Today I learned that you can enable markdown in Google Docs. This isn’t really full markdown support but it does make interoperating with markdown easier. The best feature is it enables the “Paste from markdown” right-click option.
Today I learned that per the spec, the DTEND value in an ICS file is exclusive for all-day events. It makes sense but it’s not how most people think of date ranges. I ran into this while making a small node script that takes a json array of events and generates an ICS file. This has been the most convenient way I’ve found to quickly bulk create events in Google Calendar. The only issue is the multi-day events were coming up a day short. ...
My Life in Weeks by Gina Trapani. This is a pretty cool little project and I’ve long thought about doing something similar so it’s great that she put the source on Github.
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. ...
I recently gave a lunch-n-learn at work on productivity. This is brief a overview of the points from the talk 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. ...
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. ...