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The Changelog - v0.2.0

It's the week before Thanksgiving 🦃 and looking to wrap up a few things before the holiday season kicks into overdrive (already stressing about gift-giving! 🥲). I digress...

In this changelog, I'm changing the way I go about reading documentation and reminding myself of the importance of clean code. Also, highlight some tools I found this week and ones I enjoy using consistently. Lastly, a new project I'm working on to learn a new framework (hint: terminal 💻 + Python 🐍).

Here is the latest release! 🎉 Version 0.2.0 🎉.

RTFM 🤬 ➡️ 📖

When I stumble upon a ✨ new package or library ✨ that I think will solve my problems my next steps are as follows:

  1. Open documentation ⤵️
  2. Read the intro ⤵️
  3. Try the example (hopefully they have one 🤞) ⤵️
  4. Then immediately dive into whatever problem I am trying to solve that led me to the package in the first place ⤵️

I thought that was a good strategy, but after reading a recent blog post my view on reading documentation has changed.

📕 Read:

  • I stumbled upon this post by Aaron Franics 🙋‍♂️ that developers should read the docs like a book because it can help:

    1. Build a "mental map" 🧠🗺 of the tool's features and functionality.
    2. Prime the subconscious to recognize new context and patterns 🧘‍♀️.
    3. Extract more details. 🔬
    4. Make stronger connections 🪢 to other other sources (eg. YouTube 🎥, Podcasts 🎙, Courses 🏛 etc.).

I'm trying to implement this strategy into the next framework I'm working with Textual

I appreciate well-written code as much as the next developer and it is important because writing clean code helps to reduce cognitive load.

🧠 "People can typically hold up to 5–7 separate pieces of information in their short-term memory;..."

I think I hold less in my head 😵‍💫, so I try to adhere to the best practices mentioned in this post to make functions small, single purpose, and return as often as possible 🫡.

One of my favorite writers on the web Trung Phan, writes about Brian Eno - the man behind the Windows 95 startup sound 🤯. 🎨 11 Creative Lessons from Brian Eno

🗣 "The idea that anything “you don’t have to do” is “art” is a universal. It permeates everyday life across cultures and time. It clearly serves a purpose. It gives us comfort. It is a way to express ourselves. It is a form of communication. It helps us bond. These are all crucial aspects of the human experience. If “art” didn’t achieve any of these goals, our species wouldn’t have been making such stylistic decisions for thousands of years."

🧰 Tools:

  • 🖼 tldraw whiteboard with new AI capability to turn any sketch into a working prototype.

  • ⌨️ Cursor - AI-powered IDE. A fork of VSCode.

  • 🦘 + 🐍 = [Mockaroo] is a tool for generating mock data quickly. I even wrote a Python library around its API for those Django and Python web developers in mind. Check it out here.

✨ New:

  • Started a new book A Philosophy of Software Design.

  • Started a new project that uses Textual and Yahoo! Finance API to build a stock screener. The goal of this project is to learn more about the Textual framework and apply some of the lessons from Aaron Francis's article about reading the documentation like a book.⤴️.