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In a recent newsletter, I answered a question about how I spend my time between projects. For me, the biggest projects I have, in terms of stress and time consumption, are the books I write. The client projects–Web development and such, no matter how big or complicated, never seem to be that much of a burden. Mostly this is because I find programming to be much easier than writing about programming, and because it’s fun to make things happen, to implement new concepts. Over the course of a year, I’ll work on any number of projects, ranging from consulting a couple of hours here or there (i.e., helping to steer the actual developers) to doing all of the development myself. When these bigger projects are done, I’m pleased to have them off of my list, but there’s never the huge sigh of relief that I have when I’ve finished a book. And that sigh says: now I can do these other 20 things that have been waiting for me!

With the completion of the JavaScript book on the horizon, I’ve been making my January to-do list, and salivating over all the things I’ll be getting done. Certainly, what I will actually do won’t be nearly as long as this list, but one can dream, no? My next deadline isn’t until this summer, which is when I have to turn in the third edition of my PHP 5 Advanced: Visual QuickPro Guide book. Although I’d like to, for a change, get that book done well in advance! Still, I have a bit of time to really put a dent in my “someday” to-do list.

First on my list is to exercise more often. I feel like I’ve gained five pounds for every book I’ve written (all that sitting), and while I’ve exercised more than never over the past few months, I’d like to do much, much better. We could all probably use more exercise!

After exercise, which is a daily and on-going goal, I’ve grouped my dream tasks into four categories:

• Things to work on
• Books to read
• Work things I really should get done
• Personal things I really should get done

The last category is of little interest to you, I imagine, or wouldn’t mean much regardless (mostly construction projects around the house). The work things I really should get done are those things that don’t get done during my books and big projects. For January, this primarily means creating an HTML5 version of this site’s design, plus a corresponding version for my forum. Before I redid this site in October of 2010, the site had become woefully outdated and I want to insure that doesn’t happen again. If time allows, I’ll do a mobile version, too, and make sure everything is performing as well as can be.

The books to read are both personal and work related. I want to read one or two parenting books, a novel, and some work-related books. I’m specifically looking to read The Pragmatic Programmer by Hunt and Thomas first. I’ve heard good things about it. Then, coincidentally, I have a couple of ebooks from The Pragmatic Bookshelf on my computer awaiting a few moments of time. As I read these, I’ll no doubt be posting my thoughts about them here.

Finally, there’s my “things to work on” category, which is a broad category of topics without definitive targets or concrete tasks. Normally these items are a matter of improving my skills in specific areas. Right now I’m thinking honing my abilities and knowledge with respect to Launchbar and TextMate, two Mac apps I use all the time. I know for a fact that I’m underutilizing both. The time I spend improving my skills with them now will pay dividends over the rest of the year. As time allows, I also plan on continuing to write my Yii book, although I’ll probably do that as blog posts, too.

So there are my January 2012 non-resolutions. Which will likely also be my February 2012 non-resolutions. Sadly, at least a quarter of them will end up on my September 2012 resolutions, too!

UPDATE: I just literally finished all the work on the Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design book yesterday, so thus far, I’ve done pretty much none of the things on my list, including exercise more. Ugh. But how about that February list…

• HTML5 offers many features of conventional apps, such as support for gestures, ability to handle video, local storage capability, and offline usability.
• The same application will be virtually guaranteed to work on multiple devices (mobile devices by their very nature use extremely current browsers).
• Apps can be updated without the user having to download and install anything (and, actually, the user never installs anything anyway).
• HTML5-based apps can be “distributed” without going through proprietary systems like Apple’s App Store.

It’s this last point that impacted the Financial Times’s decisions to go with a Web app, as detailed in this recent article at Macworld.

To be fair, an HTML5-based app is clearly lacking many features that conventional mobile apps can offer. And because HTML5-based apps use the device’s browser, it’s a different, less branded, user experience, even though some steps can be taken to equate the two (as the article discusses). But just one year ago, if you wanted to develop mobile apps for iOS devices, you had to: own a Mac, know Objective-C, and distribute through Apple’s App Store (okay, you didn’t technically have to, but you essentially had to). To develop mobile apps for Android devices, a separate set of skills, software, and destinations was required. Now you have two great alternative routes: using HTML5 or Adobe Flex+AIR (as I’m doing).

My thanks to Yogesh for passing this along to me!

For this reason, I was quite happy to see the release of the book “Take Control of Scrivener 2“. I haven’t read it yet (ironically, I’m waiting to complete the book I’m currently working on first), but it’s high on my “to-read” list. Just scanning the 22-page sample that’s available, this looks like a good, fast resource. And at $10 (US) for the book, it’s a steal.

In no way am I suggesting that HTML5 is the only smart way to create mobile apps—there’s still plenty HTML5 can’t do, but this is an interesting turn of events that I, for one, didn’t see coming.

1. Plan/research
2. Write
3. Rewrite (rewriting implies both reading and editing)

Of these three, writing is by far the least important, which is ironic, because many people think it’s the most important. And this is actually a problem, because people that think that put so much stress on writing something exactly right, that they struggle mercilessly. Never sweat the writing. I’m not saying that the writing doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter that much.

The goal of of the writing step is not to write something perfect or great or even good, it’s just to put words on the page:  to move the cursor to the right and down. Writer’s block is simply a person not writing because they can’t get the words to come out precisely as they should. Well, that’s going to happen…all the time. The most critical step is rewriting. Rewriting is how you make something good out of something decent; something great out of something good. And every rewrite will make it just a bit better. Once you accept that, you’ll see that the real purpose of the writing step is to give yourself something to rewrite. I’m big on analogies, so I think of the writing process like sculpting with clay: during the writing step you build up this big, rough mound of blob, that you can then sculpt into what it should be during the rewrites. No sculptor would think they have to get the clay in the absolutely right shape from the start (now cutting stone: that’s a different issue). The next time you’re in front of the computer, trying to churn out the next great novel, blog posting, technical article, email, or whatever, remember the immediate goal: get some words—any words—on the page, so that you can later make them better. This is how good writing is done.

