Very cool tool for organizing and manipulating a project on PivotalTracker.  I really wish it used oAuth or something, though.

This idea of a simple query language that actually is geared towards normal people is interesting.  SQL was supposed to be that way back when, but no one today would ever claim that a search engine that exposed SQL to users would be better for the masses.  But a simpler version could have some really awesome broad impact in other areas.  As people become more comfortable using semi-structured queries we can use them in our own web apps without extensive education or making them “advanced features”.  I don’t know if Blekko can succeed, but if they can I think the web will benefit in some interesting ways.

This sort of data collection and information extraction is becoming easier and more accessible.  I’ve personally used tools like RescueTime and TrackYouHappiness.org with some benefit.  I can see this becoming more prevalent and also the quality of information (as opposed to data) going up.  I’ve been trying to track my migraines and workouts, but don’t really know what I’m looking for and it is difficult to maintain.  One thing I love about tools like Kissmetrics is that they allow you to throw data at them and then build funnels after the fact with that data.  That sort of post processing seems ideal for life tracking like the article talks about.  Along the same line of reasoning, being able to combine multiple life streams that may individually include different pieces of data about you in to a single system would simplify collection as well.  If my Twitter stream, RescueTime log, Gowalla checkins, and happiness reports were all pulled in and correlated together I imagine I could get a much clearer picture of what things impact my mood and productivity.

Wow, this is really interesting.  I’d love to see what kinds of tracking you could do with something like this.  If it can actually do what they claim it can do this would really expose the aggregate data that is living in twitter.  Heck, the fact that they have a sentiment analysis filter they are making part of this is exciting on its own.

I’m really excited about this new feature of HopToad.  I’ve played around with ExceptionHub but it was missing some important features like team management.  Leveraging HopToad to do this kind of JavaScript/browser level error tracking really cleanly combines two useful and similar tools for debugging a running system.

I should add that I echo the concerns of some of the commenters on the linked to blog post about security concerns.  It would be helpful if ThoughtBot followed this up with a post to address this concern in a bit more detail.

All in all though, this is nice

In any case that is not what I’m here to talk to you about.  In looking through these mp3′s the list of webinars was not collected in to any sort of podcast format.  This is frustrating because this would be ideal commute time listening on my iPhone.  Out of this frustration came podcast.local.  Podcast.local is a simple Rails application (really simple) that allows you quickly create a podcast through a series of forms.  The name comes from the naming convention provided by the Passenger preference pane on OS X.  If you set it up through the pref pane you will just need to go to http://podcast.local.  From there you can create your podcast one episode at a time and then subscribe to them through your iTunes.  The coole thing is that because it’s on the web iTunes just picks it and starts downloading episodes.

Like I said above, this application is too simple to go in to much detail.  I used it to do some experimentation with a few technologies that I haven’t had much time to mess around with.  Namely Blueprint CSS, jQuery, jQuery UI, and Paperclip.  Enjoy!

I’ve been having discussions recently with some coworkers about finding better tools for various aspects of our business. A lot of our discussions are looking at how to organize our development process, but every once in a while it diverges to a different set of issues, especially how we track our developer/designer/account managers’ hours.

If you’ve known me for a while, you’ll know that I get a kick out of trying out new apps and services. I like to find ways to make myself more efficient and better at my job and life in general. Usually I end up throwing these tools away after a few weeks. But every once in a while I find something that lasts. A great example of this is OmniFocus. I had been trying to implement a good approximation of GTD for several years, and in that time I’ve tried probably 15 different tools and online services that implement various approximations of GTD. But it wasn’t until I started using OmniFocus that I really found a sustainable process and a tool that empowered me.

Coming from the agile community the common reaction to “What tools should I use to organize my development process?” is whiteboards, poster paper, and ample note cards. While I do appreciate this tactic from first hand experience, this has some obvious flaws as soon as your team members are not co-located.

Our current suite of tools have a number of failings for a number of different reasons. The reaction that I’ve been hearing lately from my colleagues is that we need to find a single tool that handles all of our major needs. The theory—I presume—is that having fewer tools will mean less manual work maintaining the tools and their content.

I’m not a big fan of this philosophy for a few reasons:

1. It is not likely we will find a single tool that fits all of our business requirements without it being too complex or expensive (or both), therefore our processes and practices will need to be adjusted for the tool. The realist in me is OK with the idea of adapting to the tool to an extent, sometimes the tool can give you a better process that you didn’t know before (eg: OmniFocus), but that’s pretty rare.
2. There are a few tools that are actually working very well for us, however the “one tool to rule them all” model creates artificial value in eliminating that independent tool for a consolidated one that may be less effective.
3. It impairs a teams ability to experiment with new work patterns and tools by adding cultural pressure and often bureaucratic overhead around tool choice. If agile software development is about expecting change and continuously adapting to it, then I want to have the flexibility to adapt everything down to the tools the I use.
4. I’m not convinced that maintenance overhead is entirely due to the number of tools. I think it has more to do with not using the right tools.

Modern application development approaches have really focused on the idea of specialized tools that solve a small set of problems. The old model of monster apps that can be customized to do what you want, but not quite perfectly, is being phased out for interoperability and APIs. Our Github account can send post-commit notifications to our Campfire account, our Acunote account integrates with our bug tracking system, and just about everything will send an email to keep you up to date.

The moral of the story: Why use one tool that does everything just OK when you can have many tools that to their own things really well and will talk to each other?