Rake Is Awesome
I sat down to start compiling these notes, and of course got sidetracked putting together the Rakefile which can be found in the root of this repo.
Hacktoberfest
I was all gung-ho about getting started with Hacktoberfest this year, but I’m not sure I can muster the energy. I absolutely do not need any more t-shirts, and the negative energy around the event’s growing spam problem just turns me off participating entirely.
Regardless, I’m enjoying stewarding How Old Is It? the only project I’ve had that’s gotten more than 10 stars on GitHub. I hope I can at least help some other non-spammy participants get their t-shirts.
What Even Is Typing?
Trying to get better at navigating around my code editor without using a mouse. This is motivated by the audiobook of The Pragmatic Programmer that I’m listening to, in which they discuss how efficiency can be improved by reducing the friction between your brain and your computer.
The issue isn’t that taking your hand off the keyboard, placing it on the mouse, clicking some stuff and then moving your hand back to the keyboard takes too much time; realistically the extra time added by mouse usage is going to be dwarfed by a the time spent in meetings or making seven or eight cups of tea.
The issue is that it’s a distraction that takes your mind off what you’re writing.
Rails Test Assistant
There was some functionality in RubyMine that I missed, and wanted to replicate inside VSCode. Rather than use one of the existing plugins that more than adequately solve the problem, I decided to write my own. Because, y’know. Of course I would.
Hello, Rails Test Assistant.
Things I Read
- The Self Retrospective - I enjoyed this, or at least I’m in the right place to read it. The orderliness of my attempts to improve at my job and as a person waxes and wanes, and at the moment it’s waning pretty hard.
- How to remove condescending language from documentation - At work, there are two words that we try not to say: “just” and “should.”
- test && commit || revert - A programming workflow where the tests must pass every time the code is committed. If they fail, the code is immediately reverted to the last point at which the tests passed.
- “Fake COTS” and the one-day rule - When is “off the shelf” software not really off the shelf?
- Asking Better Questions
- Options, Not Roadmaps