Customized Suzuki Intruder in French village
Photo: Copyright © 2014 Eelke Blok

Code Review Etiquette

Another good one for the responsible coder. Code reviews are a tricky thing. They can improve software quality tremendously; two know more than one, obviously. However, it is all too easy to invoke bad feelings in the reviewee (if you think, "They should just grow thicker skin, it's not personal", this is especially for you). The simple fact of the matter is, coders are people too, and following some easy tips when doing reviews can go a long way to improve (or at least not reduce) the moral of the team and thus the code quality.

Hyphen, en dash and em dash

Just now I was looking for how to type an emdash on the Mac (and also, whether my intended use was actually correct). I found this great little article.

En and em dashes are of­ten ap­prox­i­mated by typ­ing two or three hy­phens in a row (-- or --- ). Don’t do that—it’s an­other type­writer habit. Use real dashes.

The shortcuts are surprisingly simple on the Mac. The hyphen is just, well, the hyphen (a.k.a. minus, next to the +/= key). An en dash is created by pressing ⌥ - (option + hyphen). An em dash is ⌥ ⇧ - (option + shift + hyphen).

Goodbye WordPress, hello Drupal 8

It's been in development for literally years, now, from well before Drupal 8.0.0 was released (having kids has this severe effect on the amount of spare time you have for this sort of thing). In the same vain as I have always developed this site, this time I wanted to get some practice with Drupal 8 under my belt* (the blog has been om Joomla for the same reason, and the move to WordPress seven years ago had the same background). So, goodbye WordPress, hello Drupal. This feels a bit like coming home.

Bring back the keyboard shortcut for Responsive Design Mode in Safari 11

Yesterday, I tweeted:

Seems like Apple removed the keyboard shortcut for entering responsive design mode in the latest Safari update.

— Eelke Blok (@eelkeblok) September 21, 2017

Today, I wipped out my favourite search engine (DuckDuckGo, obviously) and found out you can actually define your own keyboard shortcuts from the macOS Keyboard System Preferences.

Open a bunch of URLs from the clipboard in a browser on the Mac

Just now I had a bunch of URLs in a spreadsheet I wanted to quickly open. This time, it wasn't too quick, because I went down the rabbit hole of coming up with a solution (and making a blog post about it). Next time though....

Steps:

  1. Copy your URLs into the clipboard (⌘C or Edit > Copy)
  2. Open a terminal
  3. Type:
    pbpaste|tr '\n' '\0'|xargs -0 -I{} open /Applications/Safari.app {} &

Quick rundown:

DrupalJam talk: Drupal 8 Configuration Management

Last week, on wednesday May 24th, the annual Dutch Drupal conference DrupalJam had its 2017 edition in "De Fabrique" in Maarssen. After having been an attendee for quite some years, this time I submitted a proposal for a talk, which was accepted. I'm now happy to report the slides are available online: Drupal 8 Configuration Management, Workflows for Site Development.