DEV Community: Ryan Maynard

Setup Firefox for Web Development in 3 Minutes

Ryan Maynard — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This article was originally posted on my personal site.

Step 1 - Download Firefox Developer Edition

Go download the Mozilla Firefox Developer Edition.

Step 2 - Add an Ad Blocker

Head to Firefox Addons and install an ad blocker of some sort. I currently use uBlock Origin, but there is also Adblock Plus, Adblock for Firefox, or Ghostery.

Step 3 - Add a Password Manager

Setup your password manager addon. If you don’t use a password manager, you may want to check out Lastpass, BitWarden, 1Password, or one of the Keepass addons.

note: You can get a month free of Lastpass Premium with this link.

Finished

Thanks to FireFox DevTools, and the developer-friendly default settings of the this edition, there isn’t too much you need to do in order to be up and running with FF Dev edition. You may wish to take some time to explore the full capabilities of DevTools, the advanced settings in the about:config, or customize the Firefox UI with CSS.

Honorable Mention

A few other Firefox addons worth checking out include:

If you have any additional recommended addons or protips, please share them.

How To Optimize Your Environment for Flow

Ryan Maynard — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Flow is the psychological term for what is colloquially referred to as “being in the zone”. The term originated with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is identified by the following six factors:

Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
Merging of action and awareness
A loss of reflective self-consciousness
A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
A distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time is altered
Experience of the activity is intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience

Other traits associated are:

Immediate feedback
Feeling that you have the potential to succeed
Feeling so engrossed in the experience, that other needs become neglible

A more palatable summary would be that you view the activity as voluntary, enjoyable, the right balance of challenging, and clear goals to define a successful outcome.

As a remote worker, I find the experience of flow offers yields incomparable to a semi-focused state. This is especially true with programming of any sort. Having worked remotely for roughly a decade, there are a few things I found that help me personally create an environment conducive to flow. Your mileage may vary, but it may give you some ideas of things to attempt.

Dedicated workspace arranged in a way that makes it easy to grab things and to task switch quickly.
Keeping that workspace clean and sorted, such that you know where the things you need reside.
Having a ritual for when you enter the space to Pavlovian condition yourself that you’re in the place where things get done.
Eliminate as many trivial and chaotic distractions as possible. Some things that work for me are: phone on silent, headphones on with ambient music on low, avoid logging into social networks, and muting email notifications. I have yet to uninstall Slack entirely, but should I encounter a project that required my full attention, that would be the next thing to go.
Attempt intervals of focus while giving yourself breaks. You can’t force flow. It happens as a result of being lost in the work. By using something like a pomodoro timer, you don’t have the weight of “My focus should be laserlike” on your shoulders. Play around with different combinations of timed intervals + distraction breaks until you find a balance that suits you.
Some tangible way to measure tasks and performance. I find that apps that allow completed items to remain on the list with a strikethrough help in gaining mental momentum. The dry erase board or a nice graph pad is great for this also. You’ll visualize your tasks easier by physically writing them down.

If you have any other suggestions for things that help you achieve flow, I would love to hear from you at hi@ryanmaynard.co

How to Verify Your Mastodon Account with Keybase

Ryan Maynard — Sat, 08 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This article was originally posted on my personal site on April 8, 2017

At the time of this writing, the decentralized network Mastodon has recently surged in popularity out of relative obscurity. Anyone can spin up their own mastodon instance on their own domain, with their own rules. The collective of all inter-connected instances is being called the Fediverse. There is a great list of Mastodon instance here.

Identity Verification

As with any newer social network, there is the question of identity verification. Do you need to create your preferred username on all instances in order to prevent abuse? How are you to verify yourself?

Keybase does not have an in-built option to verify one’s Mastodon account yet. Chris Coyne, Keybase founder, tweeted about whether or not he should wait to implement it, in case there are major structural changes to Mastodon in the oncoming weeks. That seems to be a reasonable concern.

For the time being, you can simply sign a message with Keybase to verify yourself.

Create your Keybase proof

Make sure you have installed the keybase cli.

keybase sign -m "Hi! I'm @you@mastodonserver.tld on Mastodon."

For example, here is mine:

keybase sign -m "Hi! I'm @ryanmaynard@mastodon.cloud on mastodon

Take the result, and make a post on your Mastodon account like so.

Verify a Keybase proof

Take the contents of a posted proof, and place it in a file.

keybase verify < keybase_proof_filename

The results should appear something like this:

Alternative Keybase Proof

Another method you can use, it to post a public proof using the Keybase filesystem, KBFS

You can post a variant of I am <username> on Mastodon

cd /keybase/public/username/
touch mastodonproof.md

Would be visible at

https://keybase.pub/username/mastodonproof.md

You can also add index.html or index.md to your /keybase/username/ folder and it will be accessible at username.keybase.pub

For example, here is mine.

Thank you @todb for this idea, and thank you @seabre for pointing it out to me.

Find Your Friends

If you want to “import” a few of your Twitter followers at the start, there is an unofficial app hosted on Heroku, Mastodon Bridge. It goes without saying: use at your own risk.

Followbots

Someone has put together a followbot, if that is your thing.

Support

If you like Mastodon, don’t hesitate to toss a few dollars to the developer, Gargron. Here is his Patreon page. There are also plenty of issues to be resolved, if you want to help that way.

Hi, I'm Ryan Maynard

Ryan Maynard — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 20:03:02 +0000

Software Engineer & Process Management Consultant #python #ruby #datascience #businessintelligence #dataviz

Twitter: @RyanMaynard00
Github: ryanmaynard
Gitlab: ryanmaynard

Wanna stalk? Here is my personal site.