The Valuable Dev

Saturday Greetings, Valuable Developer!

I hope everything’s fine on your side.

This month was very busy for me: I released my first book. It was a marathon, and the last meters were really hard.

But it was definitely worth it; the results blew up my craziest expectations, the feedback I had were very positive, everybody seems to have a lot of fun with it!

I took another decision I’m thinking about for a long time: after a decade working for companies as a full time employee, I’ll try to become a freelancer to have more time for my projects. Here are my goals:

Writing even more for The Valuable Dev. I aim to release the usual article and an article about mouseless tools each month. I might not be able to sustain this pace before a while (these articles take a long time to write) but I’ll try to tend to this goal.
Developing more open source CLIs and TUIs. I’ll release soon a CLI for Pocket.
Recording more videos for my Youtube channel.
Making courses.

In short: I’m trying to help even more!

Speaking of which, if you have any idea about articles, CLIs, or videos, I would love to hear them. The “reply” button is waiting for your click.

Vim For Advanced User

To celebrate the release of the book, the third part of my learning series for Vim is done!

I hope you’ll like it! If you do, don’t hesitate to spread the love around you 😃

More Updates

I spent hours trying to improve the speed of The Valuable Dev. Everything should be faster now.
I’ve launched a new blog. I needed something more chaotic than The Valuable Dev to throw random ideas out there.
- I’m planning to update there my “weekly stand-ups”.
- If you don’t like Twitter, you can access my monthly tweets here.
I’ve updated slightly the about page of the blog including my routine.

Resources

I really liked this article about TDD. I share the author’s feelings: it’s a nice framework, but also too rigid, and I like flexibility. Writing useful tests is really important, but I never wrote tests first.
Even if you disagree with him, Alan Kay’s talks are always thought-provoking. Here’s one of my favorite. If you don’t know him, he (and his team) coined the term “OOP” and invented the GUI.
Having experience is good, but metrics will really convince your management to act. Here’s a very good talk on metrics for technical debts.
This talk is awesome: it’s about Bash, legacy code, and refactoring.

Mouseless Tools

Having a Kanban board in the terminal was something I’ve searched for a while. I found it with Taskell.
I’m a big fan of man pages, but it can be difficult to find what you search in there. To have simple examples for a specific command, I use tldr or cheat.sh
I never found a good solution to manage my images in the terminal. I’ve discovered sxiv this month, and it’s really powerful! I love visualizing thumbnails with sxiv -t, but not only: you can do much more with it.

Let’s Connect

If I can help you in any way, you can hit this “reply” button and ask me anything you want! I’m always happy to receive emails.

Similarly, if you think this newsletter is boring, if you didn’t like my last article, or if you have any feedback of any sort, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Thanks a lot for your interest in my work and see you in a month!

Matthieu