Hi there 👋

I watched The Castle (1997) for the April movie club… great choice Zachary Kai! In short, I really enjoyed this film. Go watch it. I’ll admit the trailer didn’t really sell me on it but after watching the first eight minutes on YouTube, I was in. It’s about a working-class Australian family that fights to keep their beloved home from being torn down to expand an airport. The humor is definitely my style with a fast stream of jokes, most of which came from the dialog but there were also some fun visual gags. ...

As part of the Indieweb movie club for March, I watched the 1972 film What’s Up Doc?. I hadn’t heard of this movie before but I ended up having a lot of fun with it. If you don’t mind silly older commedies, then I definitely recommend giving this a watch. The film is billed as a screwball comedy starring Barbara Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. That’s really all you need to know going into it. I was surprised to learn however, a “screwball comedy” is actually a very specific sub-genre of romantic commedies dating back to it’s peak during the 1940s. After reading a bit more about it, I realized that this film is a fun homage to the genre and I recognized several of the common tropes such as a “one-sided courtship”, crazy coincidences, and a classic chase scene to name a few. ...

Even Troy Hunt (a well-known security researcher and creator of Have I Been Pwned) fell for a phishing email. He wrote all about it on his blog: A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed my Mailchimp Mailing List I found it a valuable read, not only for the lessons learned, but it’s also a reminder that it could have happened to any of us. The email looks fairly well crafted and I appreciated his analysis of the factors that led to him falling victim. It’s important to remember that even the most security-minded people can make mistakes and that security is hard. ...

I found a way to stash changes in git without including the branch name in the stash message. This might be a very niche use case but it’s been a minor annoyance for me for some time. If you just want the alias, then add the following to your .gitconfig: [alias] sm = "!f() { git stash || exit 1; rev=$(git rev-parse stash@{0}) && git stash drop stash@{0} || exit 1; git stash store -m \"$1\" $rev; }; f" You can also use this technique for renaming stashes. ...

I’ve reviewed quite a few pull requests in recent years and I’ve noticed some less-than-ideal practices when it comes to creating merge commits so I thought I’d list some things you can do to make life a little easier for someone reviewing your code. Make the commit message as useful as possible A lot has been written about how to write good commit messages, but I rarely see the advice applied to merge commits. They may not be the most exciting type of commit, but they’re still very important. ...

I saw this on Chris Coyier’s blog and thought I would jump on the bandwagon. The idea, is to see for how many things you use the default apps for your system, which for me is mostly on Android/Google. It’s a fun exercise and I totally get the arguments for “just” using default apps, but I also get a little sad at the thought of huge companies like Apple and Google able beat better alternatives simply because they’re the default. ...

Blazor took a lot of design decisions from React and other frontend frameworks and as a stateful component-based UI framework there is quite a bit of experience that can be transferred from one to the other. I gave this talk earlier this year at KCDC and then last week I presented an updated version as a Jetbrains webinar. Special thanks to Khalid for inviting me on and being an excellent host! ...

This is mostly a collection of my notes on productivity and little tips for saving time or being more efficient while doing knowledge work. Organization vs Execution To me most productivity advice either falls under “organization” or “execution”. Organization being advice like “create task lists”, “process your inboxes”, etc. I could write a whole separate post just this category. Whereas execution is all about finding the time to actually do the tasks that are on your plate. ...

If you’ve ever worked on a project with me then I’ve probably recommended at least one of these config settings in git. git config --global pull.rebase true - tells git to always pull with rebase instead of merge (the equivalent of pull --rebase). This not only saves you having to type the flag every time, but also ensures gui clients will also use rebase when pulling. Note: You should only enable this if you’re comfortable with rebasing. git config --global fetch.prune true - tells git to automatically run git remote prune after a fetch. This will clean up any local objects that no longer exist on the remote like tracking branches that have been deleted from the remote server. git config --global rebase.autoStash true - tells git to automatically stash when you perform a pull and then attempt to unstash them once the rebase is complete. This is almost always my workflow so it’s nice to have git do it for me. git config --global rebase.autosquash true - tells git to automatically include the --autosquash parameter when doing a git rebase --interactive. You should read more about autosquashing commits if you’re unfamiliar with it. I use it all the time for fixing up or rewording previous commits. Newer settings If you haven’t updated git in a couple years then you should as it’s worth it just for these new config options. ...

I’ve spent the past year as a technical lead for the first time in my career and there have definitely been a lot of lessons learned but in this post I want to focus on personal productivity and time management and the techniques that have helped me in this area. As an individual contributor on a dev team, decisions about what you should be working on are mostly made for you. You pick up tasks from the sprint board or tackle tickets as they’re assigned to you. Tech leads’ tasks tend to be much more fluid and it’s usually up to you to track them in addition to what the rest of the team is working on. That being said there should still be plenty to take away from this post for non tech leads as well. ...