babafemio

[babafemio]

No keyboard samurai

I started out with graphics programming mostly because my initial passion for software came out of an unbridled love for computer games. Every small code I wrote had to have elements of graphics as text-based MS-DOS was very boring. Graphics in DOS was not easy, however. You had to tickle CPU registers to set the right interrupts to get the position of the mouse; fiddle with virtual memory libraries to access more than the inadequate 64kB of RAM that DOS made available. But why not just develop for Windows? All the mouse and memory management is already handled there. But how can? Windows is slow and besides, most video games at the time loaded from DOS anyway, so there...

I was a keyboard samurai… Building out what could be a the next ‘window-ing’  framework.

Perhaps I should have spent all that time writing programs that I could actually make money (which was much needed at the time) from. But no sir! This was more important. I was invincible…

[babafemio]

Before you take that discount

On a very regular basis I engage in very tedious and tiring negotiations sessions. Many times the suppliers would come ready very early with a sweet ‘discount’ to motivate you to buy or take the deal at that particular moment. Allow me to land… Discounts are good, but what’s even better is getting a good discount for what you actually need. 

So, the next time you are in that situation you need to ask yourself “what am I buying”? and go through the invoice line by line and ask if you need that feature right now, if you would need it later or you read about it in a blog and it sounds nice. Once you have both settled and agreed on what you really need and its corresponding value to you, then begin the discount discussion. Maybe you’ll get lucky keep the same discount levels. He he.

[babafemio]

Clear desk, clear mind?

Every time I switch offices, I try make the next one neater by leaving behind junk from the old one or tucking them away from sight somehow in the new one. So, after a while and with many comments about the fact that I do not have paper on my desk, it does appear I have been following law no. 1 of the laws of simplicity. Reduce. Of which one of the key techniques is to 'hide'.

I still have paper, but they are kept (...when necessary) somewhere hidden underneath the table where nobody comes around to see.

I also do the same thing on my computer desktop rather subconsciously. It's hidden! And has been that way for years now, from laptop to laptop. And for that reason as well, I never put (or leave) any document on the desktop. No point. It's way easier to find in a folder.

Now, I have no idea how any of this has impacted my productivity, but I can say, it looks pretty cool.

[babafemio]

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A post shared by Babafemi Ogungbamila (@babafemio)

Happy New Year Everyone! Welcome to 2015!

[babafemio]

Digital me...

It's one of the few holidays where I took a decision to think not about work... Meaning that I have about 10 days to faff, but it took less than a day to figure out what all that time would be spent doing. I have been doing software for a bit now and felt I could at least convince myself to employ my services to create a landing page for myself. So simple, I can do this! ...and yes, also watch and record as many Bond movies as possible.

I decided to buy the babafemio.com domain! As funny as it sounds, I have not paid for a domain name before personally, as in whip out a credit card and pay, Tosin does that as I have worked through the years with product teams to create many great products that have their own domain names... Also, this used to be a long thing back in the day when I freelanced... We had to mail cash to friends in the abroad to make the payments. Now, you can use your locally issued card to do this and it's a lot cheaper now! As a matter of fact I was having so much fun, I ended up buying about 8 domains. This holiday sha!

Ok so, buying the domain is really no good without a landing page of some sort, abi? So, I went a step further and begun to think of what my landing page would look like. While that idea marinated inside Trello, I put up a LaunchRock landing page which gave me another idea, by the way. This thing was beginning to feel like a new product. This is supposed to be a holiday, ne?

Now, where do I host this thing? The last time I bought hosting personally was in 2001 at hub.org. It was expensive at the time, but that seemed to have the best combination of what I was looking for: open source things like Apache, PHP, PostgresQL and such. You had to configure everything on your own though, SSH log in and all. Again we asked my partner's sister in Yankee to make the credit card payment for us. Can't even remember if we paid back... I'll have to ask Oloks.

But things are a lot simpler now... We've got platforms-as-a-service offerings and one-line deploy from command prompt. I had to give it go, especially since we are working on something like this at the office. The choice was nodejitsu.com. Since Rafiki, I have been enamored with the simplicity and power of Node.js.

Of course, I could have done something with WordPress or something simple like that, I tried to do something different... Might not end up being really different, but I decided I would have a bit of fun along the way anyway. More on the 'anatomy' of the landing page later.

Now that babafemio.com is ready and it is quite an MVP to be proud of, I had to create this blog because the 'About Me' was looking very lonely and I didn't want any links that didn't work and I had to post something so that the blog would not look under construction-ish and now I would have to keep this up and post fairly regularly.

Needless to say that at the end of my holiday, I have managed to create more work... The perils of creating a digital presence... But it could be fun.

[babafemio]

WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER WHEN YOU ARE IN A BAD MOOD?

A good movie gets me out of the dumps...