Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs are meaningless jobs. Jobs which if taken away, won’t matter to anyone (Maybe except to the person who is/was in that position) While responding to a listener question, DHH mentioned 1 that it is actually a book, based on a study of such jobs. He mentioned that BigTech TM hires talent so that their competition can not hire the same person, even if the hiring company does not really need the highly talented individual.

Be Better Than You Were Yesterday

Few of the quotes from this1 interview, Danny Meyers On why someone is motivated (From sports) Likes to beat others 2 - Muhammad Ali Hates to lose - John McEnroe Beat own record - Usain Bolt Every day is an opportunity to be better than you were yesterday Perfection is stupid, receipe for unhappiness [paraphrased] Be a 51 percenter. Of total 100 “marks” - 49% are for the technical skills required for the job and other 51% are for “How did you make everyone else feel while doing it?

Magit fixed

As I wrote earlier, I was unable to use magit because of the third party issue. Doom fixed it within hours (bigger community) But minmacs also fixed 1 it (only one person) I had to follow a slightly complex set of instructions, but I’m glad it all worked out in the end. I will continue to use Minemacs on my personal machine. Working in markdown is pleasure in minemacs. I want to get robe working with minemacs, and codium and chatgpt

Back to Doom : For work

I updated Minemacs few days ago, and it broke magit 😱 1 I had suspected that it is not problem with Minemacs But I can’t have magit broken, so on my work machine I switched (back) to Doom FWIW, the issue is already fixed on Doom 2 This time I noticed doom now installs itself under ~/.config/emacs rather than ~/.emacs.d I also updated my init.el and config.el Now that I’m back, all my muscle memory started kicking in.

CPR for Work

I came across this in the 1thing podcast 1 C-P-R stands for Communication, Planning and Resources Nick mentions that how we sort the laundry into separate drawers so that when we need, we can easiy find socks in their drawer, rather than looking for then in a pile of clothes. Similarly, at work if team members know where to look for something, it would save them time in the long run (even though it feels like it takes time to do that initially)

Switched to Arc

I wrote about Arc browser earlier here. At that time, I was still on macOS catalina, version of macOS not supported by many, including brew and Arch browser. Now that I have successfully upgraded - I was able to get Arc working on my personal machine as well. I did not wish to make this default on my work machine - wasn’t sure if it was supported (based on Chromium, so it should work, still if something does not work, getting support from IT won’t be easy.

MacOS Upgrade : The Conclusion

previously .. our protagonist made all the preparations, and yet his two attempts to upgrade the OS failed due to what seems like hardware failure. Will he succeed, or give up ? Let us find out in this thrilling conclusion aka Part 2 So in place upgrade did not work. I looked at my SSD. It was partitioned in two. One for OS and other for data. I do not remember if I did that when I tried to install linux on this machine.

MacOS Upgrade : The beginning

As I intended and mentioned here - I have started upgrade to macOS Monterey. I had already taken backup. (I don’t expect the entire data to be lost, but still ..) Just before I clicked the upgrade button - I created a list of software I need to re-install after the upgrade. I also went ahead and deleted apps left-right and center from the Applications folder. Nice (and not so nice) stroll down the memory lane.

→ Zed Editor ∞

My colleague told me about this new editor written in rust yesterday. The feaure page mentioned vim-mode, so I was OK to try it.

It seems collaboration is their USP - I don’t see using that feature personally anytime soon.

So what about rest of the features ?

My first impression is that it can be light alternative to VSCode. It has similar UI structure, default keymap as VScode. It supports few languages Out of the box, Ruby being one of them, so I may try it at work as well.

Coming back to vim-mode - the reason for which I even was ready to try it. It was not easy to enable it. I had expected to find it under keymap.

But vim-mode is restricted to modal editing, so one needs to enable it via settings.json (similar to VScode) and set "vim-mode": true there. Other things - not related to modal editing, but I have come to rely upon - like : commands to save (:w), or :1 to jump to the beginning of the file, do not work.¹

Opening new file wasn’t intuitive. It closed the existing file. There is no New tab either.

But after adding the folder to the project and opening anotehr file from the same project, opened it in separate tab. 😌

In conclusion :

1. Good attempt to provide VScode alternative. Because it is a native app, it will be faster than Electron app
2. This is not meant to be terminal app anyway. So for modal editing in terminal, I will stick to helix