Bookmarked The bootstrapper creates value (Seth's Blog)

The times are nothing remotely like that any of us would have predicted just a few months ago. And many of the institutions and jobs we depended on have changed, perhaps for a long time to come. It…

If you stay focused on creating value (easiest way to do this is to save the user time), you can get ahead/make progress.

Is there still hope for COBOL programmers?

Recently, Joseph Steinberg noted that the governor of New Jersey put out a call for COBOL programmers to assist in updating or fixing business applications being used by the state for unemployment applications. I last wrote about this in June 2019 , after seeing an article about COBOL expertise being still in demand by financial institutions. I decided to look and see if there were any resources available for someone to get familiar with COBOL. It turns out that Micro Force is a company that has up-to-date COBOL development environments and compilers, OpenSource.com lists several compilers available (gnuCOBOL seems to be the significant one (documentation here)), and there is a beginning COBOL programming book available from Apress. Looks like there may be some opportunity here (at least according to Indeed.com ….).

Bookmarked The Archive Turns 2 Years Old (Zettelkasten Method)

Last week, on March 15th, was The Archive‘s 2nd anniversary. Just like we’re all supposed to not celebrate big birthday parties or gather for festivities in general, this year’s app anniversary is toned way down as well. Here’s to what has happened in the past year.

Bookmarked Open Source Tools From the Warren for President Tech Team (medium.com)

We are so grateful for the hundreds of thousands of Warren supporters who used our tools to help our grassroots movement: Thank you.

In our work, we leaned heavily on open source technology — and want to contribute back to that community. So today we’re taking the important step of open-sourcing some of the most important projects of the Elizabeth Warren campaign for anyone to use.

Our hope is that other Democratic candidates and progressive causes will use the ideas and code we developed to run stronger campaigns and help Democrats win.

Bookmarked 10 top writing tips and the psychology behind them (withoutbullshit.com)

writing tips Photo: Wikimedia commons
There are plenty of folks happy to tell you how to write better, just as any doctor will tell you to “eat right and exercise.” But changing your writing (or eating) habits only happens when you understand why you do what you do. I can help you with that.
…

from Josh Bernoff

Bookmarked #remotelearning: Building Community and Skills (Silvia Tolisano- Langwitches Blog)

If we can see the closure of schools and students continuing to learn remotely as an opportunity to create learning experiences that allow us to explore new forms of teaching and learningto build s…

Bookmarked Notes from Danny O’Brien’s NotCon Recap of Life Hacks (craphound.com)

Notes by Cory Doctorow on a talk by Danny O’Brien in 2004 on living life in text files

Bookmarked Living in a single text file (williamhern.com)

I’m always interested in ways of working smarter and over the past year I’ve been trying out a number of the productivity tips espoused by the LifeHacker and 43Folders websites. Many of their suggestions are designed to declutter your working life and reduce information overload, allowing you to focus more completely on the task in hand and get it done more effectively.
The most ambitious of these suggestions grew out of observations by Danny O’Brien about the work habits of technologists – he noticed that many of them worked from one single large text file. Everything they did (and wrote) was put in there.

I wasn’t sure about this one as it seemed ridiculous and highly constraining but decided to give it a go anyway. One year on, I now have to admit that it’s really grown on me as a way of working.

Bookmarked Interview: father of “life hacks” Danny O’Brien (Lifehacker)

Just about a year ago, technology writer Danny O'Brien strung together the words "life" and "hacks" and fired off synapses throughout the geek community.

This a 15 year-old interview with the person who first popularized “living in a text file”, filing this with Org-mode stuff.

Bookmarked Org Mode – Organize Your Life In Plain Text! (doc.norang.ca)

This document assumes you’ve had some exposure to org-mode already so concepts like the agenda, capture mode, etc. won’t be completely foreign to you. More information about org-mode can be found in the Org-Mode Manual and on the Worg Site.

I have been using org-mode as my personal information manager for years now. I started small with just the default TODO and DONE keywords. I added small changes to my workflow and over time it evolved into what is described by this document.