sebastiandaschner news

Hello from ICE 594 and the middle of Bavaria. Right now, I’m on my way to JUG Bodensee to give a presentation on service meshes and Istio with Java EE. After Japan, I had a few a bit more relaxed days, at least in comparison :-)

Last week I had the chance to attend the J-Spring conference in Utrecht. I very much enjoyed the whole time and the interesting venue (a concert hall) and I think the organizers did a great job at this one-day event! Actually, believe it or not, it was the first time in the Netherlands for me, though I’m German. That said, I pretty likely will come back :-)

Tomorrow I’ll fly to Tallinn, Estonia (another first time) to speak on GeekOut EE. Looking forward to meeting other geeks :-) and to share some more Enterprise Java enthusiasm.

This newsletter is still on the topic of developer productivity. I hope you enjoy reading it.

What’s new

Browser Shortcuts for Chromium

Most developers agree that using keyboard shortcuts get you to your goal faster. I believe productive developers should pursue as many keyboard shortcuts on as many applications as possible.

So here you are, my personal favorites of browser shortcuts, specifically for Chromium:

Most of them work in Chrome, as well. For Mac, replace Ctrl with ⌘. And you’ll find more, of course, in your browser’s documentation :-)

Distraction-Free Command Line Todo Script

One challenge I always faced with managing todo lists was that I immediately got overwhelmed and distracted by the sheer number of unfinished tasks when I just “quickly” wanted to store and add a task that came to my mind while working on something else. Mostly, I simply wanted a “write-only” text field where I could hack-in a quick thought, idea, or reminder which I’d process later on — after I had finished my actual task.

I usually like simple solutions, so here is a simple distraction-free command line “tool” :-)

I’m in the command line most of the time anyway, and typing $> todos-add 'something to remember' and hitting enter allows me to relax and focus on the actual task again. Of course, I would use an appropriate alias, see my newsletter issue #25.

You can infinitely enhance the script for the task management solutions of your choice, sending tasks via the network, integrating with APIs, etc., etc. But sometimes, very simple solution do work (for me).

Using The gcloud Command Line Tool

And we stay in the command line. A general advice, that I try to give developers is to favor (scriptable) command line tools over GUI usage. While using the UI is more intuitive in the beginning, command line tools are far more productive in the long run, especially for powerusers.

For my presentations on Kubernetes and Istio I sometimes use the Google Cloud (GCP/GKE) to create clusters that I can use (and discard) quickly. I’ve always done that in the Web UI, until I discovered that the gcloud tool can also do that job for you, without touching your mouse :-)

$> gcloud container clusters create test-cluster-1 --num-nodes=4 --region=europe-west3-a

I think good command line support is crucial to any technology to provide a great developer experience. They especially make it very easy to automate actions. This is just one example where using the command line can get you to your destination faster for frequent tasks.

Thanks a lot for reading and see you next time!