DEV Community: Peter Denham

Weekly Developer reading

Peter Denham — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 04:00:00 +0000

In a fast-changing dev landscape, it can be tough to keep up with the latest news. I gave up on constant refreshing of developer news sites/discussion forums a while ago in favor of reading a select few (weekly) digests by e-mail. It's important that they don't interrupt my daily tasks, but are there when it suits to do some reading.

Benedict's Newsletter - "a weekly email newsletter about what's happening in tech that actually matters, and what it means. I pick out the news and ideas you don't want to miss in all the noise, and give them context and analysis. "
Last Week in AWS - "Posts about AWS come out over sixty times a day and the signal to noise ratio is abysmal. I filter through it all to find the hidden gems, the community contributions - the stuff worth reading!"
JetBrains Blogs - Latest product features updates from JetBrains
Kent C Dodds Newsletter - Focused on Javascript/React/Testing and tooling
Node Weekly
Database Weekly
React Status
Best of JavaScript - not a curated newsletter, but something you can quickly scan for trending javascript libraries of the week

What are some newsletters/sources you use to keep up with developer news?

40% Keyboard Programming on Vortex Core

Peter Denham — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 05:00:00 +0000

(this is a WIP)

I recently started using a 40% keyboard (vortex core) as my daily driver for the $dayjob . It's a nice compact board, but the default layout isn't very effecient for programming, specially common symbols used in development are tucked behind weird key combinations.

I took some inspiration from the planck and another users reddit post. Another reddit user created a better MPC than the official version for remapping keys on the core, which was super handy for iterating and testing several layouts.

Some of my design decisions

Enter on left space bar, as the home row is one key short of a 60 keyboard and missing the apostrophes was constantly tripping me up
Swapped Fn1 and Fn physical keys. Red Fn1 is a little easier to hit for the common programming symbols layer. Blue Fn key layer is for navigation and media keys. I kept the mapping to the printed keys so they're a littler earier to learn

Limitations

Macros are great for reducing all the shift-key operations from 3 to 2 key combos. There is a limit of 20 macros per layer, which limits your options.
Key combinations sometimes mis-fire. I found you need to hit the modifier key f
Windows required to use the MPC web interface the first tim

Best RubyMine plugins for Ruby on Rails development

Peter Denham — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 05:00:00 +0000

These are a few of my favorite plugins that boost my productivity with RubyMine for Ruby on Rails.

Would love to hear any others that you find useful in your workflow!

Rubymine, rvm, git and overcommit issues

Peter Denham — Thu, 10 Oct 2019 00:10:40 +0000

Something I've struggled with in my environment recently is using RubyMine/IntelliJ across multiple microservice projects with git and overcommit hooks.

When committing/pulling from a git repo it would often complain about ruby version mismatches, overcommit gem not being installed etc.

After some digging, I finally came across an old bug report in the RubyMine backlog which mimics the behaviors I've been experiencing.

The root cause seems to be RubyMine not respecting the ruby version as set by rvm for each project, and it is in fact using the default system ruby. Once I realized this, the issue symptoms I was seeing started to make a lot of sense!

Some developers have mentioned having more success with rbenv instead of rvm, but haven't seen consensus with that either. Another workaround is to use github for mac desktop application - but the trick is to launch it from the command line from your project root folder with github . so it has the ruby environment loaded. This is a pain too, especially when working on several projects, each with their individual ruby and overcommit version conflicts.

Once I find an acceptable workaround I'll update this post, but hopefully this will get some exposure for others experiencing the same issue, or someone can reach out if they have a better workaround/solution!

Personal domain e-mail on AWS with Gandi

Peter Denham — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 04:00:00 +0000

I recently moved hosting of my domains over from a managed hosting provider of several years to AWS. While there is the inherant time sink of managing the infrastructure yourself, I didn’t want to maintain an e-mail server.

My domain registrar, gandi, provides 2 free e-mail addresses per domain, and unlimited forwarding accounts.

While your domain may be hosted on AWS (using aws nameservers), you can update the dns configuration to point to gandi’s mail servers, and setup and manage all your domain name e-mail addresses from gandi's console.

This is managed in you aws console under Route53, Hosted Zones, . You'll then want to create two record sets for the domain as follows:

Type	Alias	TTL	Value	Routing Policy
MX	No	10800	10 spool.mail.gandi.net.	Simple
MX	No	10800	50 fb.mail.gandi.net.	Simple
TXT	No	10800	“v=spf1 include:_mailcust.gandi.net ?all”	Simple