In this Google Clean Code talk, Miško Hevery presents the evils of global state, how this relates to Singletons, testing and what to do about it.

Questions starting at 31:20 are pretty interesting.

For years I have struggled with organising my email in an effective manner.  Most of my attempts until recently involved lots of email folders and mail filters and still I’d have difficulty telling the wood from the trees in terms of importance and feel swamped by the quantity of email.

My most recent system which I am very pleased with so far consists of only the following four folders:

• Inbox – Only emails with me in the ‘To’ field, kept for three months.
• CCed – Only emails with me in the ‘CC’ field, kept for one month.
• Lists – Any emails that don’t have me in either the ‘To’ or ‘CC’ fields, kept for two weeks.
• Archive – No filters put email in this folder, it is 100% manual, kept forever.

This system has made it easy to filter out the important emails (sent directly to me) from less important emails (which I am typically CCed on) or mailing lists (which seldom require any action).  I use the auto archiving (deletion) feature of my email client which allows me to automatically dispose of emails after a preset period based on the folder they are stored in.

I hope to phase out the archive folder sometime as I use Evernote to store any information I want to be able to find easily at a later date: as a purpose designed note/idea management application it is highly superior for the storing, organising and searching of data.