Last year I put together a blog post describing the technology I keep on my desk. I’ve changed some things around since then, so here is this year’s post. Most of the basics on my desk have stayed the same over the past year. I still have the same two monitors in the same configuration and the same desktop. The speakers are the same, but up in a new home to make room on my desk. I’m also using the…
Here’s another installation in my ongoing series of zettelkasten tooling updates. I have changed up my preferred set of tooling again in the time since the last post, and I’m now using Obsidian . I discussed my reasons for not using Obsidian in that last post, but both Obsidian and my workflow have changed some since then. My main complaint in the past post about Obsidian was its autocompletion…
The last few months have included my first foray into job searching post-college. I started looking when I had reached about 2 years of experience at my past role. In the world of software development this typically is the time when it becomes possible to find a job at a higher level (pay + title) than is available to recent college graduates. I took this opportunity to make a parallel move,…
A couple weeks ago I received access to the Github Copilot beta. Github Copilot is a tool for writing code that is like autocomplete on steroids; it is marketed as having the ability to write whole lines and functions of code for you. Copilot is available to beta testers as a Visual Studio Code extension and supports most common programming languages. My experience with Copilot has been that it is…
I’ve spent the last couple of years working in the evenings on my side project, autodo . autodo is not a very complicated app, but I’ve taken a long and winding path towards making it work. I started out with a mobile app, only to realize that I needed a proper backend to persist the data across devices. I then looked online for an ideal stack for a first-timer’s web app. These resources largely…
Rework is a collection of helpful tips for building successful businesses and projects. It’s a brisk read but I found it to be full of helpful info and I’ve collected my takeaways here. Running Projects Fried recommends early in the book to not turn guesses into plans. Plans let the past drive the future and prevent flexibility. I liked the section about how long projects zap morale. The longer it…
My side project of choice at the moment is Squiggles . Squiggles is a library that makes it easy to create bezier curve paths, or “Squiggles”, for robots. I wrote the library in C++. After completing the initial development of the core library I started development of a web-based GUI for drawing out these paths. My goal for this GUI is to provide an easier way to prototype paths by both overlaying…
The set of hardware on my desk has changed pretty dramatically this year. I’ll attribute a decent part of that change to COVID-19 and working from home for most of this year; I’ve had to care a lot more about my working space as a result. I’m putting together this post as a way of reviewing the hardware I’m using and to capture this point in history of my working space, as I anticipate that it…
I recently started a new side project, Squiggles , a C++ library for generating spline-based 2D paths for robots. This project was my first time setting up a C++ library meant to be included in other projects across different platforms. CMake is the build system typically used in these cases and seemed like the right fit for this project. CMake has an impressive set of functionality but can be a…
I recently came across the GBoards line of low-profile keyboards and immediately wanted to try out this thinner design. I still stand by my previous positive review of the Alpaca Keyboards HotDox that I was using as my daily driver, but the GBoards designs addressed a couple of my pain points with it: The height of the HotDox, and most normal keyboards, for that matter, essentially required wrist…
I’ve heard The Design of Everyday Things recommended a number of times and recently picked up a copy. This book was my introduction to design theory; the most in-depth information I had gotten on design up until this had come from blog posts. I don’t have much to compare the book to as a result but I found a lot of valuable information from it. Major Points The book started out by laying the…
While I had posted before about how I felt that I had found the ideal tooling for my Zettelkasten in VimWiki , I hit some growing pains with the toolset as I continued to add to my notes. When my notes were fairly small it made a lot of sense to keep all of the notes in one, large document, but that got to be difficult to work with. My Zettelkasten is still far from huge compared to the examples…
Forever in search of the best keyboard, I recently embarked on the journey of hand wiring a keyboard. I had been using a Hot Dox keyboard for the better part of the last year and liked it for the most part. The Ergodox layout had two main issues for my uses: It was large and had too many keys the thumb cluster wasn’t within easy reach for me I only ever used the two “2u” sized thumb keys so the…
I was very excited for the 20.04 LTS release of Pop!_OS that came out a few days ago. The addition of automatic window tiling and the various GNOME improvements that came with the update were well worth the move from 19.10. After a few days of using the update I still stand by my opinion that the upgrade was worthwhile, but it wasn’t an easy transition. For starters, the 20.04 upgrade with…
I’ve been in a time of turmoil with note taking and text editing. I bounced around between a few different editors before landing on Vim full-time. I experimented with a gitbook , I used Joplin for a bit, and I wrote a lot down on paper and post-it notes. As much as I love using pen and paper, I need to take notes on a computer to ensure that they’ll be with me everywhere. I looked for a way to…
I recently picked up a 2015 MBP to use as a development machine for my side project, auToDo , since Apple won’t let you make iOS apps without a Mac. I’m not thrilled to be developing on a platform other than my beloved Pop! OS , but it’s at least still a *nix based system. I was glad to see that, as of Catalina, MacOS uses Zsh as its default shell. I use Zsh as my default shell on my linux machine…
I recently picked up a Hot Dox keyboard from Alpaca Keyboards as my introduction to the world of split ergonomic keyboards. My primary goals in moving from a traditional mechanical keyboard were to get an improvement in ergonomics and to get much more customization potential than I had with my current keyboards. The Hot Dox is acceptable on the ergonomics front and excellent on the customization…
I recently got started developing a cross-platform app in Flutter , a framework developed by Google that uses the Dart programming language. One major benefit of the fact that Flutter is created by Google is the mostly easy integration with Google’s other services. I have come across one minor exception to this rule in my attempt to integrate Firebase with my Flutter project, an error regarding…
I’m a big fan of side-projects and I’ve run a Github Pages site as my personal site for a while now, so it seemed inevitable that I would take advantage of its blogging capabilities at some point. I have a number of fun new projects in the works now, hopefully I’ll be able to put together some nice articles on those in the near future.