Use Heroku for Hosting Static Websites
I switched from GitHub Pages to Heroku for hosting static websites, for two reasons. First, Heroku is free vs GitHub Pages ($7/month). Second, and more importantly, Heroku is easier to setup:
- Create a rails project
- Delete all subdirectories except 'config' and 'public'
- Place files for site into 'public' subdiretory
- Place project into Git
- Run 'heroku create'
- Push sites changes with 'git push heroku master'
GitHub Pages is trickier to setup.
Satisfy Your Customers Using Mental Models
Mental Models by Indi Young describes how to diagram your customer's needs, and how to use this diagram to generate your product's features. I found this very useful in identifying feature gaps in the current product that I'm working on.
Talk to Yourself to Be a Better Problem Solver
After reading the excellent article How Pair Programming Really Works, which says that talking is necessary to engage all parts of the brain, I now talk to myself when solo programming. It seems to help.The article describes some other mechanisms that make pairing effective.
Don't Give Advice
For one thing, when someone makes a recommendation for or against a particular option, a decision maker may feel like they have lost a bit of their independence in making a choice. Recommendations about how to go about making the choice may also make a decision maker feel a loss of independence. When the advice comes in the form of information, though, the decision maker still feels like they have some autonomy.
--Psychology Today