Paul Graham's College essay
Paul Graham seems to be this decade’s most vocal Lisp hacker, constantly spitting out new essays on assorted topics. Today’s essay is on how to spend your time in college. He dishes out a fair bit of useful advice, including bits like this:
If you want to work at a cool little company or research lab, you’ll do better to learn Ruby on Linux.
Heh. That is *so* me. Cool little company, writing Ruby on Linux.
Later on he talks about open-source projects, and how starting your own project to scratch some sort of itch is a great way to gain useful (and marketable) experience:
For example, I stumbled on a good algorithm for spam filtering because I wanted to stop getting spam. Now what I wish I had was a mail reader that somehow prevented my inbox from filling up. I tend to use my inbox as a todo list. But that’s like using a screwdriver to open bottles; what one really wants is a bottle opener.
I find this kind of hilarious, because as everyone knows, Ruby is best known for writing to-do list software.
Having said that, I’d love to see what Graham can spit out on the to-do list front. I could certainly use something better then my inbox or post-it notes, but none of the other alternatives that I’ve tried have really stuck with me. I really need to finish reading Getting Things Done.
Someone in my circle of folks told me they had all the GTD books as MP3s. When I finally remember who it was and borrow a copy, I’ll let you know.
I feel like such a follower, learning Ruby and GTD ‘cause you know, everyone is doing it :)
Yeah, I know what you mean. I suppose I can console myself that I picked Ruby up almost 3 years ago, even if I haven’t really done as much with it as I’d like to have.
GTD, though–total follower. Sigh.
How’s this for a to-do list? I always have a couple of Terminal.app windows open so I just have a comma-separated list of items typed up in one of the terminals on the command line (a text file didn’t work because I never checked it). That way I can remind myself of the list anytime I use the terminal, which is often.