Science-based practices for a meaningful life, curated by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.

Matt Sakaguchi addresses the research and the insights of a manager who worked with his own team and others to instill the findings and principles from a pilot program at Google in the real world.

I know a lot of people who want to lose weight but are stuck, like I was in 2005.

They want to get healthy and fit, but can’t seem to stick to a diet or exercise plan. They start, and then fail, and then feel bad about it.

This was where I was 10 years ago, and I’m happy to tell you that it’s possible to change.

The secret lies in leveling up.

Like a video game, the way to changing your health habits is by starting out at the first level, and only going to the next level after you’ve beaten the one before that. The problem is that most people start at Level 10 and fail, and wonder what happened. Most of us want to skip several levels, but we’re just not ready.

In this screencast, I show you how to rewrite git history by rewording commit messages, reordering and squashing commits together, and finally by breaking open larger commits into smaller ones, all with Emacs and magit.

As developers, we are asked to absorb even more information than ever before. More APIs, more documentation, more patterns, more layers of abstraction. Now Twitter and Facebook compete with Email and Texts for our attention, keeping us up-to-date on our friends dietary details and movie attendance second-by-second. Does all this information take a toll on your psyche or sharpen the saw? Is it a matter of finding the right tools to capture what you need, or do you just need to unplug.

Recorded 2009-11-06 at Øredev 2009 - oredev.org