The Fruits of Persistence

I mentioned in my last post that these last few weeks have been amazingly productive on the Accompl.sh front. In fact, I got so “in the zone” with what I was working on last night that I ended up pulling an all-nighter.

Lately I’ve found myself experimenting a lot more with what I’ve been building – trying to develop more efficiently, building things that aren’t necessarily needed but are nifty and challenge me to try stuff that’s outside of the usual features and functions.

I’ve been having so much fun just seeing if I can actually implement a lot of the random ideas I have. They’ve taken a few hours out of my afternoon, but by the end I am so ridiculously happy with actually building something that I didn’t think I could.

A sharable image that's auto-generated using GD Library

Take these goal placards (still haven’t come up with a good name for them) that I added to the site a few days ago. I’ve wanted to create some sort of shareable image for each goal so that people could pin them, tumble them, tweet them, whatever, but I figured it’d be way too complicated and not worth my time. After getting a great tip from Kastner to check out GD Library, I spent a few hours one afternoon putting these together.

It starts out simple: Let me put some text on background and save that as an image. That grows into “OK, I need to deal with multi-line text.” Which turns into “Crap, what about long words?” And, finally, “Oh, you know, I should probably put a logo on these! How do I put an image on an image?”

Each time I get a little better at it and it’s slightly less frustrating.

I think I’ve finally reached a point where I can have an idea and just set about building it instead of being intimated by whether I can actually do it. It’s an amazing feeling.

Coding is actually fun for me now. Maybe it’s that I’m coding something I really care about. Maybe it’s that I need to up my game and try to build things that are more complicated, but for the first time I feel completely literate – like I’m just waving my hands over the keyboard and the code comes out without having to think about it.

So that got me thinking: Where does the Accompl.sh codebase stand right now?
I ran sloccount to find out:

Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
php: 33801 (99.25%)
xml: 159 (0.47%)
python: 95 (0.28%)

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 34,055
Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 1,097,568
(average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

34,000 lines of code.

I found an old sloccount output from the end of October 2011. According to that I’ve written about 10,000 lines of code since I left Etsy. That’s not even counting all of the terrible and redundant code that I’ve deleted in the last few months. Even discounting the few libraries I have on the server (to hook up to things like AWS and SendGrid plus some JS/jQuery things), it means I’ve written about 30,000 lines of code over the last 2-ish years.

Granted, I have no idea how this compares to other web apps, and the number of lines of code != a great app, product, etc, but those 30,000 lines of code have finally gotten me to a place where I feel like I actually may know what I’m doing. Maybe.

(P.S. Want a sneak peek at another one of my experiments? Check out the visual list page.)

Making Time for What Matters

Over the last few months of working on Accompl.sh full-time, I’ve been on a bit of a roller coaster of emotions, productivity, and success/failure. It’s helped me to better understand what I need to do to keep myself on task. This last week alone I managed to launch a redesign of nearly the entire Accompl.sh site AND watch 8 out of 9 of the movies that were nominated for Best Picture (one of my goals for 2012 – I had already seen The Help) on top of whatever else was already on my calendar. It’s entirely possible to get a good night’s sleep on a startup schedule and still make time for fun. Here goes:

1. Figure out what matters.

An obvious first step, but an important one. If you don’t know (or aren’t told, as the case may be) what’s important to you, it’s pretty impossible to focus on it. These days there are a few things that matter to me:

  1. Growing Accompl.sh (70%)
  2. Cooking more / Eating better (15%)
  3. Growth / Learning (15%)

Knowing what you want to and need to focus on helps to filter out all of the noise and distractions. Assigning a weight to a certain bucket in your ‘what matters’ list helps to eliminate the need for a lot of time-consuming decision-making.

2. Figure out what’s hogging your attention

There are two ways to attack this one: Become extremely self-aware or use an app that does it for you. A combination of both is most effective.

