Better

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July 22, 2009 at 12:01am

This article rated PG for dropping of an a-bomb, non-atomic variety.

Over the course of my mini-vacation, I read a lot of books. In particular, I read Programming Ruby (minus the reference), The Pragmatic Programmer and revisited the excellent TextMate book from Pragmatic Programmer (If you’re noticing a theme here you should note that PragProg has a lot of my money, and an east-wing named “Kenny’s Money”). The purpose of this leisurely excursion into the netherealms of paper-knowledge is a precursor to a process of mine: getting better.¹

Better is not a goal

There is no measurement of better. There is a measure of worse or awful, called a Bixbian or a Bixby unit, but that’s not related (except for this site, which is 5 Bixby’s). If you look up better in the handy Apple dictionary you get this:

of a more excellent or effective type or quality

Since I am neither more excellent or an effective type (I’m ducktyped! nerd joke!) I provide a simple definition for being better:

The devil you know: automated

Achieving better as a goal would just be preposterous, avaricious of your time even. Say for example, if I may get a bit meta here, this article and its future spawn will hopefully make me better. I’m writing them to understand my tools and hope that your light, your Jiminy Cricket hand-holding, your comments and knowledge on what I’m writing, will rub off on me. I, in turn, hope that I can share some practical know-how you didn’t know (how). Occasionally, there may be arguments and yes, I did leave the toothpaste out or the SQL query unguarded, but in the end I think we’ll probably, potentially, be better… or at least lose 2 Bixby’s.

What does that even mean, K$? K-Dog? K-Drizzle? K-Spice? K-Rockafellah? K-to-the-izzo?²

To me, better is taking the repetitive steps and removing them as much as possible from your work. This means building things such as a standard Photoshop template and layers tree; a directory layout for your website’s static folders; using versioning to keep track of everything; setting up common brushes in Illustrator; making objects reusable in Omnigraffle; using a bug reporting system with an agreed-upon nomenclature.

Better isn’t about learning new skills, better is about removing your developed skills from the workflow. It’s about using your tools efficiently, but not over-engineering…ly, and creating an environment where repetition is handled by the automatons, while you crank away on the creative creamy center. Better is about adding processes, of the mechanical SKYNET variant, so you can focus your attention on something valuable (like saving John Connor).

When you separate the mini-automations from the creative, interesting work, you get better at the creative stuff… then you automate that when it’s at the boiling heat of understanding.

Better is practical.

Yes, yes, all these platitudes I’ve been speaking of have been phenomenally helpful I’m sure. You’ve read them on every productivity blog in the world and they sound like chirping birds at 5AM. There is nothing more self-gratifying then telling people “Get better and spend less time working, I’ve done it!” There is no value in that, nor truth. I’ve spent a lot of time working without automations, and I have dealt with more complex issues over time, adding on to my work.

There is value in practical examples and I intend to show how I do it and ask my friends if they’ll talk about it.

A tiny crumb of example for you, you starving bastard

I use Textmate as my primary editor. It’s a phenomenal tool, very pretty, and lets you run commands, create snippets, fly planes, fight Nazis, etc., on the fly.

Here’s one thing I didn’t know about, which you may have or have not, that I think is great. If you type “CTRL + SHIFT + , ” you create the following:

You can then immediately hit tab, enter your content and then hit tab again to move out of it. If you’re caret is next to a word such as img and you use the aforementioned key combo, it’ll create an element out of that word! Sha-zam!

If you’re writing in any language, learn the key combination “SHIFT + CMD + ENTER”. Retrain yourself to stop hitting “enter”. If you’re in the middle of a line, it will jump you to the next line without creating a break where your caret is. If you’re in PHP or JavaScript and forgot the semicolon, or hadn’t placed it, it will place it for you. If you’re in plain text, it will add a period. It’s bundle context-sensitive, like your ego after today’s lonely lonely excursion into your feelings.

It’s one simple way to take care of the devil-you-know and not worry about it. To free up resources gradually enough that you start to have more time.

Tomorrow, lifehack your ass off.

Tomorrow, we’ll enter into building your own Textmate Bundle, and kick off this unending, randomly updated, no promises series magi-splenderously. You’ll learn the majesty of snippets, the mastery of commands, the taming of um… snippets and commands and get the girl/guy/partner-of-your-sexual-preference.³

So until then, have a binary day… or not.

1. These, btw, are all Amazon affiliate links because there is nothing I enjoy more then free money.

2. Well that header means douchebag, but it’s getting somewhere I swear.

3. Batteries Not Included^™