/Tips

CLI Tricks Every Developer Should Know

- Kedasha Kerr tl;dr: “We’ve compiled some important tricks and commands that every developer should know from GitHub’s own engineers. By mastering these basic techniques, developers can become more efficient at working with the command line and gain a deeper understanding of how the underlying operating system and programs work.”

featured in #520

The Only Two Log Levels You Need Are INFO And ERROR

- Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya tl;dr: “Unfortunately, it's common for us to log in ways that are unhelpful. Log levels are inconsistent, and logs are added to fix bugs then removed afterwards. But come on, you saw the title, this is about the log levels, mostly.” The author discusses their logging practices. 

featured in #510

My Setup, April 2024

- Thorsten Ball tl;dr: “Last week I got a new monitor, after my old one has shown worse and worse signs of what looked like burn-ins. The new monitor allowed me to get rid of two cables in my setup, which pleased me quite a bit. And since there are people reading this whose eyebrows went up at the “two cables”, I thought I’d use this as an occasion to write about my desk and computer setup a little bit.”

featured in #510

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

Let Code Speak For Itself

tl;dr: Comments that offer useless information hurt readability. Here are some tips to let your code speak for itself: (1) Write comments to explain the “why” behind a certain approach in code. (2) Use well-named identifiers to guide the reader and reduce the need for comments. (3) Write function comments that describe intended meaning and purpose, not implementation details. (4) Omit comments that state the obvious. 

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

Push Ifs Up And Fors Down

- Alex Kladov tl;dr: The article presents two interdependent coding principles: (1) "Push Ifs Up" - move if conditions to the caller to simplify functions and enhance readability by centralizing control flow. This approach reduces bugs and makes code maintenance easier. (2) "Push Fors Down" - handle operations on batches of objects, not individually, for better performance and flexibility. This method is efficient, especially when combined with the first rule, as it streamlines processing and can enable advanced techniques like vectorization.

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