Forem: Oscar Mendoza

I have a productivity magic wand, its name is Forest.

Oscar Mendoza — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 03:15:11 +0000

Researches show that we are really productive around 3 hours per 8 hour-day work. That might be incredibly shocking but this app made me realize that is indeed true; I had finally a tool that basically tracks my productivity time for me, and the results were like a bucket of ice. Whenever I felt that I did work a lot, Forest showed me that I had just 2 or 3 focused times.
Now I try to accomplish my set goal of at least 4 hours of focus time.

Forest is [not] another tool to set a timeout of 10 to 120 minutes. You will earn a virtual tree if you complete the session without exiting the app, and it will die if you fail the session. Then you can see all your forest with all the trees you have earned, and display by day, week, month or year!

What's the magic about that?

Probably is to get the most of our anxiety, nobody wants to stop one session and see the tree die. It will be dead in your forest.

See how many minutes are you really productive per day.
And if you set a daily goal, you are going to get all the juice of Forest.

But I can facebook and reddit on laptop! What's the point?

Yes, you can; it's a matter of personal honor in my opinion. With friends we have defined some in-house rules, so we are measured with the same metrics.

When we are in a session, we really commit to it; we don't make any other activity besides our main focus.
On interruptions longer than 1 minute, we stop the timer. Yes! Even if Amazon just delivers your new books :)
Focus time is considered only when we really need to be concentrated like coding, 3D modeling or reading. It does not apply for sports, cleaning, watching videos. Of course, that are our rules, you can use whatever fits best for you!

Pomodoro technique 🍅

Probably you are familiar with the pomodoro technique where you commit to work sessions of 25 uninterrupted minutes and rest 5 minutes each session.

I started using Forest with along with this technique, and I recommend it using it as a starting point. Now I can commit to sessions of 45 minutes easily.

Keep your forest; track your progress

Your forest is a graphical indicator of your performance. Also, there are sections in the app where you can display your forest at different time intervals.

You can see your friends forests, and show off yours!

One of the coolest features is that you can spend 2,500 in-game currency to plan a real tree!

Overall major key features

Track your productivity focus time, it can be coding time or read sessions.
Social gamification makes it funnier, you can feel the race with your friends to be a bit more productive. With one friend we even bet nano to achieve a certain amount of focus time per day!
Contribute by planting a real tree. Having been there, but will be my first purchase once I earn enough coins 🌲

It costs just 2 dollars, and it worths every single penny.

And if you do, add me as a friend! osuka42@gmail.com, I appear as my artistic id Romualdo.

If you already use this app, share what has worked for you.

Disclaimer, I don't work for this guys, nor I'm associated with them. I'm just sharing an amazing tool that it's been working for me.

🍻

Requests from your DevTools Network tab to Postman

Oscar Mendoza — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 03:25:37 +0000

From your Network tab in the Chrome DevTools, select the XHR call and option click -> Copy -> Copy as cURL.

Now in Post man go to Import -> Paste Raw Text -> Paste

This will copy the exact request, including User Agent, headers, cookies, method payload, etc.. and modify to your needs.
Hope this allow you to debug/develop happier!

Stage with confidence using git add -p

Oscar Mendoza — Sat, 21 Jul 2018 00:07:44 +0000

From the official documentation

-p
--patch
Interactively choose hunks of patch between the index and the work tree and add them to the index. This gives the user a chance to review the difference before adding modified contents to the index.
This effectively runs add --interactive, but bypasses the initial command menu and directly jumps to the patch subcommand. See “Interactive mode” for details.

Said so, git add -p allows you to pick which chunks of code are going to be staged from all your current changes.

I use this all the time to avoid committing something unintended.
Try it!

Building a simple system tray app with Go

Oscar Mendoza — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 06:26:17 +0000

Hands on: Let's build a system tray application that shows us the current local time, with the possibility to choose some other countries.
We are going to use Getlantern's library systray.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "io/ioutil"

    "github.com/getlantern/systray"
)

func main() {
    systray.Run(onReady, onExit)
}

func onReady() {
    systray.SetIcon(getIcon("assets/clock.ico"))
    systray.SetTitle("I'm alive!")
    systray.SetTooltip("Look at me, I'm a tooltip!")
}

func onExit() {
    // Cleaning stuff here.
}

func getIcon(s string) []byte {
    b, err := ioutil.ReadFile(s)
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Print(err)
    }
    return b
}

You can try this code right away.
The only thing that do is to show a simple message with an icon in the system tray; that's all.
Let's split up this a bit. In out main() the only thing that we do is to call a new instance of the library systray with the function Run, this function receives a couple a parameters where we are defining what to do onReady and when the application exits.
SetIcon, SetTitle and SetTooltip are pretty straightforward. The only thing we should have in consideration is that SetIcon takes as parameter the icon we want to display as a []byte. We use the function getIcon to read the .ico file and return the []byte.

Hint: A good place to find free icons is IconArchive.

