The Valuable Dev - Vim for Adept and Active Listening
Tuesday Greetings, Valuable Developer!
I hope you have a great day and everything’s going well on your side!
I said in the last newsletter that I wanted to try writing two articles per month for The Valuable Dev. Good news: I did it for this month!
This is not something I’ll do often. It was possible this month because I had a lot of spare time, but I’m shifting my attention on my career right now (I need to pay the bills :D), which means that I’ll have less time for everything else.
Here are the goods:
A Vim Guide for Adept Users
We continue on the path to Vim mastery with digraphs, interesting keystrokes in VISUAL and INSERT MODE, thorough explanations of Vim’s regex engine, vim folds, and more.
Active Listening for Developers
Active listening is one of the most important soft skills every developer should work on. Why? What is active listening? How to do it? In what situation?
This article is quite experimental; that’s why I would love to have feedback! More precisely:
- Do you find the article useful?
- What did you like? What were the flaws?
- Did you learn something new?
If you have some spare time you can hit the reply button and let me know!
Updates
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I’m thinking focusing The Valuable Dev more on the Linux command-line and mouseless tools (like Vim for example). but It depends on what you think about it. Again, you can let me know by replying to this email.
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I’ve begun another blog for beginners eager to discover the command-line world. The articles will be shorter than The Valuable Dev (which makes them way easier to write), and I’m not sure yet if it’s something I’ll do often. Here’s an article about grep and another one about sed.
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The future book Soft Skills for Dev has now a landing page. Unfortunately, the interest for the book is pretty low, so writing it is not a big priority for me right now.
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I wanted to implement this one for months: The Valuable Dev has now a search button.
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I hate when websites are too slow, that’s why I’ve speeded up The Valuable Dev even more.
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I’ve released a new version of my open-source project DevDash and I’ve made a quick Youtube video showing how the CLI works too.
Resources
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Here’s a fascinating talk by Rich Hickey who’s speaking about his experience developing Clojure for 10 years, and about software development in general.
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A talk from Zach Tellman I really like about abstraction and software complexity, taking many examples and analogies outside the software world.
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The tail end is an article… about life? It has nothing to do with software engineering but it’s fascinating.
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I found this story about the ones behind Hacker News very interesting. At the time the article was written there were only two moderators doing basically everything (with a lot of automation).
Mouseless Tools
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If you want to search across different file formats (PDF, epub, office documents, zip…) from your shell, ripgrep-all will cover your needs.
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If you don’t use the fuzzy finder fzf, I would recommend you to try it. Here are more advanced examples and, as a bonus, here are a couple of useful scripts.
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Did you ever dream about testing your typing speed in your shell? The CLI ttyper will bring happiness in your life.
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What about CLIs to manage your databases with a powerful auto-completion? Here’s what you need. I use these tools all the time, it’s so nice to be able to auto complete JOIN statements easily in the shell. I’ve even written about mycli to manage MySQL databases here.
Let’s Connect
If I can help you in any way, you can hit this “reply” button and ask me anything you want. I’m always happy to receive emails.
Similarly, if you think this newsletter is boring, if you didn’t like my last article, or if you have any feedback of any sort, don’t hesitate to reach out.
Thanks a lot for your interest in my work and see you in a month!
Matthieu