Tool Sharpening: August 17, 2014
Sunday, 17 August, 2014 — development improvement
For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post
It’s been a busy couple of weeks with a really sweet work project and a couple of interesting events in the neighborhood I won’t go into here. Suffice to say, my time and attention to get this posted went elsewhere earlier. But, here we are now. Here’s some of what I’ve learned or refined over the last couple of weeks:
- Took two Ruby-based typing.io typing practice session and found that
{,},*and&are some of the hardest coding characters for me to type - I found a general purpose typing practice site, keybr.com
- Practiced for about 20 minutes, discovering S and Q are two of my worst characters to type
- Registered for an account the following day
- Recalling again that BBEdit makes use of Emacs keystrokes, I researched how I might use some of those Emacs commands to navigate text better
- Fixed a bug and issued a pull request on the Fleakr gem, which I use to update photos on this site from my Flickr stream
- Updated a work environment script/BBEdit text filter I use to format a list of JIRA cases
- Created a new tmuxinator profile for my current work project
- Built a plan to reaquaint myself with Rails code by looking at Rails code I’ve written in the past with the accompanying tests
- Further, I want to improve my understanding of browser-based integration testing by writing Cucumber or Turnip tests
- With my team’s current project wrapped up, during our retrospective, we decided that during our next project, we are going to investigate front-end testing methods like JavaScript unit testing and Capybara tests
- I evaluated how I could update my split repository dotfile setup to use thoughtbot’s rcm. My plan is this:
- Take a diff between the last version of thoughtbot’s dotfiles repository I had and the upstream HEAD
- Identify which files and diffs I need to undo and move those into a local dotfiles repository with the diffs
- Compare the structure of my existing local dotfiles repo and determine how I’ll need to shuffle it around to conform to rcm expectations
- One of my coworkers showed me a trick to remove untracked files in Git –
git clean - I watched a number of RubyTapas episodes ($9/month)
- I subscribed to System Administration Screencasts and watched Episode 1: Virtual Box and CentOS 6.3
- Finally, on the aforementioned work project, I had an opportunity to put RSpec shared examples to work, and learn better how they worked
I’m expecting more consistency with learning and personal project work this week. I hope whomever reads this is working on their own learning projects as well.