ACS Technologies - Community » Page Brooks

Keyboard Productivity

Page Brooks — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:00:30 +0000

Here’s a fun experiment. First, take your mouse and place it out of reach. Now, try to do your normal routine without reaching for the mouse. Usually, there are two outcomes to this experiment:

- Your hand will reach for the mouse only to discover that it is gone! Even though you moved the mouse out of reach yourself, your muscle-memory remembers it being there.

- You can work for a while, but you ultimately reach for the mouse because you cannot remember the keyboard shortcut necessary to complete your task. Before you know it, you are full-time mouse user again.

The mouse can be a real productivity drainer. Every time you lift your hand to use the mouse, you are wasting valuable time. While it may seem insignificant at first, the total time spent moving your hand back and forth can really add up over the course of the day.

I’ve found that one of the easiest ways to become more productive is to resist the urge to use your mouse and learn the keyboard shortcuts for the applications where you spend 90% of your time. Even if you just focused on learning the keyboard shortcuts for your operating system and web browser alone, most people would experience a significant productivity boost.

As a developer, I enjoy finding ways to improve my productivity; it gives me more time to accomplish other tasks.

Here’s a short list of resources for you to enjoy:

List of new keyboard shortcuts in Windows 7 – via LifeHacker

Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts – A large list of Keyboard shortcuts for the Mac OS.

Typing speed test and keyboard typing practice – Keybr.com

Mousotron – Nice utility for measuring your mouse and keyboard usage

Keyboard Jedi – Forces you to learn the keyboard shortcuts for an application

DontClick.it – Nice experiment in click-less interaction

Silverlight MVP for 2010!

Page Brooks — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:00:17 +0000

On New Year’s day, I was awarded me Silverlight MVP status for the second time. I have to say, it was a nice way to start the year off! Every quarter, Microsoft awards those individuals who have made outstanding contributions to their respective communities in the past year. Outstanding contributions typically consist of (but are certainly not limited by) speaking at various community events, blogging, participation in forums, and open source contributions.

In return, Microsoft provides MVPs with exclusive opportunities to interact with various Microsoft Product Groups. These interaction opportunities give us the ability to directly influence products and technologies long before they reach the market.

Another MVP benefit offered by Microsoft includes an invitation the annual MVP Global Summit at Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, WA. Last year my colleague, Chris Craft, and I were given the opportunity to attend the Summit. It was a great experience and we both gained a wealth of knowledge that will help ACS make important long-term decisions. This year, we will both make the trip to Redmond again this month, and our expectations are just as high as before!

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

Page Brooks — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:16:37 +0000

At major milestones in our projects, we find it useful to perform a retrospective analysis on various aspects of the project. This analysis gives us time to identify things that worked well along with the things that didn’t work so well (and everything in between). Once we have obtained feedback from everyone involved in the project, we try to learn from it. Now, there are many effective ways to analyze the data, but I have found that one of the most fun and visually appealing techniques is in the word cloud.

In short, word clouds are illustrations that give prominence to the most common words in a given set of data. At the very least, the word cloud can help you quickly determine the words that are hot topics (good or bad).

Below you will see a word cloud we created from one of our past retrospectives:

This particular word cloud was generated using Wordle.net. Admittedly, this technique probably won’t give you all of the information you need in a full analysis, but it can be useful in presentations or in conjunction with more detailed analyses.

What are your favorite techniques for visualizing data? Have you found one technique that saves you lots of time? Please feel free to post your thoughts!

Blog.Write(“Hello World”);

Page Brooks — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:00:57 +0000

Here at ACS Technologies, we’ve assembled a small group of community evangelists. The goal for each of these community evangelists is to share topics of interest from key areas with you. When approached about the idea, I was happy to hear about the initiative and I knew right away that it was something I wanted to be a part of. Each of us offer a different perspective on our industry so you can expect to see fresh content on a variety of topics. I have the privilege to work with some extremely bright and talented individuals here at ACS Technologies and I am so excited that these individuals now have the opportunity to share their thoughts and ideas with you.

Since my bailiwick here at ACS Technologies is software development, you can expect to hear my (occasionally random) thoughts on technology and its impact on our lives. I spend a significant portion of my time learning about new technologies and discovering different and innovative ways to apply them in our products. Over the years, I have found that understanding new technologies and their applications empowers to you to do more with less. It’s true that this constant barrage of “newfangled stuff” can be overwhelming at times, but that’s what makes it fun and exciting!

I hope you enjoy our new group of community evangelists and that you find the content worthwhile! See you soon!

P.S. I often use Twitter for quick updates. You can follow me at: twitter.com/pbrooks