Note to Self

Tailwind does not come with a default look and feel. If you don’t want to completely start from scratch, it’s best to start with one of many free templates. The following seem to be popular. All of them have a liberal MIT license:

• tailwind starter kit
• Meraki UI Components
• Flowbite looks somewhat similar to Bootstrap
• Tailblocks is a set of components

I also found this interesting project that is specifically for prototyping email: Maizzle. It even includes markdown support. Probably worth a look if I ever need to create HTML emails.

Browsing through Thoughtworks’ 25th edition of their technology radar, I found some tools that look interesting, in no particular order:

• “Comby is a tool for searching and changing code structure” (source: comby’s website). It’s a little like grep, but specifically for source code, as it actually seems to generate an abstract syntax tree internally. Looks very cool.
• ProxyMan is a (macOS only) and Charles are proxies for debugging network traffic.
• gopass team password / secret manager based on git and gpg.
• Berglas manages secrets using Google Secret Manager.
• Hotwire is Basecamp’s take on server-side generated frontends without needing to write any JavaScript. There are community projects for flask (turbo-flask) and django (hotwire-django, django-saas-starter)
• mob simple command line tool that helps with remote mob programming by handling the necessary “git handover”-workflow
• headless UI by the creators of tailwind css, is a set of unstyled, fully accessible UI components
• DoWhy is “an end-to-end library for causal inference”
• Prefect is an airflow-alternative that lets you create workflows by annotating plain Python functions
• Pulumi is a terraform-alternative that is not declarative and thus in some cases better suited, especially for handling dynamic deployments

The complete Thoughtworks technology radar can be found here.

I stumbled down an internet rabbit-hole today, and came across a very interesting paper published in the ACM queue: The SPACE of Developer Productivity. I found the paper great because it made me appreciate once more, how interesting and complex the work of software development teams really is.

And I found some great additional reference that seem worth checking out:

• Suchman, L. 1995. Making work visible. Communications of the ACM 38(9), 56-64; https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/223248.223263.
• Beller, M., Orgovan, V., Buja, S., Zimmermann, T. 2020. Mind the gap: on the relationship between automatically measured and self-reported productivity. IEEE Software; https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07428.
• Brumby, D. P., Janssen, C. P., Mark, G. 2019. How do interruptions affect productivity? In Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering, ed. C. Sadowski and T. Zimmermann, 85-107. Berkeley, CA: Apress; https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-4221-6_9.
• Butler, J. L., Jaffe, S. 2020. Challenges and gratitude: a diary study of software engineers working from home during Covid-19 pandemic (August). Microsoft; https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/challenges-and-gratitude-a-diary-study-of-software-engineers-working-from-home-during-covid-19-pandemic/.
• Graziotin, D., Fagerholm, F. 2019. Happiness and the productivity of software engineers. In Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering, ed. C. Sadowski and T. Zimmermann, 109-124. Berkeley, CA: Apress; https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-4221-6_10.
• Maslach, C., Leiter, M. P. 2008. Early predictors of job burnout and engagement. Journal of Applied Psychology 93(3), 498-512; https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0021-9010.93.3.498.

• What if you listened to advice and tactics of successful founders and then ignore it on purpose?
• What if you focused on the things you enjoy instead of the things that seem most important?
• What if you slowed down when you feel the need to reach your goal?
• What if you took a break when you feel the urge to keep going?
• What if you asked for help instead of doing everything yourself?
• What if you shipped something that is not finished?

Of course, leaving your comfort zone is important. But some things you might have simply heard repeated so many times that you believe they must be true, and thus you should do this as well. What would happen if you don’t?

Today I spent most of the day researching small cloud providers and “self-hosted PaaS” technology. This was triggered by a question that had been on my mind for a while: What is the minimum “cost-per-application” for production-quality containerized hosting?

What do I mean by that?

• cost-per-application: How much does it cost to host one application, two applications, etc.? Ideally, I would like to find the minimum price that will scale linearly.
• production-quality hosting: This obviously depends on the availability and performance requirements of the application. I will try to set the bar as low as possible in terms of availability and performance.
• containerized hosting: Basically, I want something like kubernetes, docker swarm etc. I won’t require a multi-node setup, but obviously that option would be nice.

After hours of research I have not found a good answer. But I have found some interesting technologies that seem worth checking out (in no particular order):

I am a software developer in my forties. Here are four things I wish I had learned and practiced earlier in my life:

• Your logical mind will often deceive you when it comes to important things in life. Learn to trust your emotions. In order to do that, I needed to first learn to recognize my emotions, to actually feel them, notice them, instead of ignoring or censoring them.
• We humans all have the same basic needs for safety, connection, and growth. If you are unhappy, recognize this and figure out, which of your needs are not met.
• If your instinct is to always do everything yourself, learn to ask for help. If your instinct is, to always ask others for help, learn to do something yourself.
• Learn to live with your negative self-talk, your doubts. But more importantly, learn to take them less seriously. You might not be able to make them go away, but you can practice ignoring them once in a while.

Have you ever noticed that you are putting off doing certain things all the time, again and again? Like doing the taxes or getting started on that personal project. Of course, you have. When I put things off for too long, my mood suffers, and sometimes this leads to putting off even more tasks. Feels bad.

Here is a little trick I came up with that helps with getting unstuck: Create an emotional brain dump of all your current tasks.

Do you use a todo or task app on your phone? And have you enabled recurring reminders for overdue tasks? Do you have an ever growing list of overdue tasks?

If your task list is growing, or if you find yourself dismissing task reminders several days in a row without actually looking at the overdue tasks, then these tip might be for you:

Don’t mix actionable tasks and “someday, maybe I should do this”

If you don’t look at your overdue tasks, maybe they are not real, concrete tasks after all. Maybe you are using your task list to remind you of things you feel you should do, but you don’t actually ever get around to do them.