At this year’s EmberConf on the 25th of March I gave a presentation with Heyjin highlighting some examples of times where using Ember has made our jobs seem infinitely easier. EmberConf was an amazing experience, the Ember community is full of genuine and welcoming people and I am so excited to see the great things that this community will build together. Slides and video below.

Last month I gave a lightning talk at the Ember.js NYC meetup. The talk was about designing your API based on what it was going to be used for by the users instead of designing it based on what is in the database. I think that this tactic can be really effective as it reduces the complexity of the front end code, which is where your users are and where you really want everything to revolve around their experience, not the intricacies of your data layer. With more and more complexity living in the front end through frameworks like Ember.js our design decisions need to be giving more weight to the front end than they used to.

This is a presentation that I gave at the New York Quantified Self Meetup. I talk about how I started to sleep polyphasically and also how I used self-tracking to make sure that I wasn’t killing myself. Video:

A very well laid out book by Kelly McGonigal. This is a quick summary of the principles that each chapter addresses as well as some of the tactics that she lays out for when tempted and the strategies that can be used to reduce your risk of failure.

Most of the habit gurus agree, when it comes to habits, the only way to succeed is to do one at a time. We have limited willpower and need all of it to invoke a habit change. I think they all got it wrong. Ever since I started reflecting daily…

One of the reasons that polyphasic sleep is less well know is that many of the people who try it fail to adapt. …

This week I started sleeping polyphasically. Seeing as I’ve had explained this to a few people lately, here’s a quick FAQ to explain my craziness. What is polyphasic sleep? A polyphasic sleep pattern is one where your regular sleep pattern is broken into three or more sessions per day. …

I’ve always really thought that habits were important and have spent much of the past few years reading about and working on changing habits. I’ve even given a few presentations where the central theme was that if you create good learning habits, then you will learn well. …

Reading Reading books about the technologies that you are using is really important. It gives you something that just looking at existing code doesn’t. Over time a code base tends to train developers into doing things “it’s way” and it takes an external influence to help pull the team into…