Making time for the things in life that should be my priorities has always been a bit of a challenge for me. You can ask my wife if you don’t believe me. Aside from reiterating the fact that it is important to manage your time so that you can give the different areas of your life the attention they deserve, I’d also like to highlight a couple different ways to do this.

When I started college, I realized that working hard and giving a task my full effort and devotion was supremely important for success. It was evident in the results that students who were less focused and driven had achieved.

It wasn’t really until getting married that I realized just how much time I spent working, rather than doing other things. Like enjoying my life and my wife.

With that realization in the back of my mind, I started trying to do something about it, so that I can give my wife the time she deserves, spend some time playing sports and getting exercise, hanging out with friends, and fulfilling my other responsibilities in life.
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Most programmers dread documentation. The thought of having to write anything but code makes them tremble (myself included). The reason is because it’s not what we’re good at, our job is to program, not to write docs for that code.

But what happens when our boss comes to us and asks us to write a user guide for our latest application? Below I’ll go into detail on writing great user guides.
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Have you ever had one of those days where you can’t figure out what you’ve been doing all day long? You get home wondering where the day went, and if you’ve accomplished anything. It’s a pretty crummy feeling, and I’ve been there many, many times.

After some reflection about how my “crummy” days went, I started noticing things that really reduced my efficiency. This is a collection of my findings; the things that helped me get more done and feel good about it.
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Another week has passed here at devjargon and we’ve had great success. This week our top three posts have been.

• What To Do With Your Old Computer
• Turn Off Post Revisions
• Tips for Personal Growth

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“A Healthy Developer is a Happy Developer”

This statement may seem a little cliche, but its 100% true. When I became a developer 5 years ago the first that that I saw decline was my health.

I started relying on energy drinks to get me through the nights of coding, fast food because I didn’t have time to eat healthier and less exercise because I spent so much of my time programming.

In the past few months I’ve been trying to get healthy again and I’ve come to realize one important fact: I’m much more happy now that I’m healthy. So here are my tips to stay health as a developer.
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Here at devjargon, like most blogs around the blogosphere, we use Wordpress as our platform. We like the ease of development and the relatively fast performance that it gives us. We recently updated to the newest version of Wordpress 2.6, and so far have been fairly impressed with the new additions.

One thing that I don’t like about Wordpress 2.6 is post revisions. Today I’m going to show you how to turn post revisions off so your wordpress database doesn’t get bogged down with useless entries.
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One of the constants in this world is the fact that technology will change, and it will change quickly. The average lifespan of a computer these days is between 2 to 5 years. Since technology is changing so quickly this equates to a lot of garbage from your old computers. Here are a few ideas of what you can do with your old computers instead of sending them to the garbage dump.
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Creating software is difficult. You need to first get the requirements from the client (or create them yourselves), then you’ll use the requirements and design a working system. Once you’ve designed the system, turn the design into code. Next you’ll test your code to make sure it works and finally deliver the completed project to the client.

Today I’m going to look at the second part of the Creating Software series: The Design phase. There are a number of aspects to designing software. You need to take the requirements you gathered previously and start to create your software. At this point, you’ll have very little code (and possibly none at all). Don’t let this fool you though, the design phase is extremely important, and many projects have failed because they either didn’t design, or improperly designed their software.

Here are three things you can do in the design phase to make your software project more likely to succeed.
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Continuous improvement is a simple ideology that is essentially summed up with the thought that everything should always be getting better. Incase you haven’t noticed, this is contradictive to the way the world works; things just don’t get better on their own. It takes work, often in huge amounts to get things to be better.

The first place you can look to improve is with yourself. A good improvement process is useless if you just sabotage it with your shortcomings. Take a step back and look at how the things you do affect the people around you and the situations that arise within your company. Make note of the negative ones so that you can improve on them.
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This week has been a great week for us here at devjargon as well as around the blogosphere. We’ve had a number of great articles and comments here and have seen a number of great articles emerge around the web. Here’s an outline of some of our great stuff this week.

• 15 Reasons Why I Became a Developer
• Create Software: Getting the Requirements
• Love to Fail: 3 Tips to Help Learn From Failure

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