Category: Developer Experience

Posts filed under Developer Experience

What makes Developer Experience World-Class?

The habits, tools, and practices that set great engineering teams apart. Developer experience (DevEx) isn’t just about fancy tools or slick UIs - it’s about removing friction so teams can move with confidence, speed, and clarity. In high-performing teams, great DevEx means fewer context switches, faster feedback loops, and more...

Read on →

Managing multiple signatures for git repositories

Github explains pretty well how to sign commits. You can make it automatic by globally setting commit.gpgsign = true by using git config --global commit.gpgsign true What if you have different signatures for your personal ID and your work ID? First, you create multiple signatures. It is important that the...

Read on →

Fixing broken Social logins on your browser

Privacy vs Convienience is a constant battle. Personally, I prefer dialing up my privacy up to 11 to avoid being tracked. Every once in a while, social logins are important because it’s the only way to use a service. If this service is an internal company login that only uses...

Read on →

The Science in the Art of the Showcase (for distributed teams)

Showcases are a key part of our agile ceremonies. We showcase our work to our stakeholders for feedback at the end of every iteration. And as with every presentation, I believe there is a Science in the Art of the Showcase (for distributed teams). On one of our recent teams,...

Read on →

Upgrade everything in brew

Homebrew is a the missing package manager for Mac OS. Brew cask extends Homebrew and brings its elegance, simplicity, and speed to Mac OS applications and large binaries alike. If you’re using these tools and would like to upgrade all of the applications you have, run the following command. brew...

Read on →

Modern Operating Systems Phoning Home

It seriously irks me when general public operating systems build in default features that send data to their servers without clearly indicating so. Both Microsoft (with Windows 10) and Apple (with Yosemite) have done so. Disabling these features doesn’t take long so here’s what you need to do. Windows 10...

Read on →

Mac: Camera not available

My Macbook Pro sometimes doesn’t detect it’s web camera when I’m trying to join a video call and it’s painful to have to reboot the machine to fix it. A simpler way (especially if you have root access to your machine) is to kill VDCAssistant from the command line. sudo...

Read on →

ExpandRegion on Sublime Text

Once you get used to the JetBrains suite of IDEs pressing Cmd/Ctrl+W for expanding selection becomes second nature. This leads to closing tabs on most applications such as text editors which is of little consequence since you can train yourself to use a different short cut. My favourite text editor (Sublime Text) does...

Read on →

Set Java Home to a specific version on Mac

Installing Oracle’s version of Java on your machine does (for most machines I’ve encountered) add a Java Home system variable. Rarely however it doesn’t work on some machines. Such folks are recommended to add the path themselves. On a Mac, you can do this by using the following export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home)...

Read on →

Cloud To Butt on Safari Update

As Reddit puts it, Cloud to Butt is the funniest plugin ever and they aren’t wrong. Childish, but funny. Safari has an equivalent but alas it’s not as effective. I really should say wasn’t that effective because I just made it :P There is a pending pull request but if it...

Read on →

Converting FAT32 disks to NTFS

There used to be a slightly long way to do this earlier but I found a simple one line command to do it. It is probably old but it’s one I didn’t know of. convert L: /fs:NTFS This converts L: to NTFS without removing any data from the drive. This...

Read on →

Soccer Scraper v1 Source on GitHub!

Oh yes, it’s time I started uploading some of my old code to github. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while. For those unaware, I use Soccer Scraper to quickly view Manchester United’s schedule in IST. The base source code (circa 2008+minor fixes) is now on GitHub. There are...

Read on →

Fix for Chrome redirecting to URL when opening a new tab

I was helping a friend fix his hacked site when I had to disable ESET to check where his injected code was (because the website ran an img iframe hack to download a trojan on the user’s machines). I found the issue and told him what to do but had...

Read on →

Recursively delete files from a folder in Windows

This is something one might need to do regularly. I need to because wget often creates multiple index.html@* files despite being set up not to (my GUI for wget might forget configs.. who knows?) I’m left with a couple of hundred folders with 6 html files each which to me...

Read on →

Eclipse + GitHub

If you want Eclipse to integrate well with GitHub (I know there are millions of tutorials out there), you should really follow the tutorial for EGit and make sure you have Git set up on your Windows machine first!

Read on →

Reloading Unix/Linux Profiles

Here’s something small but interesting and useful I learnt today. Often times, I update my linux profile so that I can have aliases to work with on my server. Problem is that the profile is only loaded when you login so, in normal circumstances, you would have to relogin to...

Read on →

Removing file extensions

A problem I’ve faced quite a few times is having a folder full of files with a padded extension that needs to be removed before I can use the files. This can happen with .tmp, .bak, or other temporary extensions added by various applications. It’s easy to rename all files...

Read on →

Playing videos in RAR archives

Large video files are sometimes distributed in multi-part RAR archives. This can happen with video downloads, backups, or files shared across services with size limits. In such cases, you’re left with RAR files that you have to extract every time you want to play them. Some video players like VLC...

Read on →

The power of the Windows key!

The Windows key might have started as something a tad bit redundant (considering Ctrl+Esc does the same thing) but the Windows Key is so much more. I have already spoken about the Win+(1-9) to activate programs in Vista’s Quick Launch Toolbar and its transition to taskbar applications in Windows 7....

Read on →

Chrome Tips

Custom Search Engine Right click the address bar and click Edit search engine. Click add, fill in a name and a keyword followed by the search query. For adding the Messenger Plus Forum Search engine I used the name as “Messenger Plus! Forum Search” (doesn’t really matter what you use...

Read on →

WhatPulse data parse class

On 10th of December, 2008, 2 days before my Computer Networks paper I made a WhatPulse class in php to get data from the WhatPulse WebAPI for you to work with. With the information at your finger tips make a forum signature, why don’t you? ;) I’ve added a few...

Read on →

Command Line e-mailing

Ever wanted to send a quick email but then though, “nah.. cba to open my inbox right now”? Now you can send emails via command line! It doesn’t have to be installed though you could do so if you please. I give you Blat! Here is a simple example from...

Read on →