onfocus

"...by telling people to put sensitive data (such as credentials, configuration files, etc) it's a really dangerous lesson for our teams. We're teaching people to blindly trust arbitrary websites that they don't have any relationship with, nor have fully audited the source code, when posting potentially sensitive data."

This is an excellent reminder that I can take a little extra time and make my own validator and make sure my processes don’t rely on external tools like these.

"Excel doesn’t offer the option to turn off this auto-formatting, and the only way to avoid it is to change the data type for individual columns. Even then, a scientist might fix their own data, but as soon as someone else opens the same spreadsheet in Excel without thinking, errors will be introduced all over again."

This is a free typeface for developers that looks niiiiice. Consolas is my preferred font for programming but I will give JetBrains Mono a try. Similarly, I'm enjoying the Dracula color theme in console windows and VSCode. It's similar to my usual preferred theme Solarized (dark), but sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind and try a new font and color theme, you know?

Bash is like a friendly nemesis to me. I use it all the time for simple commands and I often think, "If I could just string two or three of these commands together with some simple logic I won't need to move to a ‘real’ development environment!" But then stuff like this...

"This looks very much like the if conditional statement in any programming language. However, it's not."

...means six hours later I have a bash script and 99 problems. This article helps explain why I run into trouble by describing how bash evolved.

This is a nice collection of in-the-zone music. No mention of the Flow State newsletter?! Travesty! Flow State sends links to music like this to your inbox everyday.

This is a great idea: move grunt work from a checklist to an automation environment because you'll be more likely to automate any pieces as you can.

This resonates:

"Invest 80% of your learning time in fundamentals. Leave 20% for frameworks, libraries and tools."

I think it's good to step back and be mindful about where you're putting your energy. This idea reminds me of Stewart Brand's pace layering metaphor. We need all the layers for a healthy ecosystem. This article is a good reminder that we shouldn't focus so intently on the twists and turns of the outside layer that we exclude the others.

I was nodding along so much with this talk I hurt my neck. It's often hard to think about the forest of maintenance when you're in the trees of development, but it's critical because: "Humans have a finite amount of capacity for sweating details."