Pro Tips
I wish somebody told me these things.
Food
People I trust have told me that magnesium is worth supplementing.
Carbs after the gym are good because they’ll keep you from needing to lie down for half an hour and feeling grumpy afterwards. I use a serving of ice cream.
Ice cream is pretty healthy, if you work out enough.
The Iron Neck stuff is overpriced, but there is real value in neck strengthening exercises, expecially if you don’t have the most ergonomic posture.
Computers
If you spend more than a couple hours a day on a computer, it’s worth learning all the important keyboard shortcuts.
Google docs has markdown mode.
There almost always exists a tool that can do what you want, it’s just a matter of looking for it (and then maybe paying for it too).
Macbooks
The Mac’s Option Key can do a lot of useful stuff.
Quick Look: Select a file and hit spacebar. You can also tap with three fingers.
Rename: Select a file and press Enter.
Cmd + ~ to cycle through the windows from the same app. You may also like rcmd.
‘Three finger dragging’ instead of press and drag. accessibility > pointer control > trackpad options
Press CMD + Shift + . to view hidden files (.env, .gitignore, etc.) in Finder.
command + option + V changes ‘paste file here’ to ‘move file here’! I thought there was no way to move files without having to delete them manually until I found this out.
Option click in terminal jumps your cursor to that position
Select multiple images -> Right click -> Quick Actions -> Create PDF.
You can hide the Dock, you can also use ⌘ + Opt + D. You can also run this bit of code in the Terminal to remove the delay animation for the hidden Dock:
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool true && defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0 && defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0 && killall Dock
The shortcut for taking a full screen screenshot is shift+cmd+3. If you want to grab a certain part of the screen use shift+cmd+4 and if you hover over a window and hit the spacebar, it will select that window for a screenshot. holding control while taking a screenshot immediately saves it to the clipboard.
But I recommend just using Shottr.
You can go back to the classic Safari tab layout. Preferences => Tabs => Compact layout
Your Mac can generate white noise. Accessibility > Audio > Background Sounds.
Programming
Always have UUIDs (or an alternate unique ID system like Snowflake IDs) as your database keys. Not auto-incremented ints, not usernames or emails or hashes of usernames. Unique IDs. Always.
If you want to add a rich text editor on the web, you should probably work with TipTap (how to add images), Quill, or Lexical. In that order.
Design
Communication
If you have to schedule something, and there’s one person that you need confirmation from, pick up the phone and call them immediately.
Waiting for a new contact cycle is expensive. Communicate faster is the simplest way to be more effective at it. Write quick and dirty emails, instead of ones that you spend half an hour labouring over.
Learning
Some domains are unstructured enough that you need to try massive input.
Sometimes when you don’t think you know much about a subject, you really just don’t know the right language to talk about that subject with others. Find the language first and see how much your understanding grows. James Little, “25 at 25”