The github sync functionality of this app excited me, because my current workflow is:
1. Open MGit and pull changes from origin main
2. Open Markor and make changes
3. Switch back to MGit and commit and push changes
Unfortunately this app doesn't hold a candle to Markor when it comes to editing and navigating.
- Navigating links between files is a pro feature
- There is no markdown syntax highlighting while editing
- There is no way to favorite or bookmark files to easily navigate to them
As someone who uses GitHub and Markdown as a personal wiki this app doesn't have the features required to be usable for me.
Looks like MGit will continue to be an unfortunate part of my life.
Edit:
Trade offs were made in areas that make it fast to build simple apps, but don't lend themselves well to apps at scale. "Rails Magic" in a simple app becomes "Rails Witchcraft“(arcane and dangerous) in a complex app
Don't get me wrong RoR is great and it is definitely the fastest way to get a project out the door and in front of your users. I've just seen what happens when that project takes off and you end up with a massive monolith that you're paying through the nose to support with the biggest RDS DB available, and every change you make has a 50/50 chance of introducing a bug somewhere else in the system. Then, because of those issues, you decide to split up the monolith into microservice, but you have a bunch of RoR engineers that have been working with monoliths their entire careers so you end up with a distributed monolith that's even harder to change and requires coordinated deploys.
I recognize that there are definitely ways to scale RoR well (GitHub, Shopify), but the framework is designed to get you up and running as quickly as possible so trade-offs were made in areas that
Definitely pick the one you are most familiar with, if you're planning to write a lot of the code.
If you're not familiar with Ruby, Elixir, or Python or don't plan to write the app yourself, there are tradeoffs for each.
I'm currently a Ruby(Rails API) engineer, working on side projects in Elixir(Phoenix Liveview), married to a Data Analyst that uses Python(Django Pandas). IMO these are the trade-offs between the 3.
Python(Django):
- Okay tooling and meh developer experience
- Language popularity: High
- Good for ML and data focused Web Apps
Ruby(Rails Hotwire):
- Good tooling and developer experience
- Language popularity: medium and declining
- Good for CRUDs and "Normal" Web Apps
Elixir(Phoenix Liveview):
- Great tooling and developer experience
- Language popularity: Low, but growing lots of engineers are excited about Elixir but few have professional experience
- Good for chat/real-time Web Apps
- Good for CRUDs and "Normal" Web Apps (not as good as Ruby)
- Okay for ML and data focused Web Apps (not as good as python but it's actively being worked on by the core team)
Scenarios:
- "You are planning to be the only engineer for awhile or maybe hiring one or two more for help and you don't want to have to rewrite the app if it gets popular." - Elixir
- "You plan to hire a team to work with You and want to go to market as fast as possible to determine market fit. Also, you don't mind doing a rewrite if it takes off" - Ruby
- "You don't want to write much code, and would rather hire a large team to build the app and/or the app is very data focused and will require a lot of data engineering" - Python
I'm pretty biased because Elixir is my favorite language to work in and I really enjoy the community. If I were planning to start a Web App Start-up I would definitely pick Elixir, because it's very productive especially with Liveview so you could get to market fast and it runs on the BEAM so I know I could trust it to scale well. Plus, the developer experience is really nice, with most libraries having great docs and a lot of core team effort being put into tooling. Even if it was a Data Focused app I would still pick Elixir because of the progress being made with libraries like Nx, Livebook and Broadway.
The only thing that's stopping me from bookmarking the site to use for all my technical searches, is the lack of a time filter. The first search I did resulted in a blog post from 2017. Sadly in the world of software I usually have to use the "past year" filter to get useful results.
This would be amazing if it had a time filter with:
- past week
- past month
- past 6 months
- past year
I was forced to switch from Debian running on an Asus ZenBook to a MacBook Pro 4 years ago when I got my first "real" software engineering job. Having used Linux for 8+ years before that in highschool and college, it took some getting used to learning new key bindings and quickly navigating the OS. Fortunately, I was surrounded by experienced highly technical MacOS users so I had a lot of support when I didn't know how to do something on MacOS. I'm now at the point where I can easily switch between Linux and MacOS (going to windows is a lot harder for me).
There are a few things that make me comfortable in both OSs:
- I spend 80% of my time in the terminal (nvim, tmux, etc.)
- Apt and Brew are pretty comparable package managers for my needs
- I learned to use spotlight on MacOS and I make sure my Linux system has a similar fuzzy launcher with the same key binding
- I use vcsh to manage my dot files it's split into 3 repos root: all cross-platform config, macos: MacOS specific config, debian: All Debian specific config
- I keep most windows fullscreen which helps me focus on what I'm doing
- If I need to look at things side by side, I use Tmux if they're both in the terminal or hammerspoon if one is in the browser
- Hammerspoon is the most useful MacOS specific application in existence, is a text configured swiss army knife that I currently use for: window tiling, keyboard application launching/jump to application, and clipboard history
- Karabiner is really useful for remapping keys like Caps Lock -> Ctrl, also it can disable the built-in keyboard so I can set my mechanical keyboard on top of it
I recently bought an M1 MacBook Pro to use as my personal development machine and it's been life changing. It is far and away the best laptop I've ever owned! Doing everyday tasks like moving files around in the file manager and opening applications is noticeably faster (or more accurately unnoticeably faster as I don't ever have to wait it just does what I want instantly so I don't think about it). Using my M1 now reminds me of how I felt in highschool when I put Debian with xfce on my netbook after having Windows 7 on it, everything felt so snappy and quick. It's delightful to go from a machine that has a slight lag after every action to one that doesn't.
