Cory Doctorow on 21st Century Writing

Cory Doctorow tells us how he manages to write a book a year, half-a-dozen columns a month, plus plus plus, in a world of ever-present Internet distractions.

By all means, schedule a chat — voice, text, or video — when it's needed, but leaving your IM running is like sitting down to work after hanging a giant "DISTRACT ME" sign over your desk, one that shines brightly enough to be seen by the entire world.

I have the same opinion of coding. When I really need to concentrate on getting some code written, I need to kill Skype, iChat, and facebook, even if for 30 minutes.

 

Dubbiya News: What Happened?

A friend who reads this blog (Hi Johan!) mentioned that I seem to have stopped on the Dubbiya project (my in-the-browser database entity-relationship design tool).

He's right. I'm just taking a summer pause. First I suffered some "analysis paralysis" as I worked out how to handle saving data models "in the cloud". Then I tried to use Dubbiya to design a real-life data model I needed - and found that actually I've got a lot still to do to make it useful. However being the middle of summer it was time to visit people and be visited. For the next month or two, little or nothing will continue to take place on Dubbiya. After summer though, I've got plans. Big plans!

 

Coding Outside of Large Corps

 

In the short time I've been outside Google I've created entire apps in Java in the space of a single workday. (Yes, you can program as quickly in Java as in Ruby or Python, if you understand your tools well.) I've gotten prototypes off the ground, shown it to people, or deployed them with hardly any barriers.

That's from an ex-Google coder.