As discussed in other posts, I spend a lot of time in email, and much of the email I get is related to MongoDB’s Jira. I’ve written before about my Jira summarizer, which maintains a single message in your inbox with a summary of recent activity in projects you watch. In my continuing quest to make Jira email easier to deal with, I wrote a tool to make it easier to quickly assess the email notifications about individual issues.

In my first post on this topic, I said I’d post an update in a week or so. Ok, so that was about 7 weeks ago. I abandoned the trial of both of these techniques because 2.8.0 is, frankly, more important than my experiments in productivity. I’m going to get back to it, but this is actually an opportunity to say something important about getting derailed from productivity projects by urgent items.

“MongoDB is as easy to operate at scale as it is to develop with.” From the very beginning of MongoDB, I’ve envisioned making that bold claim. Until today, it’s been a dream. We just brought it firmly into the realm of the realistic. Today we rolled out a completely revamped MMS built atop Automation, our cloud service for deploying and running MongoDB. Automation works with any infrastructure, from AWS to private cloud to bare metal.

I’ve been using this new toy. Well, it’s for work, but until the novelty wears off, it’s definitely also a toy. I like taking notes in meetings on paper as much as possible. It’s less distracting, and more friendly. I’ve tried various ways of doing this, but nothing has stuck yet. The closest has been a regular notebook. The biggest problem is that I don’t like carrying things to and from work, or to different places.

I’m intrigued by the idea of using Google Glass during a presentation to avoid ever having to look at or touch a computer. I’ve taken a cursory look over the apps that are currently available, and tried out Your Show and Glassentation. I’m concerned about two things – one, pulling it off at all, meaning making sure that my audience is still focused on my talk and not my gadget, and two, being able to continuously engage the audience while referring to my notes quickly enough to not break the flow.

I’ve written a Python program to do something fancy with JIRA that I couldn’t get using built-in facilities. You already get notifications from Jira about the tickets you personally care about, based on your notification settings. My tool will give you, additionally, an hourly email in your inbox summarizing all the changes in projects you care about, skipping the the ones you already got direct notifications of. Not only that, but it will make sure that you only ever have one of these summaries in your inbox, by consolidating them when a new summary is generated.

Problem: I’m at a playground in central park and I need to print something at home. I have a new printer that is online, but hasn’t been setup with Google Cloud Print yet. Solution: Set up an SSH tunnel from my phone, through my desktop to the printer (using iSSH on iPhone). Configure google cloud print from the browser on my phone. Print from chrome. p.s. I was at a playground with my kids, not just to print something.

Emacs is the only editor I can use effectively at this point. It doesn’t matter if there are better choices (there aren’t ;-), it’s the one I’ve invested all of my muscle memory into. When working on files locally, I use normal emacs, and things are grand. Life, however, dictates that a great deal of my coding is done on remote machines. I had tried a variety of solutions to edit remote files (emacs in a shell, emacs of x, samba, nfs, etc…), none working terribly well for me.