim “Big Tiger” Remsik and Joey Marchy for putting a killer fun night together! And thanks to Sandro’s parents for bringing cake and margaritas for his birthday! A terrific cap to the evening.

Other Coverage

• Watch on Vimeo site
• Obie’s Blog Post
• Refresh Jacksonville’s Meeting Announcement
• Big Tiger’s Meeting Announcement
• Refresh Jacksonville’s Meeting Wrap-Up
• Refresh Jacksonville’s Presentation Slides PDFs
• My Pecha Kucha Bookmarks on Delicious