Roam notebook

Five minutes a day, two days per year

2010-07-25T15:20:30Z

People often hesitate to automate tasks. They reckon that that five-minute-once-a-day-thing doesn't really eat into their time and isn't worth the trouble of getting something else to do it for them instead.

Five minutes a day. It would mean not rushing to pick up the kids from school. Laying in bed five minutes longer each morning. Doesn't that sound good? It certainly does to me. Or look at it another way: five minutes per working day adds up to about 20 hours per year, or about two and a half days of working. Wouldn't it be great to have an extra two days to do some real work, or two more days off?

Decide what's important to you

Do yourself a favor and take some time to list your working day and look for the "low-hanging fruit". Write down all those dirty, boring little tasks and when you're done, get a developer you trust to have a look at it and let him pick out the stuff that can be automated with ease.

Before you know it you'll have something cheap that can perform those tasks by itself, leaving you your precious time with family and friends, doing more interesting things.

The value of one-man-shops

2010-07-24T18:20:30Z

Businesses often shy away from hiring freelancers for a job. They might have valid reasons to do so, but as a freelancer myself, I mostly see benefits to hiring people like me.

You see, a freelancer doesn't have to rely on someone else to tell him exactly what you, the customer, expects to get out of the project; he's right beside you every step of the way. He knows. And that's just the start. Contrary to big companies you know exactly who's working hard on delivering the goods. Got a question? Get an answer directly from the source. Got a request? Same thing. There's no need to do the hokey-pokey and wait for your contact to get the time to have a look at your e-mail, pass the question on and finally get back to you 2 days later with an answer.

It all boils down to this

You could write a book about the advantages and disadvantages of hiring a freelancer to build your next website or web application, but I feel the entire discussion can be reduced to the following images.

The freelancer

A freelancer is smaller, nimbler, more "agile". He can park in front of your door, load your stuff in the back and deliver the goods in a timely fashion. Like the driver of a van.

The company

The company more closely resembles a truck. Depending on the size of your business it's already a bit of a hassle to get them to come over and find a spot and you better have something large to put in the back or you're not even worth looking at. Of course, it is a bit pricey since there are more mouths to feed.

The choice

Got something big? Then only a truck will probably do. But for anything that fits the back of a delivery van, just get someone with a delivery van to help you out. It's faster, it's cheaper. If you're not sure about the size of your ~~load~~ project, ask a person who's judgement you trust to tell you what he thinks about it. Hell, ask me.

Django 1.2 upgrade: unique_error_message

2010-06-19T11:03:21Z

While upgrading a project from Django 1.1 to Django 1.2 everything went flawless. Well, expect this one thing...

In Django 1.1 you could customize the error messages for unique constraints over multiple fields by overriding unique_error_message in your form. In Django 1.2 much of the validation has been moved to the model, including the unique_error_message checks.

Using Django 1.1 you'd use following code in your form class:

def unique_error_message(self, field):  
    if field == ('field1', 'field2'):  
        return "You should not do that"  
    return super(MyForm, self).unique_error_message(field)

In Django 1.2 you'll have to change this to the following code in your model class:

def unique_error_message(self, model_class, unique_check):
    if unique_check == ('field1', 'field2'):
        return "You should not do that"
    return super(MyModel, self).unique_error_message(model_class, unique_check)