Forem: Manoel Thiago Nogueira

Failure & lessons learned

Manoel Thiago Nogueira — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 12:32:46 +0000

I am incredibly self-critic. Frequently, it's not in the way of being perfectionist, but in creating anxiety and discomfort, and plunging me into procrastination zone. This means, in some measure, I don't deal too well with failures. But I am starting to handle it better.

Recently, the Gatsby Team announced the release of themes. They also made a contest to create a theme, with rewards for participants and a great prize for the winning creators.

I had a concept that I thought was interesting enough, so I took some time to try my hand on themes. Fast forward to now: I wasn't able to complete the theme in time, so I won't be participating.

In other times, I would probably be grumpy. I caught this experience, however, decided to look from another angle, and take into account not what I lost, but what I gained with the experience:

I have a concept that I still think is interesting and useful, so I will keep working on it
Now I don't have a time constraint, which will allow me to refine better the idea and the technical aspects of the implementation.
I discovered some interesting things in related subjects (CSS! Accessibility!)
I learned a lot while diving on some behind the scenes of the Gatsby API
Spoiler alert, it will become a blog post

I also considered that it was not only my fault (though I maybe could have better allocated my time), but sometimes life happens: I am married, have twin baby daughters (that eventually wake up in the middle of the night), and had a hectic month on my job. In the end, I was quite happy with how the general outcome of all these things ended balanced, even if I had to choose to not dedicate so much to this side project.

I expect to keep this view in mind the next time something doesn't end so well: I still learned a lot, I could achieve other things. Maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on myself. Hope you can be more forgiving with yourself too.

This post was originally published at my personal blog, manoel.tech

Learn in public & save the civilization

Manoel Thiago Nogueira — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 13:33:40 +0000

Or 'A slightly clickbaity title to something indeed important'.

One of the reasons to create this habit of blogging is to adopt the habit of learning in public. Though the concept is not exactly new, it was beautifully presented by Shawn Wang on one of his blog posts.

This habit on itself is worth an entire post (or a series, even!), but I'd like to address some side effect of it that I realized recently. After watching the video of a talk by Johnathan Blow¹, "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization", I was deeply intrigued (and somewhat scared) by its premise.

During his speech, Blow talks about many technologies and apparatus developed by past civilizations. Marvels of knowledge and craftsmanship that intrigue us even with our relative technical advancement. Some items that are unattainable by us today, even with our compendium of brilliant minds and machines.

The main reason that I could grasp for this loss of knowledge is none other than the difficulty to pass forward the said knowledge. How hard it is to explain to the future generations the concepts and context in which we based our methods and achievements! Without this sharing, the knowledge ends up being siloed. The technologies and its technical concepts become stale and wither. Nonetheless, we could use a simple command in our terminals and then everything will work fine! Except when it won't.

All our toolings depend on a series of abstractions. That series of abstractions could be followed to an atomic level for what it is worth. And it is ok to use these tools, they make a big difference in our daily lives. But these are implementations on a lot of layers that can be hidden from view. What happens when the tool fails or we need something slightly different from what is provided out-of-the-box?

When we don't know how something works, and we need to learn its underlying structure to solve the problems, we end up learning a lot. And if we share what we have learned, smaller and simple as it may look, even if it is for our future reference, we unshackle this information and provide a backup to the entire world (thanks, internet). We allow that wisdom to flourish and be remixed, and to serve a lot more than only solving your problem, being stuck in your head until you forget it.

We have this current blessing² of being able to look for whatever we want, almost anyone, anywhere, just using our fingertips - literally. We can reach the latest academic discoveries about a disease, a material or many more from this world - or even others. And we can find out how to fix that snarky webpack config with the same ease.

How about we start sharing and discussing what we know? We may end up saving our civilization.

This post was originally published at my personal blog, manoel.tech

Have you ever played Braid? Whatever is your response, this game deserves to be (re)played. ↩
It may also be a curse, but it is a talk for another occasion. ↩

My desktop setup - Part 3: The VS Code

Manoel Thiago Nogueira — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 18:18:39 +0000

I already discussed at length about my OS look and my terminal configuration. Now it is time to talk about my main daily companion, the VS Code editor.

