Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

So we send a quote out to a client to update his website to make it compliant with the new privacy guidelines: SSL encryption, removing external libraries, removing Facebook Plug-ins, all that stuff. We didn't get a response.

On Monday, he called in a panic. "The website does not work, fix immediately!"

I check out the server, what do I see? An SSL cert installed the Friday before... Client decided to do it himself, on a Friday, without testing. He broke something, but cannot tell me exactly what he did.

And somehow he thinks all that is my fault :D

Got fed up with having to use the mouse/trackpad while editing code or using the terminal, so I decided to (finally) learn proper vim keybindings and tmux.

Boooooy oh boy, this certainly changes things.

I think I'm in love with tmux. Damn that piece of software is so sexy. Disabled the mouse, propped up my dotfiles and installed tmux + my conf on all machines I use. It's so useful, so fast and so pretty...

Spent some time with vimtutor too. Finally getting faster with the keybindings. Installed neovim, got some plug-ins (nerdtree, fzf etc), disabled the mouse and arrow keys, and made it pretty. It's actually pretty nice, but I'm not at the "buff gorilla who took speed and pressed 24 keys in a microsecond" typing level yet. One day though.

Also I'm using the Nord color scheme on everything. Overall pretty satisfied with the end result. Still not as productive as I was with VS Code, but I think I'll eventually surpass my previous productivity levels.

If anyone has any tips for vim/nvim or tmux, feel free to share!

Possibly the start of a very bad adventure: I'm helping my brother-in-law set up a website for a business he'd beginning with his wife. I'll be needing to provide him a simple cms & shopping cart that he can manage. No payments as we want to just use PayPal so as to avoid having to actually manage user data & credit card information.

Wish me well....

Also advices appreciated cause otherwise, I'm gonna use a simple Drupal or WordPress site with like 1 theme and 0 plug ins.

Know your tools. Take some time to explore them. Knowing shortcuts, the capabilities of your IDE (and plug-ins), libraries and many more will look you like a wizard to others and can save you many efforts.

I actually found a use for Outlook's scummy default behaviour to open links in Edge and not the default browser.

On my company laptop I mainly use Librewolf because it allows installing plug-ins despite group policy. I only use Edge for Azure DevOps and company portals because MS SSO doesn't work with Librewolf for some reason.

Because Outlook disregards the OS settings and uses Edge by default, MS software forms a sort of bubble, and I can freely set Librewolf as my default browser.

Why do most web sites have so bright design? Aaarghgh, my eyes!

Anyone who dislike screeching default color themes? Black, red, blue, on full white?

Then I guess your editor and terminal are on low contrast light grey on dark grey, or something like that, right? Maybe even your window manager?

If your setup looks like this and the web is what hurts your eyes, try Dark Reader for Chrome or Firefox. I've tried several such plug-ins in the past, but this one is amazing.

(not affiliated)

Good times: Migrating a Jenkins build pipeline patched together out of groovy, python, bash, awk, perl scripts and God knows what else since I have only scratched the surface so far, from Maven to Gradle while not breaking day-to-day builds, integrations and deployments of features, hotfixes and releases. I'm actually enjoying the challenge but it's taking forever due to several issues:
- Jenkins breaks/hangs randomly because it's Jenkins
- Gradle can't handle sets of version ranges but Maven can
- Maven can't handle Gradle style version ranges
- Gradle doesn't have a concept of parent poms, you need to write a plugin and apply stuff programmatically. But plug-ins being part of the buildscript{} don't fall under depency management rules :clap:
- Meme incompatibility issues of BSD vs GNU versions of CLI tools like sed, grep etc

I don’t know if I’m fucking stupid but ESLint is so unbelievably hard to setup. Too many fucking plug-ins, configs and rules. All I want is my Airbnb config on my React Typescript project and nothing else. I can’t even fucking get that sorted. Not to mention the hundreds of Medium tutorials that all do things just slightly differently to the point that I can’t mix and match a config.

Not sure if I'm sick or I'm actually in my full sense ....

I reached a point that I'm sick of all that million language to work with, maintain lots of shit, and started to consider using Flutter and get it done.

But I still don't like to build on these things because well, for the lots of trouble I went through in React Native, and yet again in Flutter having to modify several plug-ins because they don't support a simple feature as simple as Authentication header

I thought I'd give SwiftUI a go, but for a starter:
1. No pull to refresh
2. No proper grid (aka UICollectionView)
3. Comparing SwiftUI with Flutter, Google did a better job at keeping things simple
4. Only iOS 13+ supports SwiftUI, their statistics might show 90% using latest update, but that's their target audience, mine might be 90% not on latest update ...

Just some midnight thougts filled with frustration and wondering: How do web developers keep up with those "look ma! I made a new JS Framework!!" their life must be tougher ....

Asked why the agency added 4 different carousel/sliders plug-ins in a single Wordpress site, they answered, “so that user won’t be confused which is used where”.

My word. The way how bad and patchy the Atlassian Server SDK is documented makes development of JIRA and Confluence plug-ins an absolute horror story.
Nothing fucking works the way you'd expect it to, the development server takes upwards of 5 minutes to simply refresh a page and oooh the shit ton of money this wacky piece of horseshite costs my employer makes my head explode.
But the worst thing is:
We just have to fucking make some easy stuff we could completely just use static pages for to talk to JIRA's REST API, but someone in management made using confluence an acceptance criteria, cause some asshats somewhere else in our company made a custom confluence space - based thingy for another customer "and that's cool"
Fml

What are some of your favorite Atom plug ins?