etbe - Russell Coker

One thing that seems overlooked by most people who discuss productive work habits is the varying mental capacity for performing different types of work. While it’s well known that alcohol and other substances decrease mental ability and it’s slightly less well known that sleep deprivation has a similar affect to being drunk [1], the [...]

In a comment on my post about Bad Project Management [1] Don Marti [2] says “the more money you charge, the less of your time people waste, and the more seriously they take you” and “you can affect the client more, whether you’re peddling idiocy or wisdom“.
That’s a nice theory, however I don’t recall seeing [...]

In a comment on my post about apprentices [1] Don Marti pointed me to a blog post of his from 6 months ago where he mentioned a need for an apprentice [2]. I had read the post in question before but didn’t think about it when writing my previous post.
When I was about 17 [...]

I have just read a rant by Sean Middleditch about bad project management [1]. He describes his post as “personal, rather angsty, and especially whiny” but I think it’s useful and informative. He makes some interesting technical points about PHP programming (I wasn’t aware that there were so many ways of easily getting [...]

Shintaro wrote an interesting post about Rakugo (a form of story-telling) and Mottainai (a particular form of gratitude that is now becoming an English word in reference to environmentalism) [1]. My definitions of the two words are poor, I encourage interested readers to read Shintaro’s post for the links.
Recently I had been considering which [...]

If you live in a hotel for an extended period of time (which can provide significant career benefits - click on this link for details [1]) the issue of food price and availability is going to concern you.
If you are in a decent hotel you will have a fridge in your room that you can [...]

In the past I have spent about 18 months living in hotels with a couple of months of breaks in between. I have previously written about it in terms of living in London hotels [1], but I have been asked for more generic advice.
Firstly the amount of possessions that you may have when living [...]

I have just read an interesting article titled Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work [1] which documents the research on efficiency vs amount of time spent working (and by inference amount of time spent on leisure activities and sleep). It shows that a 40 hour working week was chosen by people who run factories (such [...]

I have just read Career Development for Geeks [1] by Erik de Castro Lopo [2]. It makes some interesting points about a traditional approach to an IT career. The path I followed for most of my career (after I had a few years experience) was to work as a contractor and happily leave [...]

Pia writes about the difficulty in getting young women and young people in general into the computer industry [1].
While I agree that having more women in the computer industry would be a good thing, I have difficulty believing some of the claims that Pia makes. For example the claim that “[girls] are more career [...]