DEV Community: Yoric

Unclutter your computer with a clean install

Yoric — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 06:48:22 +0000

“Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.” - Wendell Berry

Lately, I wanted to install the latest beta version of Mojave on my Mac, but I didn't. For one reason: I had too many messes on my computer, my disk was almost full, and so was my backup drive.

Sounds familiar ?

In the real life, my mum wanted to move for years, but she didn't. The cluttering she accumulated in her house overwhelms her.

Things you possess, possess you.

Digital and real-life clutters are alike

Oddly enough, our digital mess seems to follow the same patterns as in our home:

We accumulate things over time
It gets in our way

A fresh install is like moving house: intimidating.

Before to format the disk and install from scratch, we need to backup.
And so we need to handpick stuff in our old house that will eventually go to our new house.

We're afraid of:

Getting rid of something we might need, one day, as if our lives depend on it
Not being able to set up our machine right again (so many built-in preferences, bookmarks, setup files, dependencies hidden everywhere)
Wasting time in this scary process

Sometimes, all we need is a big wipeout

Let's face it:

We don't use 90 % of our things
Hence, we waste time in searching what we actually need
It's hard to focus in a messy environment
We get overwhelmed
It stops us from performing actions

Starving for simplicity

“Out of clutter, find simplicity.” ― Albert Einstein

Have you ever dreamed of living in an Airbnb picture ?
They usually feature bright, clutter-free interior space.

To go extreme, Steve Jobs's house was empty.

What a relief to have an empty desktop, an empty document folder, a 90% space available disk !

Have you ever got this feeling after buying a new computer / buying a new disk, or formatting your old one (which magically becomes new again) ?

How exciting to start from a blank page, to be in a neat space, it boosts creativity, as if nothing existed but what we're focused on.

Isn't formatting too extreme ?

Other options:

Uninstall applications by hand, empty the trash as you go along.
Experiment into a disposable virtual machine to avoid messing up your main OS.
Have different partitions and OS instances (one for development, one for non-experimenting tasks)

All those options are actually compatible and can help to stay as clean as possible between two disk formatting operations.

Pros of disk formatting:

It removes all hidden/invisible/junk files you couldn't remove by hands.
It removes all background process that launches at your back and that slows your computer down.
It removes all messed up installations, or configuration setup
It forces you to sort out your data before wiping it out.
It boosts performance
You break free from being "machine dependent"

To sum it up

When you format your disk regularly, it's like moving house often.
Or getting through a typhoon, wiping everything out.
You become an agile digital wanderer. You travel lightly, with only what matters.

From emptiness, you can build again.
Download the latest version of your favorite software, experiment with new ones more easily.
Recover your sensitive data from backups, and from the clouds.
Be prepared for the unexpected (machine failure, machine robbery), be used to work from any computer, and be trained to set back your favorite environment in no time (every developer should maintain a manual to that end).

Work fearlessly, be destruction-free, try out new things, embrace digital freedom.

PS: If anyone interested, I'll write down my "save/format/restore" procedure as soon as I go through it.

An elegant way to archive our voracious curiosity

Yoric — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 11:08:24 +0000

Web curiosity = crazy tabs

As a developer, we are curious, and end up browsing a lot of links on the Internet.

Some doesn’t worth more than 1 sec attention and we close the tab right away.

Some catch our attention, and we wish we could come back later,
Perhaps it was funny, or interesting, or heart moving, or chocking, you name it.

That’s what bookmarks are for.

However, imagine what would happen if you bookmark 20 links per day ?
That’s 7000 bookmark a year, and that’s not handy.

Solution 1: Text Editor

I used to copy / paste links in text files.
I would create a new file in my TextEdit / NotePad or Vim like this:

Pros:

Easy (doesn't need any extra software)
Lighweight (doesn't consume much memory nor cpu usage)

Cons:

Content get messy really fast: mixing links, personal notes, various topics
Not easy to search into for anything older than 2 months.
Loss of data: we surely backup when we format, or change computer, but still those text get buried into backups that we never open again, because, we’re busy.

Solution 2: App and browser extensions

I actually didn't try this option in the long run.
Using app like Evernote, OneNote
Or extensions like OneTab, Tabs Outliner, Toby.
They all look great, and I ~~should~~ will give them a more serious try.

highly.co is also interesting, as you can highlight text from any web page. It didn't click for me though. Maybe I like simplicity overall.

While I was writing this article I discovered some other options that look awesome.

Solution 3: Self-hosted Web App

Why a web app ? Sounds complicated.
Well, at first I wouldn’t even think about it.

Until I saw Shaarli in action... It's a > 10 years old product, but it's still there, being used every day by the author, with over 23,000 links.
It’s a minimalistic webapp you can host yourself. It aims at storing the links you want to keep track of.

Why I love it:

Lightweight: It's not a monster.
Once you install it, you own it: your history won't go on third-party servers.
Super easy to install. git clone https://github.com/sebsauvage/Shaarli. Done.
No Database: all your history is stored in one single text file.
Saving a link should fast and easy. And so it is.
Interface is clean. You can just browse thousands of links fast and easily.
You can add notes and tags along your links.
The "Tag Cloud" feature is actually useful.
Links can be "private".

Illustration of the popup you get after pressing the navbar button in order to save your current page link:

Final Note

For such a common task as saving links, we all have our personal preferences.
It's a matter of taste and habits.
What works best for you ? Simplicity, or specialized tools ?
While I am eager to test more productivity tools, I have a tendency to come back to the basics, with the good old plain text.

Now that I have rediscovered this Shaarli webapp, I am excited to give it a try on my (empty) personal website.

