When I downsized to a 65% keyboard I knew I was giving up function keys and a number pad but what caught me off-guard was the loss of my backtick (a.k.a. grave accent(`)) key. Because my keyboard runs QMK firmware, I’ve tried a number of modifications.
Computing
QMK Drop Alt
I replaced my keyboard of many years with a Drop.com Alt keyboard. This keyboard uses QMK firmware, which allows you to create modified firmware and run it on your keyboard. These are my notes about how I built a copy of the firmware locally and pushed it to my keyboard.
Manually Trigger WordPress Heartbeat from Browser
When developing code related to the WordPress heartbeat, it is frustrating to make your code changes and then wait for the next heartbeat to occur. You can trigger the WordPress heartbeat in the browser manually to eliminate this delay.
What are PHP Namespaces?
When two functions (or classes) have the same name, it triggers a fatal error in PHP. Namespaces are used to avoid these naming collisions.
Remove newline at end of text file
Sometimes when I’m working with files in Git, I find myself with a change in a file that says “No newline at end of file”. This occurs when my editor adds the missing newline at the end of the file. While you should have a newline at the end of the file, you may have a reason for not wanting to add this change. In that case, you can remove the newline from the end of the file.
SemVer TLDR
Semantic versioning (SemVer) is a standard for defining the version numbers. A version number consists of three numbers separated by periods (X.Y.Z). The type of change being introduced (e.g. a new feature or a change that breaks backwards compatibility) determines which numbers are incremented.
What is a Git Commit?
A Git commit, represented by a single building block in my Git mental model, is a frozen moment in time for your project (sometimes referred to as a snapshot). Along with this snapshot Git stores metadata about the commit (e.g. the author of the commit). Each commit has a unique identifier called the commit hash (a.k.a. SHA), a 40 character long alphanumeric string that is often abbreviated to just the first seven characters (e.g. “2b3a38b”).
Rules for Writing Git Commit Messages
These are the rules I follow when writing Git commit messages. I’ve found these serve me well and are compatible with most projects I work on (if a project has a specific set of rules for writing Git commit messages, those would override any rules I’ve outlined here).
Visualizing Git Branching with Blocks
When visualizing Git branches, I find it easier to think of them as stacks of building blocks rather than the traditional Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) visualizations.
Add git status to zsh prompt
One of the things that made me much better at Git was making my current branch (and whether or not I have any changed files) always visible. By default zsh includes everything you need to do this, you just need to configure it.