Now, we don't want to have I'm alive! as title, so we are going to update each second with the local value of the timer; let's update our onReady() function and add a couple more that help us to get the time value:

func onReady() {
    systray.SetIcon(getIcon("assets/clock.ico"))
    for {
        systray.SetTitle(getTime())
        systray.SetTooltip("Look at me, I'm a tooltip!")
        time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)
    }
}

func getTime() string {
    t := time.Now()
    hour, min, sec := t.Clock()
    return ItoaTwoDigits(hour) + ":" + ItoaTwoDigits(min) + ":" + ItoaTwoDigits(sec)
}

// ItoaTwoDigits time.Clock returns one digit on values, so we make sure to convert to two digits
func ItoaTwoDigits(i int) string {
    b := "0" + strconv.Itoa(i)
    return b[len(b)-2:]
}

If we run, we'll see our clock being updated each second; but this is not the best way to implement an autoupdater. Implementing time.Sleep() will let us pause current instance, but we don't want to block our main process. In this case we are going to use a Go routine.

go func() {
    for {
    systray.SetTitle(getTime())
    systray.SetTooltip("Look at me, I'm a tooltip!")
        time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)
    }
}()

Now it's time to add some menu items. We can easily do it with systray.AddMenuItem("Title", "Tooltip"). This function returns us a channel when pressed. So, I'm going to add some items like this.

localTime := systray.AddMenuItem("Local time", "Local time")
hcmcTime := systray.AddMenuItem("Ho Chi Minh time", "Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh")
sydTime := systray.AddMenuItem("Sydney time", "Australia/Sydney")
gdlTime := systray.AddMenuItem("Guadalajara time", "America/Mexico_City")
sfTime := systray.AddMenuItem("San Fransisco time", "America/Los_Angeles")
systray.AddSeparator()
mQuit := systray.AddMenuItem("Quit", "Quits this app")

Also, in the top of the code, let's add a way to track the timezone in use:

var (
    timezone string
)

And replace systray.SetTitle(getTime()) for systray.SetTitle(getClockTime(timezone)).
Now, a way to fetch when a menu item is pressed.

go func() {
    for {
        select {
    case <-localTime.ClickedCh:
            timezone = "Local"
        case <-hcmcTime.ClickedCh:
            timezone = "Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh"
        case <-sydTime.ClickedCh:
            timezone = "Australia/Sydney"
        case <-gdlTime.ClickedCh:
            timezone = "America/Mexico_City"
        case <-sfTime.ClickedCh:
            timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"
        case <-mQuit.ClickedCh:
            systray.Quit()
            return
        }
    }
}()

Aaaand, let's modify our getTime function in order to be a bit more compatible with our timezone selector.

func getClockTime(tz string) string {
    t := time.Now()
    utc, _ := time.LoadLocation(tz)

    hour, min, sec := t.In(utc).Clock()
    return ItoaTwoDigits(hour) + ":" + ItoaTwoDigits(min) + ":" + ItoaTwoDigits(sec)
}

Hint: the timezone identifier is known as IANA time zone identifier; google it like that. You can easly get the identifier from the city you need in time.is.

So, all our code should look like:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "io/ioutil"
    "strconv"
    "time"

    "github.com/getlantern/systray"
)

var (
    timezone string
)

func main() {
    systray.Run(onReady, onExit)
}

func onReady() {
    timezone = "Local"

    systray.SetIcon(getIcon("assets/clock.ico"))

    localTime := systray.AddMenuItem("Local time", "Local time")
    hcmcTime := systray.AddMenuItem("Ho Chi Minh time", "Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh")
    sydTime := systray.AddMenuItem("Sydney time", "Australia/Sydney")
    gdlTime := systray.AddMenuItem("Guadalajara time", "America/Mexico_City")
    sfTime := systray.AddMenuItem("San Fransisco time", "America/Los_Angeles")
    systray.AddSeparator()
    mQuit := systray.AddMenuItem("Quit", "Quits this app")

    go func() {
        for {
            systray.SetTitle(getClockTime(timezone))
            systray.SetTooltip(timezone + " timezone")
            time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)
        }
    }()

    go func() {
        for {
            select {
            case <-localTime.ClickedCh:
                timezone = "Local"
            case <-hcmcTime.ClickedCh:
                timezone = "Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh"
            case <-sydTime.ClickedCh:
                timezone = "Australia/Sydney"
            case <-gdlTime.ClickedCh:
                timezone = "America/Mexico_City"
            case <-sfTime.ClickedCh:
                timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"
            case <-mQuit.ClickedCh:
                systray.Quit()
                return
            }
        }
    }()
}

func onExit() {
    // Cleaning stuff here.
}

func getClockTime(tz string) string {
    t := time.Now()
    utc, _ := time.LoadLocation(tz)

    hour, min, sec := t.In(utc).Clock()
    return ItoaTwoDigits(hour) + ":" + ItoaTwoDigits(min) + ":" + ItoaTwoDigits(sec)
}

// ItoaTwoDigits time.Clock returns one digit on values, so we make sure to convert to two digits
func ItoaTwoDigits(i int) string {
    b := "0" + strconv.Itoa(i)
    return b[len(b)-2:]
}

func getIcon(s string) []byte {
    b, err := ioutil.ReadFile(s)
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Print(err)
    }
    return b
}

ðŸŽ‰

Do you know a different/better way to implement any of this features?
Seems that we are hardcoding the timezone selection/channels, can you find a way optimize this part?

You can find all the code ready to run in github.com/Osuka42g/simple-clock-systray. Hack on! ðŸ»