Another thing that I've really enjoyed about MacOS is a lot of things "just work". I remember spending days messing with Wayland and X trying to fix screen tearing issues during HD video playback and everytime there was a major version update for Debian I'd spend a couple hours fixing small things in my workflow that stopped working. There are some annoying things with MacOS too, mostly hardware issue revolving around dongle life, but they don't usually take long to sort out. I'm at the point in my life where I'm starting to prefer convenience over configuration (e.g. I haven't rooted my last few phones, because the extra configuration options aren't worth the time sink)
Overall, having used both MacOS and Linux(Debian) as daily drivers for years I really like both, but day-to-day use of my M1 has pushed me solidly into the MacOS camp and I would choose an M1 MacBook Pro over even the best alternative running Linux.
Great notes! I recently read Philosophy of Software Design, but decided not to take notes on it because I wanted to finish it in a reasonable time period.
I'm currently a few chapters into a few other books which I chose to take notes on, but it's very slow going and my desire to read those books has decreased because it feels like a slog.
How do you combat the desire to note every little detail (how do you decide what's important)?
Also, do you take notes directly in a text editor, or do you take handwritten notes and then transcribe them later?
I installed a digital detox app on my phone that is scheduled for 7pm to 5am every night. It only lets me use apps that I deem beneficial, and limits "scroll traps"
Also, I'm fortunate in that I can observe a Digital Sabbath every Saturday where I can turn off my phone and laptop all day and just sit in the hammock and read physical books. It's really hard with everyone in my house on their phones all the time, but I feel like spending one day a week without screens has really helped my ADHD the rest of the week.
My 2015 Tacoma is the same size as a 2005 Tundra, and significantly larger than my dad's 2001 Ranger. The Ranger looks like a toy when I park next to it, despite them both being in the same class of pickup trucks.
As someone who has been using asdf daily for over a year now I can say from experience it's awesome and should absolutely replace all individual language managers as the standard way we manage language versions.
I recently gave nix a try because of a hacker news comment and agree with most of the points in this comment. The fact that new users are encouraged to read not 1, but 3 separate manuals to grok the tool is extremely discouraging for new users. Also the fact that nix is currently transitioning to a new feature called flakes and deprecating channels signals to me that the ecosystem is not stable enough for me to recommend that my team at work use it right now.
That being said, I intend to read at least 2 of the manuals and use nix for dependency management in my side projects and to manage my system dependencies. I think nix takes all the great things that asdf can do, to a whole new level. The dream of having a nix section in my projects 'Getting Started' that only has 2 steps (1. Install nix 2. Run `nix-shell`) is something I desperately want.
I think nix is much like erlang in that it's incredibly powerful and solves a lot of common problems, but it's used and maintained by an old guard that went through the trouble of learning how to use it and maintains the "I did it, why can't you" mindset. The erlang ecosystem has been given new life and been made easily available to new users thanks to the awesome work done by Jose Valim and the rest of the elixir team and community. However, I really hope that it doesn't take 30 years and a new language built on top of nix for it to become accessible to everyone.
For those working on nix and the new flake functionality please look to things like elixir and asdf for inspiration on documentation, ease of use and pragmatism. Help make the tool you love ubiquitous. It will ultimately make your life easier when working with new developers because they will already have nix installed.
I intended to do everything I can to help push nix in this direction (once I understand how the hell it works) if anyone reading this, has some time on their hands and wants to improve the state of software development for everyone please go down the nix rabbit hole and try to find ways to contribute to making it more accessible.
I agree with most of the comments I've read in this thread. Writing code to solve a well defined narrowly scoped problem isn't that hard or valuable. It's determining what the problem actually is and how software could be used to solve it that is challenging and valuable.
I would really like to see more effort in the AI/ML code generation space being put into things like code review, and system observation. It seems significantly more useful to use these tools to augment human software engineers rather than trying to tackle the daunting and improbable task of completely replacing them.
Hammerspoon has been really helpful in tiling windows with my keyboard and adding keybings like "jump to application". Also, there are a lot of useful plugins that add even more functionality like a fuzzy searchable clipboard history.
Unfortunately this app doesn't hold a candle to Markor when it comes to editing and navigating. - Navigating links between files is a pro feature - There is no markdown syntax highlighting while editing - There is no way to favorite or bookmark files to easily navigate to them
As someone who uses GitHub and Markdown as a personal wiki this app doesn't have the features required to be usable for me.
Looks like MGit will continue to be an unfortunate part of my life.