Good vs Evil: love for Microsoft

Mijail Rondón — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 04:41:12 +0000

From my early years, I were convinced about the free software philosophy (which I'm still attached to) and back then Microsoft was the devil against the software freedom, and everything around Microsoft was a thing I learned to hate like in a movie, was the empire against the republic.

It's important to say that at that moment, I was very young and the first generation on my family to be close to computers and the internet. And to share was a principle for my family and, I took very personally the fight of the good vs the evil.

Is well known that all the power of Microsoft were used against the practices of building and sharing software collaboratively, but then something changes suddenly, with the "Microsoft ❤️ Linux", with that announcement many discussions with my friend's circle were around speculations about the real intentions of Microsoft with this change, was very hard to imagine good intentions after many years of calling free software an abomination, and use a heart emoji to express that.

We were waiting for a mistake from Microsoft to turn back and expose the real intention, and then, was announced one of the most strategical moves from Microsoft to own the open-source, and it was the acquisition of Github, at that moment and now, the larger repository of open source software and the social network to share code. I entered in panic, imagining some legal move to avoid any new contributions or licensing over the shared code and so on.

And the time goes by, but I can't see any clue. All I can see is that many of the current technologies that I use (languages, libraries, tools...) are in some way involved with or supported by Microsoft.

Now seems like I was pulled to the dark side or something, but Microsoft managed to make me love Microsoft.

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Mijail Rondón — Thu, 28 May 2020 03:06:15 +0000

I use Alfred with many workflows every day, is a very good tool for boost your productivity if you make the initial effort to be used to the change.

Another thing that I like to do is to read the top articles on dev.to but I didn't found any Alfred workflow for dev.to, so this was a great opportunity to build something useful (at last for me) and as part of my #100DaysOfCode challenge I decided to create a workflow for dev.to.

There is an Open API to get some information from dev.to, so using a simple query you can get the top 10 articles for the day:

curl https://dev.to/api/articles?top=1&per_page=10 | jq

My first thought was to use a bash script to get the articles and parse everything with jq but since jq doesn't come pre-installed on MacOS, so searching on the web about the best way to create an Alfred Workflow, wasn't hard to find an excellent library called alfred-workflow, created an maintained by Dean Jackson (@deanishe), so cheers to him because he made the harder part.

This library was written on Python so the answer to the question How we can make a high quality Alfred workflow? is with Python and alfred-workflow. Also the documentation is very good so is easy to start.

Please review the code here github.com/mijailr/alfred-devto.

Or if you prefer, you 📦 download the workflow here

DEV Community: Mijail Rondón

Good vs Evil: love for Microsoft

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