By default, Slack provides you with a Formatting toolbar and a WYSIWYG editor. I’m a big fan of writing in Markdown rather than WYSIWYG and use it everywhere I can. Fortunately, I can configure Slack to write in Markdown (or more accurately Slack’s subset of Markdown).
Recommendations
Never write “thank you” in slack
While I would never suggest someone skip a “thank you”, I do recommend that you not type these words in slack.
My Most Valuable Git Aliases are Shell Aliases
While Git supports aliases and I am a big fan of Git aliases, (e.g. ‘git lg’), the most valuable to me (and most used) aliases are shell aliases (e.g. ‘gc’ for ‘git commit’).
GitHub Link to Commit instead of Branch
When linking to specific lines in a file to GitHub, it is preferable to link to those lines in the file for a specific commit (rather than for a specific branch). This is because the contents of a branch can change but the contents of a commit remain the same forever.
Why PHP require autoload.php should be wrapped in is_readable()
When using Composer for PHP class autoloading, it is a good practice to wrap your require statement with an is_readable() check. Here are some notes on why this is an important thing to do.
Git Branch Naming
There are lots of ways to name Git branches. These are my personal rules I’ve developed for naming Git branches.
Don’t Do It Now, Open an Issue Instead
When working on an issue, it is easy to get sidetracked by other unrelated changes that need to be made. I’ve found that instead of addressing other issues as I spot them, taking a moment to open an issue and then ignoring them allows me to stay focused on the task at hand.
Git autoSetupRemote Prevents “no tracking information” Error
After creating a pushing a new branch to GitHub (or any remote), when I do “git pull” I often get an error that says “There is no tracking information for the current branch”. The Git config value “autoSetupRemote”, introduced in Git version 2.38, lets us avoid this entirely error.
Tarenheit: A New Temperature Scale
My son is studying unit conversions in school and as a family we were discussing how you can’t use the same technique (multiplication) when converting between Celsius and Fahrenheit. Out of this conversation came a new temperature scale, Tarenheit (rhymes with Fahrenheit). Tarenheit is exactly 32° less than Fahrenheit.
Yo-yo Intro
I started yo-yoing approximately one week before the original draft of this post. During that time I learned a lot of introductory information from different sources. This is the blog post I wish I had when I started yo-yoing.