Tool Sharpening: March 11, 2015

Wednesday, 11 March, 2015 — development improvement

I’m presenting Intermediate Git on March 31. It’s a one-day, hands-on workshop to build skills from beginner to intermediate with Git on the command line. Cost: $449. You can register here.

Environment + Process tweaks

I separated “Reading and Learning” posts from “Tool Sharpening” posts, as I mentioned I was going to do. These are separate concerns and they’ll be easier to make both types of post separately. My expectation is I’ll have roughly twice as many Reading and Learning posts as Tool Sharpening posts.

Also, with my new gig, I’m a lot more comfortable working on a Pull Request model. Even if I’m the only person working on a project, it’s still good process reinforcement. I’m also using a rebase model. I’ve never cared for merge commits. Conversely, reducing a feature branch to one or two very descriptive commits feels pretty good. I’ll use small commits in the moment when I’m taking small steps to implement a feature. Once I finish the feature, those small steps lose their utility. They become noise. The Pull Request model lets me strip away that noise and tell the larger story about what the commit is doing and why its there.

I also:

• Adjusted the TextExpander shortcuts I use to generate much of each podcast line to account for wording changes I’ve made
• Refactored my TextExpander shortcuts for podcasts to create the Markdown link for podcasts with a predictable URL structure, which thankfully, is most of the ones I listen to
  • A further refactoring to do is to transition to a single TextExpander shortcut that calls a Ruby script with which I could retrieve the show notes page and grab the episode title
  • This would allow me to more quickly scrobble the podcasts I listen to, even though there’s not a direct way to get the information out of Overcast.
• Created some TextExpander shortcuts for fitness and exercise
• I added some additional Composure shell commands for Git
  • grbc is git rebase --continue
    • Useful for resolving conflicts on a merge or, more likely with the way I work, a rebase before a merge
  • gmt is git mergetool
    • Get me into merge conflict resolution as quickly as possible
  • fbc is git push origin :$1 && git branch -d $1 and allows me to clean-up a feature branch after I’ve merged it to master
    • E.g. fbc nlw-new-feature
    • fbc stands for feature branch cleanup
  • gsu is git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/$1 $1
    • Useful for when I’m working with another developer on a feature branch I started and pushed, but now need to pull changes the other develoer made on the feature branch

Project work

• Moved Accomplished over to GitHub and fixed up the initial batch of tests
• Set-up a new Digital Ocean server ($10 credit for using the link) that this blog will eventually be migrated to. Outside of the initial machine creation and user addition, I’ll be doing as much of the set-up and management that I can through Ansible

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