A Powershell Todo Manager

Taylor Hutchison — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 13:57:29 +0000

A Powershell Todo Manager

For those always at the command line

October 16th, 2019

I spend a lot of time on the command line, monitoring builds and processes. I'm able to get a lot done in one window, especially with tmux. I also use a running list of todo items to help me manage my work and personal life. I've used products from Google, Microsoft, and others to manage todo lists. Those products are great, but I don't like leaving my terminal to manage them.

I've been learning powershell recently. One of the powershell legends is Jeff Hicks and has developed a lot of powershell tools including a todo list manager called MyTasks. So since I am always at the command line and I'm learning powershell anyway it made since to try it out.

MyTasks is in the powershell gallery so it makes installation very easy.

Install-Module MyTasks

The first time you run it you need to set the path for store all your task data (everything is stored as xml on disc).

New-Item -Path "~/Users/Taylor/Documents/" -Name "MyTasks" -ItemType "directory" 
Set-MyTaskHome -Path "~/Users/Taylor/Documents/MyTasks"

Now its installed and setup. The primary commands you'll use are New-MyTask, Get-MyTask, and Set-MyTask. Lets go over these.

New-MyTask

New-MyTask -Name "Run Report" -Description "Generate report for finance" `
-Category Work -DueDate "10/20/2019"

New-MyTask -Name "Book Trip" -Category Personal

Get-MyTask

Get-MyTask

ID  Name                      Description             DueDate OverDue Category     Progress
--  ----                      -----------             ------- ------- --------     --------
1   Run Report                Generate report for    10/20/19 False   Work                0
                              finance
2   Book Trip                                        10/23/19 False   Personal            0


Get-MyTask -Name "Book Trip"

ID  Name                      Description             DueDate OverDue Category     Progress
--  ----                      -----------             ------- ------- --------     --------
2   Book Trip                                        10/23/19 False   Personal            0

Set-MyTask

Set-MyTask -Name "Book Trip" -Progress 40
Set-MyTask -Name "Run Report" -NewName "Run Finance Report" -DueDate "10/30/2019"

Benefits

Along with being available in the command line, I really like having my todo list "powershell ready" so I can manipulate it with the tools I already know. I could generate an HTML report and have my todo list be available for others to see if I so wish with:

Get-MyTask | ConvertTo-HTML

Happy scripting!

TypeScript Interfaces

Taylor Hutchison — Sun, 05 May 2019 18:25:43 +0000

TypeScript Interfaces

Interfaces in TypeScript are a useful feature that I think are both underutilized and misunderstood. So in this post I will be describing what interfaces are and contrasting that with Interfaces in C# to highlight an important difference.

Looking at the TypeScript Handbook, interfaces are described as giving names to the "shape" of values. This is a great description if you are computer scientist or expert in typed languages, but to the new programmer this definition is insufficient.

When the TypeScript Handbook talks about "shape" it means the properties and functions and their inferred types that are part of an object. Take for example an object defined as:

const config = {
    log: true,
    user: 'example'
};

This object has a shape with two properties: a boolean called log and a string called user. In JavaScript we often create object literals and pass them around to functions which examines the object to see if the desired properties exist.

One method to constrain a function so that it only takes certain types is the use of classes, which will be familiar to anyone from an OO background. You create a class with certain properties and then instantiate that class with the new keyword. There are many benefits to this approach, but not always.

If you like working with object literals in javascript, or you mostly get your data from an external API and you have no need to "new-up" objects then interfaces are a preferred means of adding type safety to your application.

Take this example:


interface INamed {
    name: string;
}

function sayHello(INamed object) {
    console.log(`Hello, my name is ${object.name}`);
}

const person = {
    name: 'Taylor',
    profession: 'Software Developer'
}

const country = {
    name: 'England',
    area: 50346
}

sayHello(person);
sayHello(country);

In that example an interface was used to constrain the type passed to the sayHello function. Object need only contain a name property of type string to be able to be passed in.

Most importantly: We didn't need to declare our person or country object literals as implementing the INamed interface. It worked simply because they had those properties and the typescript compiler was able to figure out they passed the "does it have a name property of type string" test.

So in conclusion, always use interfaces until you absolutely need classes.

DEV Community: Taylor Hutchison

A Powershell Todo Manager

A Powershell Todo Manager

For those always at the command line

October 16th, 2019

New-MyTask

Get-MyTask

Set-MyTask

Benefits

TypeScript Interfaces

TypeScript Interfaces