My home office has evolved over the years. I’ve gone between Mac and PC, back and forth a few times. I’ve finally landed on a gaming PC and a mac work laptop; this works best for everything I do (mobile/iOS development = Apple laptop)
I’m a neat freak, so you can obviously see that here.
I’m the first one to admit I’m lazy when it comes to maintaining a local copy of databases I work with. So what I decided to do was make my Mac work for me while I’m sleeping.
I’ve setup a series of daily commands to run as cron jobs on my iMac to do the boring things I spend time on every morning, thus saving me an hour of waiting around for downloads, decompressing tars and imports.
Sometimes I’m working with out of sync repositories, especially when I’ve submitted code and it overlaps with a release and I don’t necessarily want to push everything at once.
I’m a freak about maintaining a list of changed files on paper – I’m a paper nerd, I still love my black felt-tip papermate flair pens and moleskine notepads – but sometimes it’s nice knowing what is out of sync with a live checkout of a branch versus the repository.
So I’ve been working in the time I have away other commitments on a new project that I’m excited to launch sometime later this year.
I’ve found the hardest part of programming in your spare time is that there rarely is any time you can actually deem “spare”.
The fun part is that I’m working with people who I’ve known for a long time and there’s no pressure to complete things on a schedule, other than ones we define for ourselves. That of course is also a problem because I’m apparently my own worst scope creep.
Keep an eye on purchaso.com
