Weekly review cw 06
I received a surprising email from a reader in Spain, with praise and a little something that surprised me. Have I already told you how I successfully increased my productivity with my bullet journal? It's not just a book; it's a tool for clarity and focus!
Friendly blog reader
This week, I found an email that surprised and pleased me during trolls and hate. A reader from Spain gave me an essential tip in addition to praising the simple design with a clear structure: In my footer, there are links to different profiles. Among them is GitHub. The icon, however, was that of LinkedIn. I couldn't believe it - I look at the page often and haven't noticed it for months. I overlooked it and corrected it immediately. This way - thank you, Carlos!
Server Side Stories
At the month's beginning, Monday was recording day for Maurice and me. We meet at his house. He has excellent equipment–perfect microphones. And we stand opposite each other when recording. This creates a different dynamic than remote. Remote works, but we have found that our result is more in line with our expectations when we are both in the same room.
The first of the three recorded episodes was published on Thursday. If you don't subscribe to our podcast, here is the direct link. In this episode, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of dotfiles and how we set up our development machines. Enjoy the episode – note: it is a German podcast.
Test-Driven-Development
It is well known that TDD is generally a good practice to writing maintainable software. I think it is essential that I keep this in mind so that I stick to this habit. I want to highlight a situation where I benefited from it again. And if you don't write tests or write the tests after the production code, take the time to try TDD!
For our current project, we receive recipes in the file system after the administration has put them in the scanner. A cron job starts every minute and checks the directory for new files so that processing is started automatically. While studying, I was told numerous errors can occur when working with the file system. With this in mind, the process for further processing the scans was developed.
I will report on our setup and the details in a future article. Just a few points as a teaser: With ViTest, it is easy to use an in-memory file system to test various conceivable (and inconceivable) situations and thus develop a stable and error-tolerant process. Of course, not everything went smoothly, but everything worked as desired in the end.
Bullet Journal
My first bullet journal was coming to an end. I had been writing in my magical little book every day for five months, with the last day of January being the last page. You have no idea how happy such a little thing makes me.
The new journal was already on the bookshelf, just waiting to be used. I didn't realize how time-consuming and exciting changing books would be. Many conscious decisions behind it have a significant impact on my daily work. The first thing I had to do was create a new Future Log. Knowing that my journal would last 5 months, I was able to design it accordingly.
Then came the takeover of the collections. I took the time for each collection to consider what it would bring me, whether I would continue to use it, and if so, how. This allowed me to remove several outdated collections with a good feeling, tidy up, and restructure the ones that had grown chaotically. The result is not just an organized list of collections—it is much more the feeling of an organized, straightforward life with fixed goals.
I expected the bullet journal to help me gain clarity. But this level of focus combined with goosebumps on usage is extraordinary. At this point, many thanks again to Maurice for getting me started!
