What's Hot On GitHub: ENTP

giles

Posted by giles at October 31st, 2008

Ruby Inside's monthly What's Hot On GitHub? post features two projects this month by developers at ENTP: astrotrain and seinfeld.

Astrotrain

Astrotrain is an experimental e-mail to Web router. It receives incoming mail and turns it into HTTP POST requests. If you've seen the innovative and intuitive way Tripit folds e-mail into its user interface, Astrotrain's a similar kind of project.

Seinfeld

Seinfeld is the code which powers Calendar About Nothing, which is based on a classic LifeHacker post about Jerry Seinfeld.

[Seinfeld] said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself—even when you don't feel like it.

He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here's how it works.

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

1 Comment

  1. Dustin Dustin said on October 31st, 2008

    Curse the ninth!

    Thanks and congrats, guys. This is some pretty good stuff.

    I haven’t tried astrotrain yet, but I can imagine how it might be useful to me.

    I’m enjoying CAN quite a bit, though. I hope it spurs more open source activity all around.

Make your voice heard

Sorry, but comments are closed for this item.

ENTP is a consultancy and web incubator based in Portland, Oregon. We make Lighthouse and Tender Support. If you’ve got a project in mind, please get in touch. We’d love to help you out.

Our Products

  • Lighthouse
  • Tender

Our Open Source Projects

  • astrotrain – simply the best email processing solution out there.
  • Seinfeld – automatic tracking of your open source contributions to github projects.
  • warehouse – still using subversion? Get the best source browser out there.
  • xtt – time tracking built for the add & twitter inclined.
  • GitNub – OS X GUI for tracking git logs.