Now this may seem like I’m oversimplifying things, or the fact that I’ve written so much would imply that my rough, ugly drafts are still pretty good (and, hey, thanks for that compliment), but I really do mean what I’m saying here. There’s this quote I like from Alistair Cooke:

A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn’t feel like it.

If you want to be a writer, you have to write, even when you don’t feel like it. Or especially when you don’t feel like it, because writing can be lonely, tedious, frustrating work, and the best day of writing still loses out to napping in a hammock on a pleasant spring afternoon. I write something pretty much every day, I expect, and there are many days when I don’t feel like it. Moreover, there are many days where I know, as I’m doing it, that the writing isn’t very good. But that’s okay, because the initial writing doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be. At this point in my career, I can normally tell as I’m putting words on the page (or screen) that a sentence or paragraph is no good. When that happens, I just write “UGH”, often stopping a sentence in the middle, and go on to the next paragraph. On a good day, I may only have one UGH an hour; on a bad day, several. But the important thing is that I took a stab at writing what I thought needed to be written, and I have something to improve when I begin the rewrites. Don’t be afraid of writing a bad sentence, paragraph, or page: be afraid of writing no sentence, paragraph, or page. That’s a much bigger hurdle to overcome (in part, because when you do finally write that bit, after procrastinating for too long, the writing is still probably going to be *$&@ that needs a heavy revision and you’ll have just wasted too much time in getting that junk on the page).

So that’s the most important thing I’ve learned, having done what I do professionally for a decade now: writing is the least important step in the writing process. Whether you’re a student working on a paper, a hobbyist trying to write that personal story you’ve always wanted to put out there, or the burgeoning professional, about to embark on your first technical assignment, the advice is the same: never sweat the writing, just write something.

1- Where are you living?

I have lived in the United States my whole life, and currently live in the state of Pennsylvania.

2- Are you working in any special company?

I’ve been working for myself since 1999, although I’m technically incorporated.

3- If you were a person who was chosen to write a secure web service, what would you use to write your web service – PHP, ASP.NET, Zend, etc?

PHP is my first language of choice. I have worked with ASP.NET (in C#) and think it’s pretty good, but it requires Windows to both develop and to run, which is a problem for me. I like aspects of the Zend Framework, and occasionally use it piecemeal, but don’t use it extensively or exclusively. If I were to write a secure Web service today, I’d do it in straight-up PHP.

4- Have you been working on any new book lately?

Yes, thanks for asking! In the fall, my most recent new title came out: “Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL” (New Riders). The fourth edition of my “PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide” just came out in March 2011 (Peachpit Press). I just began writing the fourth edition of my “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide” (Peachpit Press), which should be published around August 2011. (All dates are for the English language publication in the United States; availability elsewhere will follow.) In 2011, I’m also going to try self-publishing, starting with a book on JavaScript.

5- Nowadays programming is lot easier with current frameworks than a couple years age, some programmers prefer to use frameworks like CodeIgniter, Zend, etc. Do you prefer working with these frameworks, why and why not?

I’ve never used Kohana or CakePHP or CodeIgniter, although I’ve heard good things about them all. In 2006, I started using Ruby on Rails and like it a lot, although I don’t normally use Ruby for Web work. In 2009, I discovered the Yii framework and fell in love. It’s a great framework for PHP developers. I have used, and still use, the Zend Framework, but just don’t care for it as the basis of an entire Web site.

6- Could you tell us one of your greatest programming experiences which you had?

I can think of two important experiences, years apart. I tend to think of the greatest programming experience being the most recent one, or one of the most recent ones, in that one should always be improving as a programmer, meaning the work you did yesterday should be better than the work you did the day before. I have a client that I do a lot of work for and one of the best things about this client is that he gives me free reign to use the tools or approaches I think best. The project itself, a Web site, wasn’t extremely complicated, and I wrote the heart of it using the Yii framework. This provided quick development time, complete CRUD control, secure forms, and solid access control. One aspect of the site required dynamic PDFs as output, so I used the PDF module from the Zend Framework (within the context of a Yii-based site) to handle that. Part of the administration was complicated enough that I didn’t think Ajax and jQuery was the right solution, so I used Flex to create a Flash application for that particular part of the administration, with Web services provided by Yii. None of this was revolutionary or extraordinarily advanced, but reinforced my belief that there’s never one “always right” tool for the job. It’s best to have lots of tools in your toolbox so that you can choose the right one for the task at hand.

Another important experience happened ten years ago and wasn’t a programming one, but rather a business one that greatly impacted my programming career. I worked with a small team of people on a startup project. It was a very good idea, reasonably financed, and well marketed. Unfortunately a site that should have been successful never was, in my opinion, because of a lack of good leadership. I learned two important things from the experience. First, just having a good idea, or even executing a good idea, does not necessarily mean it will be successful. Many factors go into success, only some of which are under your control. Second, if I’m going to spend my time working for free on a project in the hopes it succeeds, it has to be my project. There’s just not enough time in the day to spend it trying to create someone else’s vision.

7- What other affairs do you do on your free times?

I used to like to read a lot, mostly fiction, and see movies. I’m also a big fan of many sports. In 2006, my wife and I had twins, so pretty much all of my free time since then is spent being a dad. Which is a pretty good gig, all in all.