Run your meetings like a Dungeon Master

Specifically I am talking about meetings where the goal is solutioning. If you’re planning out the logistics of how to get some well-defined work done, that is different. I’ll save that for a “How to run meetings like a general” post. This post is about when you need to get people together to figure out a common direction on some ill-defined problem.

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How to adjust the GUI font size in Vim or Neovim

So you want to increase or decrease the font size? Maybe as easily as pressing Ctrl + or Ctrl - like in every other GUI application out there? Keep reading.

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Add more context to your PRs

The quickest way to get nit-picky feedback on a pull request (PR) is to add a two sentence description of what was changed and put it up for review. The best way to get good feedback on a PR is to equip the reviewer with the context needed to think more deeply about the change you are proposing.

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Solve the tech debt problem with post-delivery time

You shipped a project at work. Time to focus on the next project exclusively, right?

If you’ve worked on many projects, you know that what I just said is unrealistic. At the very least, there is likely more planning that needs to be done and key decisions made before work can start in earnest on the next project. Beyond that there are likely post-delivery issues that will come up and need addressing. Oh, and maybe there is some work we can do to leave things in a better state?

The mindset of considering the old project “done” at delivery is overly simplistic, yet that is what I observe happen time and time again. At least that is what happens when no one makes a point to make post-delivery project work explicit.

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Towards a better archive extractor interface

I have waited years and years for someone to make a general purpose archive extracting tool the way I can picture it. The requirements are limited to:

  1. Extracts all common archive formats (.tar.bz2, .zip, etc.)
    • This kind of goes without saying, but it doesn’t pedantically “extract” a .tar.bz2 into a .tar file (I’m looking at you 7-zip)
  2. Needs no flags or subcommands or other configuration for the common use case
  3. Never creates more than 1 top-level file or directory per archive file
  4. Doesn’t add an extra layer of directory nesting when the archive only contains a single top-level directory

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