This weekend I wanted to setup a new playground for testing out some React concepts. I’ve decided to use Snowpack and Daisy UI. Snowpack is a new build tool and bundler for JavaScript web applications. Under the hood it uses esbuild. esbuild was written in Go and is very fast. Snowpack offers a development server and hot module replacement. It comes with a few plugins and templates to speed up setup, but its far from a zero-config tool.

My daily driver for my home laptop is Manjaro Linux. Manjaro is a derivative of Arch Linux. It offers convenience and a more beginner-friendly approach at the cost of some bloat. While Manjaro is slightly more stable than upstream Arch Linux, it’s still possible to bonk a system update. That’s what happened to me three days ago. I was able to fix almost all issues except my display manager. My Manjaro i3 installation came with LightDM, a login manager with a GTK-based greeter that fit the Manjaro aesthetic.

Every programming language needs its static site generator. Rust has 3 main contenders, one of them is Zola. I wanted to try out a Rust static site generator, so let’s walk through getting started with Zola. Installation Zola offers several ways of installing, even a Dockerfile. For MacOs, you can use Brew: brew install zola For Arch Linux (yay!): pacman -S zola That was pretty painless. Getting started The docs are very straight-forward.

A few days ago I decided to learn Rust. I was asking my tech circles for good resources and here’s what I got: The Rust Programming Language Book: the “Book” is a free resource on learning Rust, also available as paperback ULTIMATE Rust Lang Tutorial! - Getting Started: first video of a YouTube series on going through the “Book” Take your first steps with Rust: free learning path by Microsoft Take your first steps with Rust: YouTube series by Nick Taylor Rustlings - a set of exercises Rustlings egghead.

Static site generators improve performance and security of web pages. They can be cached and it’s easy to deploy them to a CDN (Content Delivery Network). Static sites are an ideal candidate for web pages that don’t require highly dynamic content, for example, blogs or portfolio pages. Astro is a new static site builder for JavaScript developers that is lightning fast. In the future, I can see it as a replacement for tools like Hugo (written in Go) or Gatsby (JavaScript + React).

I’m taking a break from daily blogging. I’ve started my first job in tech as a full-time software developer on July 1st. Before that, I was employed as a tax officer where I chose to work part-time. The transition to full-time work and a totally different industry doesn’t leave me enough energy to work on my side-projects or to write blog articles. For now, I will concentrate on getting up to speed in my day job.

The Problem I use the Kitty terminal emulator with Tmux as my main tool for working with code. My Tmux settings (~/.tmux.conf) contain the following lines to enable true-color-support: # true colors set -g terminal-overrides ',xterm-256color:Tc' set -g default-terminal "tmux-256color" set -as terminal-overrides ',xterm*:sitm=\E[3m' When I open tmux on MacOs I get the following error message: Cannot read termcap database; using dumb terminal settings. The Solution Solution as a GitHub Gist:

Simon started his career in selling software. As he learned more about the world of software, he gradually transformed into a software developer and freelance consultant. Simon build a SaaS product last year. Here is what he learned from trying to build an audience: About Building an Audience He spend a month on trying to understand his audience without trying to sell anything. His focus was on being helpful and consistently offering help.

Today I started my first job in tech. While I’m pretty excited, it’s a big step. I have to learn new workflows and tools (Jira) and become familiar with a new code-base (Angular nx workspace). Plus, I now have a Mac for work. I underestimated the differences between my Linux box and MacOs. As terminal user with lots of scripts and shell modifications, I heavily rely on my dotfiles. I came to the realization that my files are not as portable as I’ve thought.

Today I’ve started to setup my MacBook Pro for work. It’s my first Mac and I’m not amused. If you only know Linux, there are some pitfalls. My .bashrc script contains the following lines: # # ~/.bashrc # # Fish if [[ $(ps --no-header --pid=$PPID --format=cmd) != "fish" ]] then exec fish fi I use bash as my login shell, but fish as my main interactive shell. Fish is not POSIX-compliant which can lead to problems.