Shell History Is Your Best Productivity Tool
- Martin Heinz tl;dr: “If you work in shell/terminal often enough, then over time the history will become your personal knowledge vault, documentation and command reference. Being able to use this personal documentation efficiently can hugely boost your productivity. So, here are a couple of tips on how to optimize your shell history configuration and usage to get the most out of it.”featured in #505
featured in #473
Exceptional Exception Handling
- Yiming Sun tl;dr: Have you ever seen huge exception-handling blocks that throws an exception? Yiming shows an example and highlights the core problems: (1) It obscures the logic so unintended exceptions may be caught. (2) The code might end up catching different exceptions. (3) It rethrows a general exception, with the original exception ignored. This means that the root cause is lost - we don't know what exactly goes wrong. Yiming shows a better way to handle errors.featured in #471
Holiday Season Gift Ideas For Techies
- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "Holiday season is just around the corner, meaning it’s time to think about gifts – which can be a non-trivial challenge in itself. With so many choices, what are the best presents for people working in tech?" Gergely put together a list covering: (1) Books and creative thinking. (2) Gadgets and tinkering. (3) Wellbeing. (4) Office equipment. (5) Decor. (6) Toys for adults. (7) Board games. (8) Non-tech gifts.featured in #469
Navigating Around In Your Shell
- Abin Simon tl;dr: "I have been using terminals for a long time, initially because I thought they looked cool, and later because I genuinely found them to be easier/faster to get stuff done. And since I've been at it for a while, navigating through directories is something I think I've gotten good at. In this blog, I would like to give some tips on ways you can navigate around in your shell quickly."featured in #467
featured in #466
Effortless Engineering: Quick Tips for Crafting Prompts
- Michael Sickles tl;dr: "This blog will walk you through building out different prompts, exploring the outputs, and optimizing them for better results. Even though we can't guarantee outputs, we can still measure how the prompt is doing in various ways."featured in #461
Communicate Design Tradeoffs Visually
- Tim Lyakhovetskiy tl;dr: “A goal of any written design or project proposal is to present and evaluate alternatives. However, documents that include multiple solutions can be difficult to read when the qualities of each solution are not clearly expressed. A common approach to simplifying proposals is to use “pros and cons” for each alternative, but this leads to biased writing since the pros and cons may be weighed differently depending on the reader’s priorities.” Tim shows us how to color code these tradeoffs to make it easier for readers to parse ideas.featured in #459
Organizing Multiple Git Identities
- Garrit Franke tl;dr: “One awesome feature of the .gitconfig file is that you can conditionally include other config files, and this is what does the trick.” Garrit shows us what this looks like and how he manages multiple Git identities in a streamlined way.featured in #457
GitHub Has Too Many Hidden Features
tl;dr: A variety of lesser-known but useful features on GitHub: (1) Pressing '.' on a repo main page opens it in "github.dev," an online VSCode instance where you can edit code, push commits, and review pull requests. (2) The "feature preview" option allows users to enable experimental features like rich Jupyter diffs. (3) Regex search is available both within a repo and sitewide by wrapping the search in slashes. (4) Keyboard shortcuts like 'Y' to change the URL from branch-based to commit-based, and 'I' to hide comments in a PR. (5) GitHub.dev can be used on other people's repos and saves work across browser sessions. (6) Labeling a backtick-codeblock as 'suggestion' in a PR comment shows it as a line change.featured in #445