Keepin' Tabs #2 - Traversal Conference edition

Andrew Vida — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 19:43:44 +0000

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit beautiful Denver, Colorado and attend an amazing conference, Travsersal. Located at Larimer Social, it brought together a diverse, inclusive audience of two hundred professional technologists. We spent two days together in presenter-driven single-topic sessions and opportunities to discuss and interact.

Here are a few topics I enjoyed at the conference:

As someone who came to software development from a non computer science background, I always wondered if there was something I missed by not studying it at college. Turns out, there are a lot of people that come from a non-traditional background who are curious to learn more about computer science, in general. In the talk "Learning How to Learn", Vaidehi Joshi describes how she used the Feynman Technique to teach herself one new CS topic a week - then blog about it. She's since turned these blog posts into a podcast and video series. If you're like me and want to learn more about CS, in clear and concise bite sizes, check out her site:

This next talk, "Read, Write, and Tinker with AI" with Stefania Druga blew me away. As a father of three young children who is very cautious of screen time (and devices in general), I struggle with how to best introduce them to computers and the internet. You'd think it would be easy for someone who programs the web for a living, but honestly, the web scares me.

In her talk, Stefania describes how to help our children learn about AI and Machine learning thru play. She is the the creator of the Cognimates platform for AI education and also leads HacKIDemia - an organization that designs workshops and kits that help kids use curiosity, empathy, and play to invent the future.

I was excited to watch Nickolas Means deliver "Eiffel's Tower" live, as I've previously watched a recording of it at RubyConf. Nickolas is a fantastic storyteller and this talk is as entertaining as it is enlightening. See what you can learn from how Gustave Eiffel went about building his record-shattering tower to pushing your organization further.

If you loved the video, check out Nickolas's podcast, Managing Up. There he, and his fellow hosts, discuss management tips, stories, and interviews to help navigate the challenges of managing creative and technical teams.

If these talks intrigued you, keep an eye open at Confreaks as each was recorded.

Lastly, a shoutout to my favorite coffeehouse in Berkley, Allegro Coffee, for the amazing cortados and lattes. If you're there, try the Avocado toast. It's the best!

Keepin’ Tabs #1

Andrew Vida — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 21:00:39 +0000

As a software developer, I’m constantly researching new and exciting technologies, googling for better ways to do something, watching conference talks or how-to videos. Most of which, I leave up in browser tabs for days (or weeks) on end as I discover them and have time to read or watch. In each post, I’ll go thru my browser tabs and talk about each one.

I got this idea after a night of watching Netflix. We just finished the new Bert Kreischer special and I wasn’t tired yet, so off to YouTube I went. Turns out he has his own channel (obvs!), and low and behold, a show called ‘Open Tabs’ where he goes thru his own browser history, most of which is entertainment related. I thought this sounded like an awesome thing to do, but for developers. So, here we are. No YouTube channel, yet — let’s just see how this blog works first! Hopefully Bert doesn’t shut me down (love ya Bert!).

Here’s what tabs I’ve been keeping this week:

First and foremost, I’d like to give a shout-out to my @testdouble family. Software is broken. We’re here to fix it! If your team could use some extra help and you share our goal of improving how people write software, we’d love to talk to you!

The new macOS Mojave came out this week and I upgraded overnight the first night. So far, I haven’t run into any issues. A teammate of mine who encounters his fair share of operating system bugs says this is the best release in a while. One of the biggest changes Apple is touting is Dark Mode. Since I had eye surgery last year, I’ve had issues using dark editor themes, but being the fanboy I am, I went ahead and turned it on. I was right. It was super hard for me to focus on things. In previous OSX/macOS versions, you had the option to have a dark menu bar. I really wished there was some way to turn on bits and pieces of dark mode — so I hit the interwebs and found this from @mds:

I’ve found this next tab to be extremely useful as I get more familiar with Heroku. My friend Adam McCrea has created a newsletter to help you explore some of the more advanced topics that you’re bound to run into. With his help, you’ll turn into Heroku master in no time! I highly suggest checking it out, especially if you want to do more than git push heroku master :

Another reason you should subscribe to Mastering Heroku is that Adam will link to cool tools. This next tab was one of those. I tend to like to look at my database tables thru a GUI these days instead of dropping down to the console. Maybe Active Record has spoiled me. Ten years ago, I was writing super complex queries, but now I don’t have to. If you’re like me and want a quick view into your database, check out pgweb:

This next tab, from Steven Occhipinti, is an oldie, but goodie. I’m a habitual editor switcher, as anyone from Test Double can attest to. I’ll leave that story for another post! I’ve used them all — from Spacemacs, to Sublime Text (which I proudly own a license to), to Atom and Visual Studio Code. But for whatever reason, I just can’t quit Vim 🥁. Over the last couple years, I’ve been eliminating as many plugins as I can to just use plain ol’ Vim keybindings. One of those plugins that I removed was NERDTree. I began to use the built in netrw. Steven has put together a great resource for those that might also want to switch, or just want a good quick reference:

My last tab is actually for a book I’ve been reading. If you work on the web, you might not know, or feel, much connection to how it was first created. By better knowing the history of the web, the dream of hypertext, its document model, will make you a better developer today. Today’s developers have benefited from a term called ‘Conceptual Compression’. They aren’t concerned about learning how the internet or web was created — it’s just a way of life for them. This book reveals the origin of the World Wide Web from the creator himself, Tim Berners-Lee.

Last, but not least, I want to introduce you to The Machine.

DEV Community: Andrew Vida

Keepin' Tabs #2 - Traversal Conference edition

Keepin’ Tabs #1