Kyle del.icio.us’ed me this article and I really dug it. Work has been really crazy lately - we’ve been ramping up development efforts so both coding and project management needs have increased.

Have you ever asked yourself the question: “Am I busy or productive?”. I’ve been asking myself that lately. Sometimes, less is definitely more. In the Agile Software world, there’s this whole idea of sustainable pace.

How productive are you as a developer after 60 hour workweeks and a lack of sleep? Every good developer should know when quitting is actually more productive than staying busy. If you’re burning the midnight oil and making frequent mistakes give these ideas some thought:

• Am I introducing flawed code that is going to haunt me later?
• If I’m observing many mistakes that I’m making, is it possible there’s many more I’m not realizing?
• Am I really contributing to burndown/velocity effectively?

Know when to quit! Your team members and your supervisors will thank you.

Most Rails developers know of PeepCode but I know only a few that have actually purchased a screencast from them. I’m really happy that they’ve reintroduced their year subscription. There’s no excuse now - go and buy this! After watching two or three I can say it’s already paid for itself.

Interestingly, I’m enjoying the pdf’s just as much as the screencasts. Keep it up PeepCode!

If you’re a cheapskate, start out over at RailsCasts - but if you like them, help Ryan out and buy some PeepCode material.

If you’re wondering what’s up with Ruby-Amazon, it is actually based on Amazon Web Service’s 3.1 version. I was playing with it earlier this week and realized there was a ton of missing data. So I’ve migrated some of my apps to Amazon-ECS as a result. I have to say I’m pretty impressed with the library as it allows you to flexibly integrate with new versions of Amazon’s platform. There was some effort in integrating a different library but if you’re familiar with Hpricot it should be a snap. I’m not sure why Herryanto built it with Hpricot, as I’m a REXML fan myself.

I totally dig Amazon’s platform though. It really allows affiliates to add value to Amazon’s site.

So I use Trac a lot. I love their search mechanism - you can easily pull up a ticket, changeset, or report by typing #(Ticket Number), [(Changeset number)], or {(Report Number)} respectively. Many times, I’ll get a list of ticket numbers to run through and opening them all can be a pain.

With the help of Quicksilver and its Firefox plug-in, I’m able to get into Trac extremely quickly.

Here’s how I did it.

1. Install the Firefox plug-in for Quicksilver
2. Create a quick search bookmark for your trac site. Use something short like “trc” as a keyword. The location should be something like http://<your trac url>/search?q=%s&wiki=on&changeset=on&ticket=on. Make sure you place it in the “Quick Searches” folder.
3. In quicksilver you should now be able to type “trc” (or whatever keyword you set in step 2) > tab to “Search For” > tab again > enter your search query.
4. When you press enter your search results should come right up in Firefox.

Hope you find it helpful. It saves me a lot of time and aggravation.