Oh yesss… I just dit it… I just wrote a 5 things X blogpost… God save my soul.

Ok, now that I’ve got your attention (this 5 things X blog post titles never fail in that) I will continue writing a little bit more about how my experience with codealike has been so far. This article was actually meant to be part of the Boost Your Productivity With Codealike Insights review but, for once, I had the good judgement to show it to my girlfriend Malin first who wisely advised me to split it appart “I got bored after the 8th paragraph Jaime” - She said, and She was right… as usual (you may be nodding at this point XD).

1. Once and for All I have Irrefutable Proof That I Love Coding

Yes, you read it right. Once and for all I have irrefutable, specific, real proof that I love coding. Check this out. This right here is my productivity pattern per machine.

From it we can reach to several conclusions:

• You now know my machine’s name, I may have to kill you
• I wake up at 5 a.m. and code
• Looks like sometimes I stay and work too late :(
• Either my productivity sucks the whole day OR I am unusually uber-productive between 6 and 7 because I want to go home… so that I can… cuddle with Malin (…and code apparently)

2. Each Debug Session is a Failure

As a deep believer and practitioner of TDD and a member of the league of extraordinary gentle-unit-testers debugging is a failure. Every time I have to click that F5 and go into debug mode is a reminder of that moment of weakness when I decided not write a unit test, or that time I let a teeny tiny corner of the source code rot just enough… This month I failed 26 times. But next month will be better, one test/refactoring at a time, hell yeah.

3. You Can Drill Down to the Minutest Detail

Here it is. You are looking at how much time I spent coding on that javascript file (and at the fact that I do not seem to know how to spell Web XD). I have no idea about the utility of this feature, aside from the fact that long time reading within a method could indicate poor factoring and readability in that method, but it sure is a cool feature.

Oh, by the by, in C# code you can drill down to methods and not only see files.

4. You Can Healthily Compete With Your Teammates

Here you can see how this week is going so far. Daniel is kicking my butt, I have coded almost nil this week. That doesn’t necessarily mean I haven’t contributed to the team… I am funny:

And wait… yes, picture this. In a not too distant future codealike could add a gaming layer. You and your teammates would be able play games with each other based on the data in codealike, like… who’s the first to code 40 hours this month or…

5. My Coderbits Profile Is Getting Beefed Up

Yes, it is true, I must admit it, ever since I linked my coderbits account to codealike I became one of the top 200 devs.

6. You can Get a Nice Summary Of The Languages You Use The Most

Look at this nice profile called Your Facts:

Ok, and that was it for the awesome stuff. Enough of the good cop. Time for some harshness and criticism.

-1. How the Heck Do I Change my Profile Picture?

No… for real… how do I change my profile picture?

-2. I Need More Education

Once thing that you will start feeling after using codealike for a short while is confusion (and curiosity XD). Particularly, you will ask yourself, where do these numbers come from? Why does it look like that I am working so few? Does the plugin fail to connect to the backend and some data is missed? Do I really work so few? But it cannot be…

So it would be pretty great if the guys at codealike could devise a way to educate us, their users, to better understand the data. And additionally, if they could, of course still leave the capability of being able to drill into the data, but dumb it down and provide more aggregation, tailored advice and more specific easy-to-understand KPIs. That would be great.

Well, that’s all for now. I was a little bit all over the place but I hope you liked it (and secretly wish that you had a laugh or two) :). Have a good one.

P.S. I just found out that there’s a Windows Phone Codealike app! Check that out…