I would love to know how you handle your browsing gathering and retention.
(If you mind installing your own Shaarli instance, feel welcome to share your url, that could be awesomely informative)

Remember why you love to code

Yoric — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 09:48:58 +0000

Did you ever ask yourself:

Why do I love programming ?
How did I came into programming in the first place ?
Am I still connected with that first love ?

If you are in a transition or things get tough (quitting your job, midlife crisis, family matters), then you probably did.

Importance of Why

You may simply answer: I code for a living, to earn money.

That’s a good point.
However, your work may become a hassle if it’s your primary why.

Developer’s world is constantly changing.
If you don’t update your skills, you become obsolete, and competition will turn you into an has been guy.

Why would you update your OS to the latest version ? Why trying different OS like Linux, OS X, Windows ? Why learning new languages, new frameworks, new libraries ? Why optimizing your workflow with new editors, tools, utilities, config files ? Why even reading tech articles, blog or books ?

All of these takes time.
If you don’t have a beautiful and obsessive Why, you’ll have a tendency to keep playing around with the technology you already know.

How did you enter the programming world ?

Out of curiosity ? Friends’s influence ? Parents’s help ? School ? For developing your own game ? Your own business idea ? Your own website ? To impress friends, family ?

When I was 10 years old (30 years ago), all my friends owned a Nintendo, or an Amiga, Amastrad, Atari, Sega… Playing with them was highly addictive.
I never had any of those. Instead, my dad bought a Macintosh. For writing articles, and publishing magazines.
I won’t ever forget playing breakout on it, using a mouse for the very first time. And playing DarkCastle, the one game that compete with gaming machines of that time.

I also got passionate about using drawing application in those early days (MacPaint).
It felt like drawing on a paper, with the digital magic touch addition.
I could use the pencil, eraser, filler, change the brush size, and the filler pattern.
It seemed magical and I could play hours with it.

Then I naturally came to use Hypercard, which offered the same drawing tools as MacPaint, with the possibility to add interactivity.
You could draw a scene, let’s say a house with a tree and a pond fish, then add a transparent button let’s say on the pond. So that when you clicked on the pond, something special would happen, like the animation of a fish jumping in the air, and falling back in the pond.

You could actually trigger any instructions with events like mouseClick, mouseEnter, mouseWithin, mouseLeave, etc…
I didn’t realize it was programming at the time. I was hooked in trying all the possibles instructions to add interactivity to my drawings, play music, play animations…

I played hours with it, and was eager to show the results to my family. I wouldn’t have explore much if it was me alone.
I loved it to draw anything, then add hidden features that would surprise them.
It was more about creativity, and exploring new possibilities that nobody was really aware of at the time.

It was far from coding blocks of code in a text editor.
Gradually, I came to it, as I was eager to grow my one line instructions into more sophisticated code that could do more cool and surprising stuff.

At the time, I developed simple educational games, related to what I was learning at school, like how to memorize irregular verbs in English, or how to learn new English vocabulary in a funny way.

I also wanted to develop games like Tetris, Pacman, DarkCastle, but I soon realized I was limited and needed to switch to a more professional developing environment.
So I used Pascal and C language. They were way faster to execute, and the possibilities seemed infinite, although not as intuitive as Hypercard.

I finally could develop anything I wanted. Any game, and it looked fantastic.

I didn’t “learn” how to program, but I was driven by my desire to create good looking results, and exploring new possibilities. It was all about experimenting.

Eventually, I also played with assembly language. I remember I was playing SolarianII, a space shooting game, and couldn’t pass the three last levels. However I got thrilled when I discovered I could invoke MacsBug, a low level debugger, at anytime on that machine. From there, I could explore and modify the code being executed in assembly language. I figured out the memory location for the variable holding the number of lives, so I could modify it to whatever number I wanted. I was stunned it really worked. I finished the game that way, which was a disappointment for cheating, but clearly a cool hack to finish the game.

Why do I love programming in the first place ?

There’s something very rewarding in imagining something in your head, and then realizing it straight with your hands.
Could it be a game, an educational program, a system utility or a business oriented application.

There are two points to keep in mind here:

You need to have a clear view of what you want to do.
You don’t code for the love of coding in the first place, but for the end result. Then eventually coding will become enjoyable as you master the process.

The point is, you don’t code for yourself, you code for the result to be used by others.
Coding looks like a lonely activity, but good coders fuel their energy with emotions they share with others.
Could it be the end user, their team mates, the testers or business associates.

It’s a wonderful feeling to become confident enough to build anything you can imagine. The key point is to know what you want. And to be excited about it.

Conclusion

Remembering why you first came to love coding is important, because it’s so easy to deviate from it.
Before coding, ask yourself :

Do I have a clear idea about what I want to achieve in the next three hours, or the next three days ?
Will I be excited to show the result to someone I know ?
Why do I want to learn Python, Javascript, React, IA, Machine Learning, blockchain… is it because it’s trendy ? To get a promotion ? To get a new job ? To make my business idea come true ? Simply out of curiosity ? Learning with following a tutorial is cool, but it can be very boring if you don’t have your own Why.
When was the last time I enjoyed coding that I forgot eating or sleeping ?
When was the last time I was thrilled to watch people’s reaction about the product I made ?
Would I be enthusiastic myself using my application or website ?
Am I part of a vibrant community that is pulling each other forward ?

I wrote this article because I feel I somehow deviate from my initial passion. I took a year off to think about it.
Being a professional developer is cool (you get paid for what you love) until you get trapped into a daily routine with a foggy view of what to do, and why you’re doing it.