Papers

• 1983: Bewley et al, Human factors testing in the design of Xerox’s 8010 Star office workstation 
• 1965: Bresenham, Algorithm for Computer Control of a Digital Plotter
• 1977: Bresenham, A linear algorithm for incremental digital display of circular arcs
• 1987: Brooks, No Silver Bullet
• 1945: Bush and Wang, As we may think 
• 1970: Codd, A relational model of data for large shared data banks
• 1965: Engelman, MATHLAB: a program for on-line machine assistance in symbolic computations
• 1969: Hoare, An axiomatic basis for computer programming
• 1974: Irby, Display techniques for interactive text manipulation
• 1974: Kahn, The Semantics of Simple Language for Parallel Programming
• 1966: Katzenelson, AEDNET: A simulator for nonlinear networks
• 1960: Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis
• 1965: Nelson, Complex information processing: a file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate
• 1972: Parnas, On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
• 1974: Ritchie and Thompson, The Unix Time-Sharing System
• 1978: Rivest et al, A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems
• 1983: Shackel et al, The BLEND-LINC project on ‘electronic journals’ after two years
• 1963: Sutherland, Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication system
• 1968: Sutherland, A head-mounted three dimensional display

Extra: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/courses/670Fall04/GreatWorksInPL.shtml

Related or not, here are some ideas on how to improve your work:

• personal: develop habits that you:
  • find useful
  • would like
  • think are matching your personality

some examples:

• I wake up at 5 AM and I spend a full hour for checking emails and basically slacking off: 9gag, blogs etc. I used to do nothing for hours after because I was forcing myself to “work”
• I never work while I eat, no matter how much stuff I have to do: this way I have a healthy digestion and a bit more relaxed ‘me’ afterwards

• IT: get organized on the IT side
  1. use a gmail account and get used to its features (multiple inboxes, labels, filters etc)
     • why? more
     • learn to use its best features
  2. use Google Calendar – today i is the industry standard more or less and it syncs to anything
     • why?
     • it syncs with every calendar
     • link for iOS
     • extension for chrome
     • add-on for firefox; read more
     • gadget for desktop (Windows)
  3. use Google Tasks
     • why?
     • extension for chrome
     • most popular “agenda” software syncs with Google tasks: Astrid, Remember the milk et cetera (more here)
  4. use Facebook Groups and Google Docs for small teams and small projects like school assignments
  5. get your bookmarks organized; for example, I:
     • probably reorganize my bookmarks each month
     • have two sections in the bookmarks bar:
     • sites I visit every day: ‘email’, ‘tech’, ‘fun’, ‘devlife’ etc
     • folders I use to archive other links ‘epic-posts’, ‘job12′, ‘interests’ etc
  6. notepad++ is a great tool for sketching ideas, drafts, lecture notes, todo lists (because when it starts it shows the same tabs as last time); moreover, it’s the #1 Windows editor used by developers [1, 2]
• security: get your data protected
  • back up everything on an external HDD (rather cheap) and/or online (usually more expensive) on services like Dropbox
  • use Google’s 2-step verification login; it may be a bit inconvenient but this article will probably convince you to do it
  • (related to the previous article) start using free services like LastPass or alternatives

The application is called Tasks for Chrome and is a Google Chrome extension/app. My team and I started building it yesterday morning, less than 16 hours ago.

Basically what follows is a description of the ideas and concepts behind our project. I have tried to be as non-technical as possible – details of the implementation can be found on github. I’m writing this around 3 AM and we hope we can get a prototype up and ready in the following 9 hours.

Concept

I try to show in this section that the ideas behind the project are quite general and that they can stand as a guideline for possible future implementations of Tasks for Android/iOS/Thunderbird/Firefox et cetera.

What Tasks and Tasks for Chrome are about, essentially:

• a user-friendly personal organizing tool that can must be easy to use
• a tasks/todos app that could resemble the simplicity and practicality of leaving notes on post-it flyers
• also a tool that packages smart and powerful features – while stripping away the usual plethora of useless ones (sorry, fellow developers!)