The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Useful Vim commands, bad first ideas, PETS config manager, Kaizen shirts for sale & infinite canvas tools (News)

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

Colin Bartlett's 50 useful Vim commands, Jeremey Utley on why your first ideas aren't always the best, Emanuele Rocca's pets configuration management project, our Kaizen shirts are now on sale & Arun Venkatesen makes a microsite for infinite canvas tools.

What up fellow nerds, I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, November 7th, 2022. People keep asking if I'm back, and I haven't really had an answer. But now yeah, I'm thinking I'm back. Yes, we are back from last week's All Things Open Conference, and wow, it was so much fun seeing old friends and meeting some new ones. Shout out to everyone who stopped by the best booth in the building. We had so many visitors that y'all ran us completely out of stickers, keychains, and pens, which is awesome. Two full days in the hallway track means we recorded a bunch of awesome conversations that we'll be releasing over the coming weeks. Stay tuned for that and congrats to GitHub's

Mish Manners for taking home our prized Nintendo Switch. Okay, let's get into the news. The top clicked article from this week's Changelog Weekly Newsletter was Colin Bartlett from vimtricks.com who shared 50 useful Vim commands that work in normal mode. Many of them can be combined and modified to produce dozens more, of course, and Colin says you can use these as inspiration for your own repeatable workflows. Two of my favorites from Colin's list,

GG, which is how you tell your files good game at the end of a coding session, and GF, which is how you tell your files good game at the end of a coding session, and GF, which is when you love them so much that you refer to it as your girlfriend. You did not just say that. Kidding, of course. For the real meaning of GG and GF, you'll have to check out Colin's post.

Plus, there's 48 more there just waiting for you. Pets is a new Go-based configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle. Its author says, quote, This is for people who need to administer a handful of machines, all fairly different from each other and all very important. Those systems are not cattle. They're actually a bit more than pets.

They're almost family. For example, a laptop, workstation, and that personal tiny server in Sweden. They are all named after something dear. End quote. Other configuration management tools typically focus on usage scenarios involving complex relationships between multiple, fairly homogenous systems. For that, you need a templating language, maybe some way to store and share information about the various systems, and a way to either push the changes to all hosts or pull them from a central location. It's complicated and can discourage you from using a config management tool at all. Why bother with Chef syntax and ERB templates if you just need to edit a few files? Pets instead focuses on the individual local machine. No need to SSH

anywhere. No Puppet Master to configure. Nada. It works by reading your regular static configuration files, like your MUTRC, with added Pets mode lines. These mode lines are inspired by the concept of Vim mode lines. Pets can copy your config files to the right place, fix the permissions, install packages, and run commands upon file update. It looks pretty cool. Check it out. There's a link to the GitHub repo in your show notes.

Jeremy Utley says, keep them coming. Your first ideas aren't always the best. Jeremy is the director of executive education at Stanford's d.school, and he was recently featured on their Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast, helping listeners explore how we can focus less on finding the right answer and open ourselves up to more innovative ideas. Here's a moment from that show. Most people think, can I just look in the back of the textbook and see that I get it right? And that's the wrong way to approach what the subject line of this email should be.

There's no right answer. How I open this presentation, there's no right answer. How I give this piece of feedback, there's no right answer. So forget even new products and new services. If you think about the problems most managers or professionals face, they're problems of, I'm trying to solve this thing right now. And if they're aware that their tendency is to fixate on the answer, if they shift their mindset and say, instead of trying to come up with the right answer,

I'm going to try to generate as many as I can possibly think of. That actually has, it's called what Luchens refer to as an interrupt effect. It interrupts your cognitive tendency to fixate on a first idea. But the important thing is you're actually shifting the goalposts. You're saying instead of looking for the right answer, I'm trying to generate as many possible answers as I can. Jeremy also has a new book out called Idea Flow that you should definitely look into if this is a topic that interests you. We now interrupt this program for a very important merch alert.

Attention, game word shoppers. Our much anticipated and often asked about Kaizen t-shirt is now available for order in the changelog merch shop. If you haven't heard of Kaizen, it's a Japanese word that's come to mean continuous improvement in personal life, home life, social life, and working life. We do a Kaizen episode on our Ship It podcast every 10th episode, and this shirt is perfect for fans of Ship It and or fans of continuously improving. This awesome tee uses a special discharge method to achieve the front print. It's printed on a super soft black tri-blend short sleeve tea from American Apparel,

and you can order yours at merch.changelog.com quick before they run out. Have you heard of the concept of an infinite canvas? To infinity and beyond! People have been organizing and processing information spatially for centuries, whether by writing in a notebook or posting paper on walls. This kind of thinking harnesses areas of the brain dedicated to spatial thinking and mapping relationships. When it comes to software,

traditional tools like text editors and presentation software have linear interfaces that mimic their output. Infinite Canvas tools instead embrace the messy, circuitous paths we take when brainstorming, sketching, and distilling ideas. The story of Infinite Canvas software goes back more than half a century, but it's just starting to catch on thanks to the success of apps like Miro and Figma. Arun Venkatesan and the folks at Muse are so excited by this trend that they developed a microsite explaining the history and cataloging the apps

that are paving the way in this area. Check it out at infinitecanvas.tools. The infinite canvas idea is new to me. Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins told us about it during our recording of part two of his story. On last Friday's episode, we learned the story of Heroku, and this coming Friday will be all about his journey

beyond Heroku. Stay tuned to The Changelog, have a great week, and we'll talk to you again real soon.