Start paying attention to how you spend your time. How many times a day do you check Twitter? How many days a week do you find yourself sucked into the 8-11PM TV shows? How many times did you check Facebook before your morning coffee? I’ve been using RescueTime for a while now and though I don’t actually check on my stats very often, two things are working in my favor: 1) I know I’m being tracked so I’ll tend to be on my most-focused behavior and 2) When I DO check my stats, I can see where my huge time-sinks are.

3. Kill those things.

Get them out of your life. Or at least minimize their potential for distracting you. Notifications / status icons are a gateway drug. You THINK you can just check one or two, but before you know it an hour has gone by and what have you accomplished? Nada.
Some things to consider killing:

  • Growl notifications – I turned these off during college and never looked back.
  • Twitter notifications – You know – the ones that make the icon in your menu bar turn blue whenever there are unread tweets? Disable that now.
  • Alert Sounds – My exception to this rule is the “first IM received” notification in Adium. You’ll especially want to kill things like the sign-on/sign-off alert in your IM client.
  • Your TV – If you have one: unplug it from the wall. It makes it a lot more difficult to just casually flip it on for a show and get caught up from 8-11PM.

4. Get Stuff Done

Now that all of the distractions are out of the way: get to work! You’ll be amazed at how much more time you have in your day now. Maybe you’ll use it to get more work done, maybe you’ll finally get to go out to dinner with those friends you’ve been ignoring for the last few months, or maybe you’ll find a new project. The options are endless! Enjoy it!

Rinse and Repeat

Keeping your time in check is an ongoing process. Every couple of months (or couple of weeks if you feel yourself slipping), stop and take an audit of your time again. If you have something like RescueTime running, you can just check in on your stats and adjust as needed.

Don’t forget to have fun

Productivity is great, but balance is better. Don’t forget to build in time for play. Not everything you do needs to fit into your ‘what matters’ buckets. Sometimes you just have to turn off your brain. Burnout is a much bigger problem than losing a few hours to a movie or aimlessly poking around Facebook. Don’t forget to have a social life. Don’t forget to water your plants. Don’t forget to have fun. Most importantly: Don’t burn out.

I’d love to hear how you manage your distractions or what you’re doing with your new-found extra time. Leave your tips/updates in the comments! ↓

Rudimentary, My Dear Watson.

Today marks the end of my second full week of being self-employed. I have NO IDEA where those two weeks went. Well, actually, it’s possible they went 2 places: 1) getting ready for and then going to my friend’s wedding and 2) increasing my nerd-cred.

Wedding aside (story for another time), when it comes to nerd-cred I had a few learning curves to adjust to:

  • I moved to Linode – my first non-managed server. (with the indispensable help of kastner)
  • Being on Linode also means I need a pretty solid grasp of Unix commands. Going into this I was a master of cd, ls, pwd, and the occasional rm.
  • Using the Terminal so much more means that I also had to get a lot more comfortable with vim. Luckily I had a pretty good primer in vim at Etsy.
  • I moved to github – which I’ve now come to realize is the best. thing. ever.

I’m pretty sure I’ve leveled up in nerd-cred at least a few notches.

So that’s the elementary part. What’s this about “rudimentary”?

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Leap of Faith

I did something kind of crazy.

I left my job. My awesome, amazing, fantastic, ridiculously cool job where I got to work on interesting things with even more interesting people.

WHAT?! WHY!?

Yeah. That’s been the common reaction. And honestly, I think the answer only makes sense to me, since it’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a long time now, but here’s the gist:
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Guest Blog on Women 2.0

The following is an article of mine that was posted on Women 2.0, a blog/community that encourages female entrepreneurs. It’s a bit of a redux of my Relinquishing Stubbornness post, but nevertheless I want to cross-post it here for posterity. You can read the post in its original context at women2.org.

I’m about 18 months into the journey of taking Accompl.sh (formerly 101in365) from a little weekend project to automate my own annual goal tracking to a living, breathing web application.