When I first started to learn how to do web pages, I used the Notepad from Windows to edit HTML code (good old times!). When I first saw Macromedia Dreamweaver (now an Adobe product) and had the chance to work with syntax highlighting, auto-completion, file management and a lot of snippets, my then 15-years-old mind stood in awe.

Fast forward almost two decades¹. I've spent this time going in and out of the dev world. Tried full-fledged IDEs (Eclipse, NetBeans), light-weight editors (Sublime), sheer minimalism (Vim). But I believe Microsoft's Visual Studio Code has hit a sweet spot for me.

Themes

The first theme which captured my attention was Wes Bos' Cobalt2. It is a Nice balance between shades of blue and yellow, pretty comfortable for continuous usage. Recently, I have also been using Sarah Drasner's Night Owl. Besides being absolutely gorgeous, it also provides a light version, considerably useful for when the room is extremely sunbathed.

Fonts

I love ligatures. They allow me to reduce the cognitive load when looking at a symbol instead of a sequence of characters which must be read sequentially have a special meaning². Being someone who is quite financially spartan, I searched for good free alternatives.

My main contenders are Space Mono and Fira Code. It is interesting to select the Nerd Fonts patched version, which includes glyphs to decorate the command line and to use in your daily tasks with fonts, glyphs and icons. The fonts are available at the Nerd Fonts site or at the GitHub repo.

Another alternative, quite new actually, is the Victor Mono font. It provides a set of cursive-like italics, which may add some more flair to your code, if it is for your liking. It may download for free, but if you mean to use it, a donation to its creator is a kind gesture for those who can afford it.

Extensions

Some extensions are useful if you work with a specific tool or language, but these are some wonderful ones that are quasi-content-agnostic:

Bracket Pair Colorizer 2: for when you don't know what is inside of what;
Color Highlight: See if #068910 is the green you are thinking - directly in your code, as you type;
Git History, Git Indicators & GitLens: if you use git, you can cover your bases with these;
Polacode: When the code is so beautiful that it must be shared with the world in a perfectly arranged frame;
Settings Sync: keep your doubts away from which setting to choose in each of your different computers - by making them the same;
WakaTime: log where is your time going in your projects.

And that's all folks! Thanks for reading!

"Time, Time, Time / See what's become of me" ↩
e.g. A "fat arrow" instead of an "equal followed by a greater than" ↩

My desktop setup - Part 2: The Z in the shell

Manoel Thiago Nogueira — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 18:37:05 +0000

On my last post, I talked a bit about setting the OS appearance to my liking. Now, to the shell.

For a few years, I used fish as my default shell. It was pretty user-friendly and easy to configure. But its syntax was not bash-compliant and I had to exercise my brain to put some workarounds to use tools that I needed to use frequently (and sometimes without having the same results).

I tested Zsh previously, but only recently put the effort to set it in a way that kept me pleased and productive. Here go the steps to put together what I tried.

Installing Zsh

To use Zsh in Ubuntu, you need to install it and set as your default shell:

$ sudo apt install zsh
$ chsh -s $(which zsh)

After these steps are complete, restart the user session to validate the change.

The next time you open your terminal, you will be greeted with the configuration function for new users and may press 2 to accept the defaults for now. This shall show a slightly different prompt without much flair, but we will solve it next.

The "Oh my!" effect

Customizing the terminal can be a quite daunting task. Luckily, there are great tools that allow us to ease it a bit. My choice is the Oh My Zsh framework by Robbie Russell and contributors.

To install it:

$ sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

You need curl and git installed, so sudo apt install curl git in case they are not already in place.

It is... different. We got the git status indicator, yay!. But not much attractive yet.

Theme

The Oh My Zsh framework comes with a lot of themes, like one of my favourites, agnoster. To set one of these, you just need to edit the zshrc configuration file (~/.zshrc):

ZSH_THEME="agnoster"

Thou I find this theme quite eye-pleasing, I decided to use the powerlevel9k one and pump it up a little to my preferences. It works in tandem with powerline-fonts to the visual niceties.

