Nothing against the idea of healthy eating or smoothies for that matter but it just may be the claims made in your post that made it read like a testimonial you see on fitness sites or fad diets that may have triggered the ire of the folk reading it. It's nothing personal, and please don't take it that way and for the record I'm going to try this out( but that's because I like smoothies).
The efficacy of TDD is dependant on language,tooling and experience. You want to spend most of your time writing the problem, AFTER you have thought about it. Developers complain about TDD when they can't think through their problem clearly and use it as a tool to validate bad thinking. TDD in this situation will naturally feel like running in heavy lead boots, since progress will be slow. Very surprised that the test pyramid is not being discussed as much as it should.
The slant in the list is companies doing interesting things with big data or applications from unexpected areas like weather and mapping it onto things like shopping habits. What I don't understand is how Splunk is on the list since operational data and business intelligence has been a historical fit for big data. Nothing new. IBM is evangelizing big data. A bit of a weak one, I thought but the Smarter Cities initiatives doing some good work. Some interesting companies on the list and in the comments section.
I use a variation of this technique. I spend X minutes doing Y. Where X is 5 minutes. The 25 minutes of the Pomodoro is too long to focus on one thing. I have a very very short attention span and I found 5 minutes to be the optimal timebox for me. Anything longer and I get bored. Now I have clock which doesn't increment in minutes but 5minute units. It's the only way I can make sense of the passage of time.
At the end of the timebox I do a 30sec review where I assess how I executed the task. Did I spend most of the time searching for information and organising material or did I spend it purely executing. I find with highly skilled people they spend most of they're time executing. If I spent most of it searching for stuff, I'd mark it as a delay due to organisation, if I was searching on how to do the task I would mark it is 'upskill', then I'd move onto the next thing. After a few hours patterns start to emerge around similar tasks. If a lot of related items were marked 'org' I'd then exploit them for automation or create them as templates for resuse. All the 'upskill' marked tasks would be condensed into a learning task at a more convenient task. The idea around all of this was to progressively become more organised and more skilled so that when performing a task, I would purely be executing and not faffing about.
It's a bit convoluted but it is a system that has worked terribly well since late last year and it's made me twice as productive at work, and smarter at what I do. There are times though where I wish I could be like people around me who are able to focus on thing for half an hour or more but we all have to play the hand we've been dealt and mine is a chronic lack of focus.
r Read the foreword to his book. Something I should have done before buying the book. It is not about the statistical methods he used and how he collected the web data. It's more of an online dating manual. If Christopher is on HN, an article on your site about your methodology would be great.m
