You don’t need to be a “test first”/test-driven developer to like tests in your application.

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Task Management

There is a great OmniFocus plug-in by Kaitlin Salzke called Work On which apparently is an idea - the work on task that is - that Kourosh Dini came up with.

People who know GTD know that I’m at least to define the next step that would bring my project closer to completion. But sometimes even that gets in the way and so I end up not setting up the project in OmniFocus at all. The antidote is a repeating “Work on” task that I can check off when I did an appropriate amount of work. Instead of defining the next step I’m just working on it and especially in projects that are self evident, creative or not in need of lots of planning this is a great idea.

Kaitlin’s plug-in makes this thing now even better, because I can check the task off for the whole day and it won’t come back until tomorrow.

Great idea, great plug-in. Give it a try.

P. S.: It’s maybe slightly too early to write a post like this, but I just wanted to share my enthusiasm. So take it with a grain of salt - and ask me in 3 months if I’m still using this.

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I didn’t sleep long. I didn’t sleep deeply or well, really. But man, did I enjoy sleeping on the couch for a little bit just now. What a great start to the evening.

I can’t get this out of my head: mastodon.online/@virtualb…

Can’t believe that at some point in my life I wanted to live in the US. How fucked up are things over there, that they won’t even respect unions anymore?

I’m happy to be living in Finland tbh, where unions and coops are actually very common.

A little thing I do, when critiquing societal issues: I try to say what I think is wrong - morally or otherwise - and then try to formulate it as a requirement: In my future society, as a citizen, I’d like X. This helps to stay constructive, I find. It also helps to formulate guidelines for my own actions.

A good difference to make when talking about generating code through ChatGPT: It is much more of a molding process, than a writing process. Or: Using a chatbot to generate code is managing a bot. Managing (or molding) are a different kind of expertise than writing/programming. But you need to know how to program to manage your bot well, because you need to validate its output.

PHPStorm's keybinding system is ridiculous

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Setup > Dev Notes

It is no news that I am pretty skeptical that PHPStorm is actually a good IDE. I especially question their handling of international keyboards. You see, on an international keyboard like the German one the keyboard shortcuts cmd + shift + 7 and cmd + / are virtually the same, because there is no way to type a / without typing shift + 7.1

To my knowledge the only modern IDE that offers a default keymap for macOs that doesn’t work out of the box with my default international keyboard is Jetbrain’s offering. The reason is that some genius thought to implement key bindings without any understanding what symbols are necessarily typed by using a modifier key. So you end up with a keyboard shortcut like cmd + / that doesn’t work in PHPStorm, but will work out of the box in VS Code.2

P.S.: The problem is old btw.: The offical issue in their bug tracker is 7(!) years old.

P.P.S.: Is this a hard problem? Maybe. The more interesting question to my mind is, though: Why is it a solved problem in all other IDEs? This is table stakes.

  1. By chance you can also type cmd + devision symbol, but that is not the same as a forward slash and is indeed - and this time correctly - its own shortcut in PHPStorm. Try to type that one on a keyboard without a numpad, though - which means this shortcut is useless on all(!) MacBooks - if you don’t have an external keyboard attached. ↩︎

  2. To be fair: The shortcut ends up being displayed as shift + cmd + 7, but at least vsc won’t act like cmd + / and cmd + shift + 7 are completely different key bindings (which they are not). ↩︎