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Much of the break in blogging for the past week has been the result of spending the latter part of last week at Code for America Summit in Oakland, CA. I traveled to California on Wednesday with co-workers from my group at MAPC and friends from Code for Boston. It was great to see many facets of Boston’s civic technology ecosystem represented in the talks and sessions. Conferences are important both for taking time to meet and learn from peers, and to take time to be reflective. I was lucky to experience both.

For the most part I try to keep my inbox “near zero” but know that getting to real zero can be a challenge. The first part of the challenge is mental. No matter how hard you try it can be difficult to stop your inbox from becoming the “place where important stuff stays you do not lose it” which it should not be. The second challenge is that it can also become your to-do list. Most people suffer from the worst possible scenario: it becomes the place where important stuff stays and also your todo list and it becomes hard to distinguish how much is from one bucket or the other.

For the past few years I have spent most of my time working on applications in Ruby on Rails. When I was the Berkman Klein Center I also had an application in a Javascript framework called Meteor.js but for the most part we prioritized back-end functionality over front-end interfaces. This means that for applications like Lumen Database the front-end was written in HTML and embedded Ruby. This past week at MAPC has been a whirlwind of updating my front-end web development skills, primarily by learning React.

This lecture on time management is full of great advice:

As I think about my own philosophy towards software development I think it is useful to consider it in the context of values. When trying to make decisions what are the yard sticks that are used to measure them? Here are some of the values I have and use in making my decisions: