Over the last few months I've created a handful of local-only web apps for my own use and for family members. They're designed for somewhat specific needs that only occasionally arise, but those needs supplied an excuse to play more seriously with
Christian Johansen's suite of ClojureScript libraries, namely
Replicant,
Portfolio,
Nexus,
m1p,
Lookup, and
Dataspex, which I appreciate for their focus on data-driven frontend development. Each of the apps runs entirely in the browser. Chrome has a file system API, but not everyone uses Chrome (including me), so to persist data the apps save to and load from the browser's local storage, as well as providing buttons to download a file and copy data to the system clipboard, both of which export YAML. To load the data, you can import a YAML file.
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I automate a lot of the repetition in my development workflow to make tasks not just easier but also more reliable. Automation encodes knowledge. Scripts give me a place to capture things I learn. Here are descriptions of several scripts I use on a daily basis.
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I've written about various practices I have when writing or reviewing code, from
splitting branches using diff files and
drafting pull requests locally to
reviewing code locally and
documenting exploratory testing. It's not always easy going those extra miles, so I try to make it as simple, reliable, and fun as possible by automating whatever I can. Here are two scripts I often use, both of which use
git and
fzf. One helps keep commits clean, the other I use for testing tests.
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An old oak in my yard fell a few weeks ago, and after I cleared the brush my kids volunteered to help rake up twigs and bark. My six year-old declared the job somewhat difficult, to which my three year-old replied, "It's not hard for me." I was a bit snappish and couldn't let that braggadocio go uncorrected, so I told him, "It's easy for you because you're not doing anything, you're just telling everyone else what to do." He paused for a long moment. Then he said, "But you are doing a good job!" The little guy is a born manager.
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Back in 2013 I learned about
sketchnoting in a workshop at Midwest UX, and as someone who always doodled in my notes, giving meaning to the doodles felt like an obvious innovation I had overlooked, like putting wheels on luggage. After a few months' practice, I captured
some brief tips. Since then, I've sketchnoted presentations from Agile Conf, local software meetups, company retreats, Clojure/conj, a handful of local one-day conferences, and a commencement speech. My style is mostly the same as it was ten years ago. And that's fine, because the point was never to get better at drawing, it was to capture notes more memorably. If you're interested in visual note-taking, here are five tips after 12 years and 100 sketchnotes.
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