Year: 2017

Colemak Fingers

I’m switching to Colemak. It’s an alternate keyboard layout that allows you to type while your fingers travel shorter distances. You can read more about the reasons this is better than QWERTY here: http://chetansurpur.com/blog/2012/11/colemak.html

My main reason for switching is that so many others at Automattic made the switch and had only good things to say. For me it came down to comfort, speed and the joy of trying something new.

I was considering the impact that this will have on my work as a programmer, but figured there will never be a good time to do this. There will always be deadlines, things to get done and communication to be had. So now is the best time.

Also, it’s time to try something new as QWERTY hasn’t done me much good. My current typing speed and accuracy is terrible and I experience pain in my wrists. I pathetically type 30wpm with 77% accuracy. My goal is 100wpm with at least 90% accuracy.

I hope to improve accuracy and typing speed and so my productivity and reduce fatigue in my fingers.

I’ll write more about my journey.

Keeping a journal can change your life

I started some time ago, but it is now more focused and intentional.

I’ve always used a notebook but have recently started using the Dayone App. It allows for multiple journals in one app. So I have a journal for health, wealth my walk in Christ and even one for my son Judah.

I keep track of all my goals and my progress towards them. I write down lessons learnt and mistake I wish to avoid in future. I write some very private stuff, and also keep note of my bad habits.

When you journal you keep a record of your growth. The mind simply doesn’t track change like this. It doesn’t remember small changes over a long time. Just like when you see a friend after a long time, you can show they’ve changed, but they and the people around them don’t notice much. Reviewing the journal after some time is like visiting an old friend. You see all the changes in their life and can compare what you’ve written down.

Jim Rohn speak so powerfully about Journalling, this inspired me even more:

 

A todo list, React, Redux and the WordPress JSON REST API

I always wanted to create a very simple WordPress based Todo App. After putting it off for a very long time I finally had the time to look into it.

The Idea

The idea was a simple todo list that takes over your WP home page and relies on a standard to do post type for persistence. The interface should be driven by React using redux for state management.  The result should be WordPress plugin that simply works without any configuration. The app works over the WordPress JSON REST API and must have a very simple UI framework.

Screen Shot 2017-06-19 at 11.42.07 PM

The Parts

1.Defining the data we need to store:

  • user – name and login details. For this, I cheated and simply use the WP login interface.
  • Todo item –  with the ability to save details on a todo. For this, I use simply used a new post type. The title being the todo, the content being further information and post meta to store the state( completed/not completed )

2. Define the todo post type which we’ll use to store todo items. Each todo item relates to a post. You will notice that it’s not anything fancy but includes a few rest API configuration to make it easy for us to call posts at a later stage.

3. Setting up the JS system. I used Webpack to manage all frontend modules. I used yarn for package management and also Bable to allow me to use ES6 syntax.

4. For the UI framework, I used spectre as it is very light: https://picturepan2.github.io/spectre/

5. For user authentication, I used the user login and then relied on the WP cookie to allow the user to create todos over the REST API.

You can find the source code to play with here, it’s a wp plugin so you can install it:

https://github.com/dwainm/wpdone

I attempted this project mainly because wanted learn about all the new frontend tools. I mostly work in PHP and doing this was very refreshing. I’m inspired to do more of these. Even if no one ever needs it, I built it coz I wanted to.