Jorge Ramon

You are here: Home / Blog

Brief Interruptions and Productivity

Leave a Comment

I still do quite a bit of coding besides my work managing a team of software developers. I frequently dedicate solid blocks of time to coding work on specific projects. They are usually one to two-hour blocks. I minimize large interruptions during those periods by blocking my calendar, minimizing my email inbox and closing my internet browser.

Brief Interruptions and Productivity

There’s a more subtle type of interruption I haven’t eliminated. I’ve known of it for years, but I’m giving it my “undivided” attention after I heard Carl Newport and James Altucher discuss its effects.

I’m talking about the brief interruptions I still allow into my workflow.

Continue Reading →

Project Spotlight: Meeting Room Scheduler Software

Leave a Comment

I’ve been working on a proof of concept for a meeting room scheduler software I think you will find interesting.

The initial target audience of the app is professional services organizations with geographically dispersed offices that need to manage meeting rooms in the different offices but don’t have a large team dedicated to this task or a large budget to acquire expensive meeting room management software.

Meeting Room Scheduler Software

Continue Reading →

Document Assembly and the Broken Placeholders Challenge

Leave a Comment

I’ve been writing document assembly software for the past few weeks and I’ve found some interesting challenges in the process. One is an issue where some placeholders in the document template break after I edit the template file manually.

Before I show you the details and the solution I found, let me give you some context by reviewing what document assembly is.

Document Assembly Systems

An automated document assembly system, or document automation system, merges data originated from a repository, or collected on the fly through a user interface, into a document template, to generate electronic documents as its output.

Document Assembly

There can be various levels of complexity in this process, ranging from simple data insertion into the document template, to applying complex logic and conditional transformations to the source data during the merge process. Think about hiding or showing paragraphs, inserting or removing list items, and highlighting or underlining text blocks.

Continue Reading →

A Web Page Progress Indicator with Bootstrap and Font Awesome

2 Comments

In this article, I will describe a quick method I use in my web applications to create a progress indicator using Bootstrap and Font Awesome. I like this method because it doesn’t require adding large amounts of html and JavaScript code to the application.

A progress indicator gives users feedback about what’s happening in the application. You can use it to increase the perceived performance of the app, especially during long-running operations. My indicator will render as a rectangle with an animated spinner and a text message:

loading-indicator-3

I can control the spinner type, text, colors and other visual attributes using CSS. I use Font Awesome for the spinner and some styles from Bootstrap for the other elements of the indicator.

Continue Reading →

Contact Me



Don’t Miss the Free Updates

Receive free updates in your inbox.
Your address is safe with me.