Danny O'Brien's Life Hacks

Here are my running notes from Danny O'Brien's NotCon recapulation of his "Life Hacks" talk. Danny interviewed a bunch of prolific geeks and asked them how they do it: this is his distillation of the habits of the geeks who spew the most code, words and such. Wish he'd turn this into a book already!

People use todo.txt (Ford's is 27,000 lines long)
* Don't use complicated apps
* Use Word, BBEdit, Notepad, emacs, vi, whatever
* Why?
* If you want to organize yourself, take the stuff you're going to forget quickly and dump it just as quickly -- if it's in your short-term memory, you have to put it somewhere
* You need to be able to find and enter text fast
* Can cut, paste and find text fast
* XML Guy: "Not interested in tagging my behavior with metadata -- just want to find stuff. Google shows that text cna be found quick"
* Text editors have incremental search (Mozilla: type slash and begin typing for your search string) -- quick way to lock-in on your desired text
* In Moz, Panther, Launchbar, Quicksilver, etc
* Text can be trusted
* Power users trust software as far as they've thrown them in the past
* Power users know that the bigger an app, the flakier it is
* They've upgraded and crossgraded a lot, which means that they need text, which can run on every platform

Link

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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