tag: Tools

I have been a great admirer and user of command line tools. They reduce so much time and energy while getting things done. But, on the other hand I have not been a reasonably good user of Git by itself. I could never come to terms with typing in one too many statements to get to where I was going. For example - Compare changes with previous version Check who did changes in a specific version Revert to previous version Check changes to stage / commit, and periodically commit These and many more require far too many commands. These commands were sometimes coded in batch files and copied/pasted whenever I needed them. I just could not remember everything - probably not as good a user of Git as I would like to believe. ...

I love the simplicity, speed and awesomeness of static sites. I also happen to love Vue for its power, simplicity and its feature set that makes development that much easier. So, what will happen when Vue is combined with static sites? Awesome Gridsome - that’s what. Gridsome describes itself as a Vue-powered site generator. Use Vue to design your site on top of Gridsome framework, and write your content in markdown, and generate complete HTML pages for your content that is complete in all respects. ...

I write quite a bit of Javascript on a day to day basis. But, I have a poor memory and keep forgetting things. Things like how I should be using a certain function the right way. This is where web applications like https://jscomplete.com/playground help. But it is not a pleasant experience to have blocks of incomplete code lying around in jscomplete, and keep executing few other parts of the program. I use the following tools to quickly know how to write a piece of functionality, or quickly test parts of code/components. ...

VS Code is the most useful thing discovered after sliced bread. The extension ecosystem kicks up the productivity in VS Code many notches higher. Here are a few shortcuts that you must include in your toolset to get into God-mode. 1. Prettier on Save: Quicker format Install prettier. Enable ‘Format on Save’ in Settings’. Rock and roll. I have never seen any tool save so much of my time. 2. Ctrl + D: Select Word, repeat selection and edit in one go Ctrl + D (repeat to select multiple instances). Multiple edits in one-go if you have selected multiple instances. ...

It has been quite sometime since I used vim or one of its flavours as my main editor for development. Is it time to go back to Vim? I am attracted by Vim’s productive usage of keyboard, but not so much about having to sacrifice VS Code or a few important shortcut keys in VSCode that Vim takes over. I used Vim on and off - but never as a fully-featured editor. For all its never-gets-old capabilities and the power of Vim scripts, I could never successfully scale the initial curve to fully appreciate its greatness. So my reasoning was to use Vim but stick to VSCode in the meantime so that I don’t lose all its features in one go - that is a system shock. ...

I had to create a mobile app for one of the data driven applications that I recently developed. Cordova has proven to be an excellent choice to reuse my existing code and make life easier for everyone. Nature of the web app - Enable users to create and track specialised electronic devices Track customers who buy these specialised devices and deploy them at their site Track usage of deployed devices Track issues and manage resolution process Enable users to create charts out of device usage The app is hybrid of technologies but the web app was mainly developed using Javascript in the backend. Vue and Vuetify turned out to be highly productive choices for the frontend. Component based development, readily available UI components, and data tables turned out to be life savers. ...

Most of my coding a few years back consisted of the following actions - Type slowly Type (a lot of) mistakes Use spaces and tabs to format. Get confused about loops and add ad-hoc spaces and tabs Curse my typing skills and the soul who invented spaces and tabs While formatting code was also becoming an interim ’thought provoker’, it was simply too much typing. Enter prettier. Although my typing is only half as bad, I now have far less stuff to worry about. ...