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Showing posts with the label Personal Development

How to Be an Organised Developer (and spend more time coding!)

As a developer your main focus is to write code. But over time, you'll find that there is a lot more to development than this. If you're not aware of this, you might one day wake up and realise that the notepad file you used for passwords and connection strings has gotten out of hand. Being more organised from the start can help keep you focussed on coding and help you stay more efficient. If you move jobs you'll pick up a lot of information in the first few weeks, you'll want to organise it well from the start. If you stay in the same job for years, the 'other stuff' you accumulate can get messy and cumbersome. Like good code, making an effort to organise yourself well from the start can pay dividends later on, when it comes to navigating and maintaining all your stuff. Here's a list of some of the "stuff" you'll find yourself accumulating as a developer, and how to keep it well organised. OneNote (or Equivalent) An essential tool

Creating Value: The Key to Innovation

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Creating is to bring about something new. The act of creating involves integrating two or more concepts together to create a new idea. Value is typically that which adds value to one’s life, whether that be an individual, a group, or the whole of society. Values are benefits, improvements, they alleviate suffering, reduce cost, increase availability. So how do we go about  Creating Values ? You don’t need to be creative to create values. But you do need to utilize certain skills. Given that Values are that which add benefits to one’s life, in order to create them, we must understand human needs. Understanding Human Needs To do this, simply  Observe . Watch the world, and pay special attention to where people are happy or unhappy. Figuring out what makes them happy or unhappy is a key to creating new values. Try and find out what are the influences that affect happiness. Also look at cost, efficiency, functionality and availability. Given that these criteria affect happ

The 7 Layers of Creativity

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It is said that art imitates life. To be able to express oneself creatively is both powerful and fulfilling. True creativity resides within all of us, but because of the power of creativity those that aren’t ‘naturally gifted’ feel intimidated to even try. By breaking down the fundamental layers of creativity, we see that the process of creating art is not only simple, but can be applied to all activities of your life – whether you are organizing a file cabinet or painting a self portrait, these 7 steps will help you find art in all that you do in life. Imagine you’re painting a picture. You find a nice spot, on the beach. You find an appropriate angle, where you will have an interesting view of the sea, with the beach and a palm tree coming in on one side. In the distance, there is a city skyline. It’s a perfect scene. Now, many would assume that the creative process involves simply transferring this beautiful image onto a canvas, that this is what it takes to be crea