Sam Links

Sorry float, we had a good run but you were always so temperamental and moody.  Sometimes you worked, other times you didn’t.  You always had these picky requirements about your parents and how they had to be just right for you to line up well with your siblings.  I’m happy to say that I won’t be using you anymore because I’ve found something that works so much better: ‘display: inline-block’ That feels good to say.  I feel liberated really.  All of my divs are now so effortlessly inline.  Thank you display: inline-block.

I wrote the following for the Creating Joy website as sort of a prologue or lengthy testimonial of this book.  I’ve read it and believe fully in its power to transform your life.  While I am the author’s husband, I have also read many books on similar subjects and can say unbiasedly that this book is powerful.  It about more than just being happy, it gets right to the root of the essence of conscious and intentional living.  Check it out here:   http://www.iamcreatingjoy.com/

Creating joy is an exploration of intentional living. For thousands of years philosophers, religious leaders and the chosen few have understood certain fundamental truths about our world. When applied, these truths can and do improve the quality of life. In fact, human nature at its core is built upon very simple mechanisms that support our joy, or our sorrow. It is a choice where we focus our attention and what we repeatedly focus on becomes our reality.

Aristotle once said “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”. Thought precedes action, therefore before we are able to form a habit through repeated action, we must align our thoughts with what we ultimately want. “Creating Joy” explores this topic and guides a reader through nine keys that when applied, positively affect the outcome of the reader’s life. A life based in joy begets more joy. Even in hard times, a joyful perspective lessons the blow or enables you to more easily see the silver lining.

I invite you to change your life today by applying the principles in this book. Take each key in turn and focus on it intentionally to create the habit. For example, key #1 is about opening your heart. Achieving the predominant state of open heartedness towards life may take practice, but once instilled, you’ll have access to a wealth of information. Ancient religious texts and modern day philosophers alike refer to the heart as the nexus between physical and non-physical reality - the intersection of the divine and the physical. Louise Hay once said that the answer to every question you’ll ever ask is inside of you. Those answers come from your heart and when it is consistently open, it will act as your compass, helping you navigate your life to higher states of joy and abundance than you could ever imagine.
It starts with the thought that your life can be different, that it can be more joyful. Next comes the information to motivate your inner change and the tools to solidify the habits. Consider this, in Deepak Chopra’s “Creating Affluence” audio program he sates:

“Knowledge has organizing power inherent in it. It is simply enough to know, to be aware of the principles; the knowledge will be processed and metabolized by our bodies and the results will be spontaneous. The results do not occur overnight, but begin to manifest gradually over a period of time.”

What this means is that by simply studying the material in this book your life can begin to change for the better. Even reviewing the same material at a later time can reveal a deeper understanding of the same content that you felt you fully grasped the first time. The information stays the same, while your awareness expands to see it differently. It’s quite amazing, really.

It has been my honor to witness the transformational process in Kristina that has resulted in the publishing of “Creating Joy”. Her journey is inspirational and gives us all hope that we can achieve whatever we want in this life. The material in this book has changed my life and I believe that it can change yours too.

Check it out here:   http://www.iamcreatingjoy.com/

layervault:

Today we’re announcing a new project called Divergence. It was built to streamline staging server testing by avoiding developer conflicts and by removing the deployment process altogether. All of this is done by taking advantage of the way Git branches work.

What’s Divergence?

At LayerVault, we’ve always made a habit of developing new features on their own branches. Also known as the Github Flow, it’s a great way to keep your master branch clean and to avoid development conflicts with other features. Unfortunately, it can be expensive to run multiple staging servers, so before testing any production-ready code we always have to ask if the staging server is in use to avoid confusing fellow co-workers. To add to the problem, fixing even the smallest issues are a pain. You have to deploy code, test, fix bugs, push the fixes, deploy again, test, and so on.

Read More

That’s right, I figured it out. Finally. I’ve read tons of information on productivity. So many tips, tricks and systems to get stuff done that I had to create systems to organize the systems. Okay, that’s a bit far reaching, but the point is that none of them really worked. They all had great methodologies for getting things done and keeping track of them, but none of them ever really worked for me.

Until I figured out why. Until the light bulb finally went off and I exclaimed “Ah Ha, that’s it!”.

It’s all about joy.

What do I mean? Is this some kind of feel-good, idealistic idea? Shouldn’t we all just work more, work harder, start that side-project and sleep less?

I started to notice some key correlations between when I was productive and happily checking off tasks on my list and when I wasn’t making progress. The key correlation was happiness. What I realized is that when I really loved what I was doing, I did it better and often faster. And when it wasn’t faster, it was of higher quality. Either way, the end result was better than the output of those tasks I hated to do. As an added bonus, I felt good doing the tasks I loved.

What I realized from this is that all I need to do to maximize my productivity is to align myself with work that I love. Work that I’m passionate about. Work that is part of me day and night, but not in an un-healthy way. Rather, work that is so intrinsically aligned with my core values that I truly love doing it and it, in turn, fills me up, supports me and makes me better. That’s a win-win situation.

Perhaps easier said then done, but I’d rather expend my personal resources aligning myself with fulfilling work that I love than learning another system of getting things done so I can tolerate doing things that I don’t really care about.

I just ran across this awesome select box javascript plugin that I’m really loving.  I’ve been part of an implementation for a large system that uses ICEFaces 3.x and the users have asked for exactly this many times.  Our answer is always no, we can’t do that because it’s not available in ICEFaces yet (something similar is supposedly in the works).  I’m sure we could have developed it, but something about budgets and dates kept us from that :)

Here is a quick Image of one of them in action:

Anyway, here it is and it’s awesome.  I can’t wait to use it for something.  Props to the folks at Harvest.

(Source: harvesthq.github.com)