I work at Thinkific with 20+ other developers (we are hiring for multiple positions) in different codebases. GitHub is part of our toolkit, and I decided to write a post sharing a few Chrome extensions, integrations and third-party apps that help me be productive as an individual contributor and organized as code reviewer and team lead.

Chrome extensions

Refined GitHub

Sindre Sorhus extension brings a massive list of improvements to GitHub UI and many of them have become part of the product after a bit.

Better Pull Request for GitHub

This extension list project files in a tree. This is quite useful when you have a big pull request and you need to go back and forth to understand better what is going on.

GitHub Hovercard

This extension shows info about a user, project, issue or commit. It is a cool UI trick like Facebook does. This extension even works for private repositories, as long as you have a valid token to grab the information of the service.

GitHub Repository Size

This extension automatically adds the repository size and individual files size

File Icon for GitHub and GitLab

Not a lot to say here :)

Integrations

Pull Panda

Pull Panda is an integration GitHub acquired a few months ago and they have added for free in the product. It is very handy because you can map GitHub users to Slack users and then they will get inside Slack all the information about the work they are following in Slack. Pull Panda delivers comments in PRS and even tell you about git conflicts (I love and hate this one).

Pull Panda can also spot bottlenecks, show who are the ones most pushing/reviewing code and even assign automatically people to Pull Requests.

macOS apps

Gitify

Gitify lives in your Mac menu bar and it is quite simple to understand. If the icon is green, you have a notification! It is also cool to mention the app is open-source (Electron-based, if you are curious).

Quests

Quests is similar to Gitify but one important difference here is Quest also supports GitLab.

iOS apps

Githawk

Gitwalk is my favourite iOS app for GitHub. It lists pull requests in a friendly way and I like how you can see the files affected in the PR and all conversation in place. If you need to take a lot at a pull request when you are not in front of the computer, this app is for you!

What are your GitHub tricks? Let me know in the comments :)

In the last years, newsletters became more and more popular. Along with Twitter and RSS, it is one of my favourite ways to keep me updated it. Here are the ones I follow:

• Software Lead Weekly – if you are a team lead, engineer manager, CTO you will like this one. Worth to mention their Slack group.
• Changelog – independently of your stack, Changelog is a rich newsletter with interviews and tool suggestions. They also have a podcast – Example
• Dense Directory – Every Tuesday a newsletter helping web workers be productive, stay inspired and think critically
• dev tips – Chrome Dev Tools gifs weekly in your email.
• JavaScript Weekly – a once–weekly email roundup of JavaScript news and articles
• React Status – another one about JavaScript but React focused – Example
• Ruby Weekly – once-weekly emails about Ruby. This one and the previous two are curated by cooperpress
• Daily Developer Tips – code snippets, tools, techniques, and interesting stuff from around the web.
• Gartner L2 Daily Insights – news and research analysis across digital marketing, site & e-commerce, mobile and social media.

Being a Team Lead requires more than tech skills: you interact daily with people and it is quite challenging building stronger relationships and improving employees onboarding. The following document is my People Lead Readme (sometimes known as Manager Readme), where I talk about me and I share my expectations on people and on the product.

What?

This document is an extended introduction to what I value and believe in as a team leader and software developer. It is also a quick introduction about myself and how I work.

• This document doesn’t replace getting to know each other through 1:1s and day-to-day chats. As I said before, it is an introduction.
• This document applies only to me, and in no way should be considered to apply to any other team lead or manager at Thinkific – even though we think in similar ways sometimes.
• If you feel like I am not acting like I describe here, please let me know.
• If you are curious why this document exists in the first place: there is a newsletter called SoftwareLeadWeekly (recommended) and managers share their own readme’s there. After seeing several documents, I decided to write my own.

Read more

A few days weeks I got a MacBook Air as secondary machine. Since its SSD is smaller than my main Mac I couldn’t use Time Machine. It was definitely a good time to finally create my dotfiles repository. My repository is based in webpro/dotfiles (you may want to check it out his repo to understand this one if you feel lost).

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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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