First, to install it:

$ sudo apt install powerline powerline-fonts
$ git clone https://github.com/bhilburn/powerlevel9k.git ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/themes/powerlevel9k

Then, edit the ~/.zshrc file and add a few more lines to adjust the theme:

# Hide the user from the prompt
DEFAULT_USER=$USER

# Shorten the folder breadcrumbs
# ~/my/extremely/long/fumbled/path becomes ~/my/e/l/f/path
POWERLEVEL9K_SHORTEN_DIR_LENGTH=1
POWERLEVEL9K_SHORTEN_DELIMITER=""
POWERLEVEL9K_SHORTEN_STRATEGY="truncate_from_right"

Shameless plug(ins)

I must admit that I am slightly lazy, so I'd prefer that my tools do the work for me. In the terminal case (no pun intended), I want that it complete my sentences, remember what I typed earlier, show me if I am typing something wrong, and so on. For my better fortune, there are two plugins for that: zsh-autosuggestions and zsh-syntax-highlighting.

To install them, clone their git repos into the plugins folder of Oh My Zsh:

$ git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions
$ git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting

After that, edit your ~/.zshrc (again!) and add those to the plugins section:

plugins=(
  zsh-autosuggestions
  zsh-syntax-highlighting
  # any other plugins come in here too
)

And look as it goes!

Wow! Quite a lot in this post. Time to take a break and see you next time!

This post was originally published at my personal blog, manoel.tech

My desktop setup - Part 1

Manoel Thiago Nogueira — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 16:44:56 +0000

I spend a good amount of my time programming (8+ hours, Monday to Friday at least) with an Ubuntu Linux workstation since 2012. A few years ago, I started to tweak a setup that I thought it was nice to look and reduced eyestrain as much as possible.

(A previous look at my setup was registered in a GitHub repository, but I changed it since then, so here come the new looks!)

The first step of this quest was to find an editor that I could use for a long time, without too much distraction, a light and fast one, but powerful enough that I hadn't to rely on many other tools to get the job done. IDEs (as Eclipse and NetBeans) were quite powerful but took a long time to initialize and had a lot of visual clutter. So, I passed to the 'lightweight' editors: Sublime Text, Atom and Visual Studio Code. Each of them had its strengths, but I settled for the VSCode for a few reasons: integrated terminal from the start, constant development, nice extension support, good and functional interface, and relative maturity took me to adopt it as my editor.

Besides the helper extensions, I looked for a theme that was nice to look for an entire day. Went through some nice Material-based themes and icons. But really liked Wes Bos' Cobalt2 theme and, more recently, Sarah Drasner's Night Owl.

I also adopted the zsh shell with a few gimmicks, namely the Oh My Zsh framework and the powerlevel9k theme; and also the Fura Code and Space Mono fonts, patched by Ryan Oasis' Nerd Fonts to comply with the PowerShell-like terminal decoration.

Meanwhile, I tested a lot of variations for the Ubuntu desktop (Unity, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Mate). In the end, I settled down using the default Gnome shell, plus Adapta GTK theme and Paper Icons by Sam Hewitt.

As it is a long list of things, I thought it would be better to split in a few posts, instead of creating a gigantic, tiresome list. This is mostly a reminder to myself of what steps I have to do in case I have to reconfigure my desktop. If you got interested and want to try some/all of my custom setup, be my guest!

For this first part, Ubuntu!

Configuring the OS

I use the Ubuntu default distro, but make a few adjustments to my taste. For that, I use the Tweaks tool to choose theme and icons that will be installed next (sudo apt install gnome-tweaks if it is not already installed)

Adapta GTK Theme

It is necessary to add the repository to the system sources list before installing it:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tista/adapta
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install adapta-gtk-theme

Paper Icons

Similarly, to add the Paper Project repo:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:snwh/pulp
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install paper-icon-theme

Activating all

Open the Tweaks tool from the Applications list or from the terminal with the command gnome-tweaks. In the tab Appearance, choose Adapta (or variants) from the GTK+ dropdown, and Paper from the Icons one. Done, you are themed (well, you still need to restart the session).

Hope this first part be useful for someone (for the future me, at least!). See you on the next post!

This post was originally published at my personal blog, manoel.tech

I had no blog, but I wanted to scream

Manoel Thiago Nogueira — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 19:33:20 +0000

Hello, Dev Community!

As eagerly expected by approximately one person, now I have a blog!

I will be posting about developer musings and the daily life and troubles of a common tech guy, and eventually some more technical piece. And dev.to will be my main cross-posting and discussion station!

Hope to be back soon with my thoughts and reflections about this crazy but incredibly interesting developer life that we live.

PS: If you got the reference from the title, you earned 10 points. In whatever game you choose.