Hello everyone, and welcome to WHV #216, the one looking back at the two weeks from Monday February 1 to Sunday February 14, 2021.
Figure 1: Sup?
The two weeks in question can be characterised by Somehow Working Really Hard with Lots of Focus.
I would like to say that it has something to do with the liberal daily application of the One Main Thing idea, but experience has taught me that it’s probably some other unexpected and hidden interaction of a number of obscure factors that I will never ever understand, and that next week I’ll be solidly back in the arms of my old friend the really slippery eel.
Whatever the case may be, I have been making good use of the (temporarily?) increased capacity.
Fresh from the oven: vxlabs software development handbook
The vxlabs software development handbook, at the time of this writing about 65% complete (that’s a random number that my brain gives me every time I publish a new version), is now available over on my nerdy blog.
If you are working with a smaller development team, or you’re starting with a new dev team, the handbook is not the worst place to look for development process tips. Furthermore, it’s available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, so you can copy and paste and rebrand to your heart’s content as long as you give due credit somewhere to the original author (me and vxlabs).
In the coming weeks I’ll be trying to complete more sections to get closer to that mythical 100% completion grade.
Two miscellaneous tips for nerds
PrintFriendly on your phone
You might remember from my 2019 note-taking strategy post that I convert all interesting web pages I come across to PDF and dump them in my dropbox.
This has turned out to be the best way to store web-pages for later searching, reference and winning of arguments.
However, the mobile part of that strategy was traditionally weak, as is also discussed in that post.
The problem was that Safari on iPhone has a great reading mode that strips ads and other unnecessary bits, but when you print from reading mode, the PDF is formatted for mobile, and, more importantly, there’s no way to get the source URL embedded in the PDF.
Anyways, after years of using the PrintFriendly browser extension on the desktop (as is also explained in the note-taknig post), I finally got around to installing their mobile bookmarklet on the iPhone. (this should work on any mobile browser)
The instructions are a bit finicky, but one ends up with a bookmark that you can activate on any page to have the printfriendly service pre-process that page for reading, from which you can tap on the print icon to get a mostly perfect PDF that is also stamped with the source URL!
Fish shell
After years of resisting all the zsh blog posts and especially the pretty oh-my-zsh powerline prompts and sticking to my stock standard bash because get-off-my-lawn, I finally broke down and installed…
fish shell is a “smart and user-friendly command line shell for Linux, macOS, and the rest of the family”.
I like it because one of its goals is to be more useful with hardly any extra configuration, but you can also install oh-my-fish with my new favourite theme bobthefish.
I was planning to convince you of my choice with a number of technical reasons, but it is now clear to me that technical arguments are irrelevant when you can rock a theme called “bobthefish”.
P.S. Let me know in the comments if you would still prefer to talk about technical reasons.
A brief pause
Since we last spoke about GOU#1’s running habit, it gives me great pleasure to report that she has, quite routinely if I may add, done another two or three 10k runs, one of them even up to eleven by accident.
Folks I wish you all the best. I look forward to our next connection!