Tool Sharpening: July 21, 2014
Monday, 21 July, 2014 — development improvement
For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post
It’s been far longer than I’d hoped with my previous entry. Sometime reasonably soon, I’ll have some thoughts on stress and creative energy. In short, I’ve found that a lot of the creative energy I would otherwise have put into my tool sharpening was going into other, more stressful arenas. Ergo, when I was home and otherwise “available” to make some of these tool sharpening changes, I found that my will and energy to do so was exhausted. Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of time reading fiction. Doing that, I could focus on material far away from my normal day-to-day routine as a stress-reducer. I’m disappointed that I wasn’t writing or making tooling improvements. I am happy about doing what I needed to in order to take care of myself.
The situation that resulted in said stress is improving. After a very relaxing weekend, I’m back to tool sharpening. Onto the batch of recent changes:
- Added a TextExpander shortcut to correct my constant misspelling of visibility
- Added additional mailing list filters
- Adjusted my git commit message template to use BBEdit placeholders to move from segment to segment
- Set-up a typing.io account to begin language specific typing practice
- This was a pick from Ruby Rogues Episode 147
- I suspect I’m a slow coding typist and I want to get better
- My first Ruby on Rails lesson resulted in a 35 wpm typing speed with an unproductive keystroke overhead of 10 percent
- Opened a RubyTapas account and watched episodes 219 and 221
- Found a few options for converting PDFs to EPUB format
- I’m taking a hint from Michael R. Bernstein and attempting to read more papers
- A lot of the papers I see linked around are in PDF format
- I’d prefer to use an EPUB, where I have better control over the text sizing. I can also highlight and comment
- Updated git.bbpackage, Source.bbpackage and ryans_rails.bbpackage to latest versions