appytizers

Sandwich Experiment

food — tags: experiment, sandwich — Rohan Deshpande @ April 22, 2012 7:49 PM

Bread: White
Spreads: Ketchup, tamarind chutney, mint chutney, coconut chutney (mix ‘n’ match)
Contents: Samosa

Rating: 4/5

Trello as a Personal Task List

aboutme — tags: experiment, trello — Rohan Deshpande @ 7:45 PM

I’d like to describe how I use Trello as a personal task manager in the spirit of Scrum.

I have one board named Everything. Literally everything happens within this board. I run 7 day sprints from Sunday till Saturday. Each card represents a task that can be accomplished in a maximum of 4 hours. I make liberal use of the Labels and Comments features.

The board has five active lists:

Ideas represents the backlog. This list is never prioritized. Each card represents an item that I need to work on at some time. Some of the items have due dates. Every Sunday, I review this list and move cards to the Next list.
Next represents items that should be done within the current sprint. This list is always prioritized. I assign estimated time to each card from a minimum of 1 hour to a maximum of 4 hours. Every morning, I update priorities and estimates and move cards to Ideas or to Doing.
Doing represents tasks that I am working on. I try to ensure that this list never contains more than 3 cards at any time. A card from this list goes to Next, Blocked or Finished.
Blocked represents tasks that need additional input. A card from this list either goes back to Doing or to Next. Often times, cards from this list will generate new cards in the Ideas or Next list.
Finished on YYYY-MM-DD represents tasks that are completed in the current sprint. Every Sunday, I archive this list and create a new list to represent completed tasks for the next sprint. Cards from this list can never go to any other list.

What I’ve learned with Trello is that I’m tracking not just when a task was accomplished but how it was accomplished. The story helps me break down and estimate future tasks.

Obviously, this is not a perfect process and I make changes as and when necessary. I’d love to hear how I can improve and also how you use Trello.

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Install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu

tech — tags: install, ruby, ubuntu — Rohan Deshpande @ March 27, 2012 6:33 PM

Concise and updated instructions to install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu. Tested with Ruby on Rails 1.9.3 on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. These instructions are based on the original post on sudobits.

# install rvm dependencies
sudo apt-get install git
sudo apt-get install curl
sudo apt-get install lynx

# install rvm
bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer)

# should display ‘rvm is a function’
type rvm | head -1

# determine requirements for ruby
rvm requirements

# install requirements from the previous output in the ‘ruby:’ line
sudo apt-get install build-essential openssl libreadline6 libreadline6-dev curl git-core zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev automake libtool bison subversion

# install and use ruby 1.9.3
rvm install 1.9.3
rvm use 1.9.3
ruby -v

# install rails
gem install rails

# test rails
rails new rails_test
cd rails_test

# therubyracer gem needs to be enabled for rails server to work
nano Gemfile
# manually uncomment the gem named therubyracer
bundle install

# start the server
rails server

# browse to the server (in another terminal)
lynx http://localhost:3000

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