Tool Sharpening: June 8, 2014

Sunday, 8 June, 2014 — development improvement

For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post

This past week found me still getting over the last vestiges of a cold, then traveling for a conference. Consequently, not a whole lot this week. But, on to it:

In Mail.app, I created a Smart Mailbox for any email that contains the word “unsubscribe”. I caught this somewhere in my online travels in the last week, but I’m not able to put a finger on who I picked it up from. When I find out, I’ll update with credit. The goal here is to review for mailing lists in general from one spot and decide if they’re still valuable.

I created a training session template in BBEdit for note-taking during RubyNation 2014. I focus on talks and lectures by writing notes down in outline format. It was a habit I built up during college lectures, and one that I retain when I’m processing new material. This template gave me the ability to quickly create a Markdown with YAML front matter document, tab through some placeholders to fill-in some document tags, the name of the talk and the presenter. From there, I just need to name the document and I’m ready to take notes. During the two day conference, I created 21 documents, iterating on the template during the first quarter of those sessions.

I’ll have more to say on the conference itself later this week. As a preview: Good to great talks and a whole lot of processing to do with some thought provoking material.