For a few weeks I have been using two tools to map my work activity. Since my work involves manager and maker modes, I am trying to figure out how much time I spent in each of them and possibly how to remove distractions. A co-worker recommended RescueTime and WakaTime and here are my comments.

RescueTime

RescueTime home page says “With so many distractions and possibilities in your digital life, it’s easy to get scattered” – yes, I know – and “RescueTime helps you understand your daily habits so you can focus and be more productive”. Yes, they really helped me understand my daily habits.
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This week #deletefacebook was a trending topic everywhere after all the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Lots of people deleted their accounts, including Elon Musk and the WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton. I didn’t delete my account but one thing that I did in the middle of February was deleting the app from my iPhone – which is a good step anyway.

I am not deleting my account because I still need Facebook to reach a few people from my previous companies/schools. I used Facebook groups a lot in the past when I was dealing with immigration and unfortunately, it is difficult to find a replacement for this functionality. Forums and lists are not a thing since Facebook absorbed everything on its island.

What can I do?

If I can’t delete my Facebook account, I may have some way to undo my friendship with them.
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A few months ago we started using React at Thinkific. One of the challenges of using React is creating reusable components not only from a look and feel perspective but also shareable in different projects.

I didn’t create this concept of elements (or components) library. To be honest, there are podcasts, courses, and examples everywhere about it but how to even start it? When you start creating a project from scratch you face several questions:

• How to style components? Sass? Stylus? styled-components?
• How to show the elements?
• How to build the library? Babel? Webpack?
• How to publish the library? To NPM or not NPM?
• How to use integrations and CI in your favour?

Lots of decisions and you may not know all the answers. Startup Life™ doesn’t let you do whatever you want – everything has a cost and a trade-off. Why am I talking all this story? Because I wanted to share my thoughts about it and I created a repository to document what we are doing.
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I am huge fan of podcasts. It is always nice to hear people’s thoughts, struggles, jokes and sick picks. Here is my short list of development-related podcasts.

• Syntax: Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski talk about webdevelopment. You can expect lots of Javascript – especially React – and CSS here.
• Developer Tea: plenty of episodes about the developer career. Off the top of my head I would recommend the episode about Experienced Developers and Impostor Syndrome.
• Front End Happy Hour: each episode the hosts toast when someone says a specific word. If you are into style guides, you must head their episode about it.
• Software Engineering Radio: I didn’t hear a lot of episodes here but it caught my eyes ears the one with David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails.
• Vancouver Tech Podcast: last but not least, I’ve been living in Vancouver for more than 2 years and it’s nice to hear the local tech scene.

What are your favourite podcasts? Let me know in the comments :)

2 years ago I wrote a post about my tooling and here I am again, 2017 edition. I decided to write again because I keep listening to podcasts with Sick Picks and I also have my Sick Picks :)

Dev tools

Editor: Atom

I have been using Atom for a while. Despite I started testing VS Code in the latest months, I returned to Atom because VS Code doesn’t separate UI theme from syntax theme – you may not care about this, but I am a fan of a light UI and a dark code highlight.

Here are the packages that I have installed:
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Many of us use Github daily however we usually don’t use all its features. On the latest months, its team released a few webinars about how Github uses Github. More than showing the web interface, they talked about their culture and their workflows. In this post, I’m adding the links to the webinars with a few notes.
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Few months ago I saw in The Verge a post about CloudReady. CloudReady is a remake of Chromium OS ready to go in old PCs or Macs. The company behind the product sells its solutions/support to organizations interested in keeping using their hardware. It’s really interesting.

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In yesterday Code & Coffee Meetup I talked about how Web APIs can improve User Experience. I watched Zeno Rocha talking about it few months ago then I decided to study/share the subject.

Here are my slides and the example repository that I created for the event.

We usually create HTML files in our Github repositories, but how to show this data in the browser? RawGit is a solution to serve files with the correct content types.

Example: The WordPress readme.html file can be shown in the following URL:

https://rawgit.com/WordPress/WordPress/master/readme.html

You only need to follow the formula:

https://rawgit.com/USER/REPOSITORY/BRANCH/file.html

The advantage of using RawGit over Github Pages is that RawGit works with all branches, while Github Pages requires a gh-pages branch. Last not the least, the source code of this solution is also available in Github.

Last week I presented in Code & Coffee about WordPress and Gulp. In my 10 minutes talk, I explained briefly what is Gulp and how its tasks can save our time.

Here are my slides and the example repository that I created for the event.

Update: video

I’ve in my development mac different virtualhosts, using .local or .wp TLDs. Opening these address in Chrome are slow – about 3 seconds ‘resolving address’. This situation doesn’t happen in Safari or Firefox. Here is my typical /etc/hosts configuration:
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This is an old trick that saved me several times. Sometimes people forget to setup their name and email information. The following script is useful to fix mistakes:

#!/bin/sh

git filter-branch -f --env-filter '

an="$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME"
am="$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL"
cn="$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME"
cm="$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL"

if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL" = "[email protected]" ]
then
  cn="New author name"
  cm="[email protected]"
fi

export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="$an"
export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="$am"
export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$cn"
export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$cm"
'

echo "Run after"
echo "git push origin +master:master"

This post is also available in English.

Um dos meus programas de rádio favoritos é o Central 98, da 98FM (de Belo Horizonte). Ele começa às 10h da manhã e devido a diferença de 6h de fuso horário eu não consigo ouví-lo ao vivo. Então, criei um shell script para gravar o programa e assim posso ouvi-lo no meu tempo livre.

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Esse artigo está disponível em português.

One of my favourite radio shows happens every day at 10 AM (Brasilia Timezone). I was unable to listen to it because the time zones. Then, I created the following small shell script to record the show and then I can listen to it in my free time.
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the ink magazine was an assignment of my HTML & CSS classes in the Web and Mobile App Design and Development program, performed in Langara College.

The students was supposed to create a magazine responsive layout using HTML/CSS. (I usually use Gulp and SASS in my projects, however, I didn’t use extra tools in this task).

The source code is available in my Github profile.

I have just moved this week to Vancouver. I started my Web and Mobile App Design and Development post-degree in Langara.

Maybe I should write a blog talking about cultural differences between Brazil and Canada, like dozens of Brazilians but I think that those pages show limited or inaccurate point of views.

New times are coming! :)