Overcoming that scroll direction discomfort

Kevin Ng — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 12:47:39 +0000

Being a MacBook user, my job requires me to log in to a Windows VM from my MacBook, so I bought a new keyboard and mouse to help me cope with that.

My setup is something similar to this

Colourful right? It makes development very enjoyable.

This one sparks joy

But here comes the problem:

I realised that the scroll direction on my new mouse mimics the scroll direction of the Apple trackpad. I like how in 2011, Apple introduced natural scrolling on the trackpad to mirror the way we use our phones. But to me, this feels awkward on the mouse because I'm not interacting with the screen using my fingers. At my workplace, I'm kinda forced to use the old-school scroll direction: roll the mouse wheel up to scroll up and down to scroll down.

So, I did a quick search and found that it's such a common problem that some people even wrote to Apple:

Thanks Peter Marcotte, you're a hero. Source: stackexchange.com

After trying out several solutions, I finally found one that I'm happy with and would recommend: https://mos.caldis.me/

Installed the app, opened it up and saw that both Smooth Scrolling and Reverse Scroll were already checked for me. On top of that, I checked the Launch on Login as well, so that the setting stays.

Preferences page

The app made scrolling with a mouse buttery smooth, as advertised. But it also created another issue when I'm in my company's VM using Citrix. It caused my mouse wheel to take a gigantic step every time I scroll, jumping too forward and too backward past where I intended to stop. Luckily there's a nifty tab called Exception that helps me to customise my mouse settings for any particular app. I customised the settings for my mouse to disregard global settings when it's in Citrix and reduced the step speed and duration to the minimum.

Exception page

I can finally get back to developing without experiencing brain fart when switching between trackpad and mouse.

First shot at open source

Kevin Ng — Sun, 08 Nov 2020 08:40:26 +0000

Around mid-October, my friend introduced Hacktoberfest 2020 to me. It looked so interesting that I decided to sign up even though I had no experience with contributing to open-source.

Background

I'm going to talk a little about myself. I'm new to the coding scene and started my journey with a bootcamp and now I'm working as a junior software engineer. During this time, whenever there were discussions about contributing to open source, it sounds so distant because I feel like I don't really have anything to contribute with my current skill level.

Process

Nonetheless, the event and reward for participation drew me in. Onboarding was simple, all I had to do was link my Github account to the event. They even had a short video walkthrough to guide newbies like me. Some important takeaways were how to look for projects that were open-source and contribution guidelines. To find projects, here's a list of online tools that I found very helpful:

Contributions

The video walkthrough also held my hands through making a first PR with an open-source project, DigitalOcean Community's haiku collection. It helped me to understand the most non-disruptive way of contributing:

look through the issues tab to find suitable problems to tackle
fork the repo
clone it to local
make changes
push changes up to forked repo
submit a pull request

The next repo I worked on was to write a readme for cipher diaries explaining how the rail fence cipher works.

After that, I found another project that collects solutions for algorithms. I helped code out an implementation for rail fence cipher which I learned while writing the readme for the previous project. How convenient!

A more impactful project that I took on was to help a certificate generator with front-end code. I managed to refactor their view files by making partials for pages to reduce repetition. This way, the .ejs view files can be kept short without having to write a full HTML document for every page created. This was fulfilling because it added scalability to the project.

Reflections