Taking the “long way” of being a solo founder, I found working on Accompl.sh as a side project has been a crash course in time management, community building, product development, design, coding, you name it. But the most difficult part of all has been making the big decisions about the direction of the project itself.

Without a co-founder to help rationalize my own thoughts about the future of the product, I was stuck in a bit of a quandary — Do I stay on the path I originally set out on, potentially limiting the growth of the site, but staying true to my original design? Or should I compromise a bit and open the doors for even more people to use the tool that I built and believe in? The answer may seem obvious, but when you’re up until 3 or 4 in the morning working on your pet project in virtual isolation for over a year, it’s not as clear.

Decisions, decisions. Over the last few weeks I’ve made a few major decisions about the future of Accompl.sh — decisions I’ve been struggling with for well over a year but that I finally took the leap and acted on. I’ll share a bit of the process with you all in hopes that it’ll help you avoid the traps that I fell into.
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relinquishing stubbornness

I’ve been working on 101in365 accompl.sh for about 18 months now and it’s been an endless crash course in time management, building a community, product development, design, coding, you name it. My feelings about it have run the gamut from “yay! cool! people are using something I built!” to “holy crap! people are USING this thing! I really can’t screw it up now!” to “hey this is just a side project and it’s MINE so why can’t I just do whatever the heck I want?” to “But the PEOPLE! They have demands!”

It’s been a constant struggle for me – determining that line between “this is mine” and “actually it’s not MINE anymore.” I had a very specific vision for the site when I first pieced it together over a holiday weekend, but at the time I was really just building it for myself. For my very specific use case. And as a Product Manager I know better than anyone that that’s just NOT the way to build things to be used by the People of the Internets.
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workflow

I’ve wanted to do a quick write-up of the apps I use and the various bits of my workflow that some people find intriguing, but since I’ve been a total slacker in the writing department lately, I’ll let this interview I did with the Evernote Blog fill in in the meantime! Go on, give it a read!

on to the next chapter

I’m going to keep this one short and sweet:

A lot has happened in the last few weeks.

I’m no longer at Flickr. It still feels very surreal. Like I’m just on a vacation or a long weekend or just working from home. It’s kind of cool and it kind of sucks at the same time. I no longer work on the site that I’ve called my internet home for the last who knows how many years and I don’t get to work with and hang out with some of the coolest and smartest people I know.

But it’s given me time to think about what’s next: what I want to accomplish in the next few years and what I want to do in the longer term. Continue reading

De-Cluttering

Part of my end-of-the-year, now-I-have-a-lot-of-time-on-my-hands mission is to de-clutter my life. And by my life, I mean my apartment. I have a lot of “stuff” around – things that I thought I needed when I moved here from the east coast or things I had some sort of sentimental attachment to at the time. It’s time to get rid of that stuff. Must be the spring-like weather in SF…

I’ve put a good bit of it on craigslist over the last few days and that’s worked out well, but I figured I’d put some of the more miscellaneous things here. If you’re interested, drop me a line to stuff at jennvargas dot com or, if you’re a friend, just shoot me a text, IM, dm, whatever. Some things are yours if you get to them first. Some of the more valuable things might have a price. Again, if you’re a friend, and I think you’ll make good use of it, we’ll see! :)
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Recapping 2009: The 101 in 365 list

Last year my roommate April and I set out to write a list of 101 things that we each wanted to accomplish in 2009. It’s hard to believe that today is already Day 365. SO much has happened this past year that I don’t even know where to begin, but I think it’s safe to say this was one of the most eventful years of my life so far.

Throughout the year I really enjoyed having my list to come back to when I was feeling bored, unproductive, or reflective. It was great to have a tangible set of things that I wanted to do that I could check off along the way. It’s why I created 101in365. I wanted to do it again, but even better this time around.

I rarely made a conscious effort to accomplish one of the items on the list. I generally just let life happen and along the way hope to tick off as many as I could. I’m disappointed that I couldn’t finish a few of them but overall I’m happy with what I was able to accomplish this year. So, without further ado, the list:
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