eeskildsen

Since going full-time on my startup, I often work remotely at my local library. Over my time there, my eyes have been opened to what an absolute treasure public libraries are.

Besides the physical books everyone knows about, which are a treasure by themselves, there are many other valuable resources, as you mentioned, including:

- The Adobe suite, even including Character Animator

- Udemy

- Digital access to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and others

- Free notary services

- Print magazines and newspapers

- Puzzles

- Music and films

- eBooks and audiobooks

...not to mention community activities like classes, groups, and concerts.

Just being physically present in the library has benefited me. When I take breaks, I sometimes pick up a book at random. It may be about sales, health, politics, history. I sometimes come away with new ideas for my business, sometimes am just inspired or informed or amused in general.

I encourage anyone reading to stop by a library if you haven't been in a while. See what they offer. You might be surprised. And please, do what you can to support them in whatever way you can, even if that's just to use them, demonstrating the need for them by your patronage. We need these institutions, and they won't be around forever without our support.

I've found templates most useful as personal shortcuts.

I.e., once you've settled on a prompt that you may reuse, save it to something like a snippet manager so that you don't have to type/speak the whole thing again.

I've been doing this with a snippet manager that supports string interpolation. Recent example:

  I'm working on an ASP.NET Core Razor Pages web application that I need your help with. I will send you the relevant code over several requests. Please reply "continue" until you receive a message from me starting with the word "request." Upon receiving a message from me starting with the word "request," please carry out the request with reference to the code that I previously sent. Assume I am a senior software engineer who needs minimal instruction. Limit your commentary as much as possible. Under ideal circumstances, your response should just be code with no commentary. In some cases, commentary may be necessary: for example, to correct a faulty assumption of mine or to indicate into which file the code should be placed. Code: {{Code}}

There's obviously nothing magical about the wording; saving it just gives me a quick shortcut for inputting paginated code and then explaining what's needed.

One of my favorite things about i3 is that it doesn't force itself on you when it's not needed. You can keep it "in the background" in tabbed mode, effectively using it like a non-tiling WM, as long as you want. Just let your windows pile up and switch between them with fuzzy search (rofi/Switcheroo). Then, once usage patterns emerge, you can tile to take advantage of spatial memory.

Example:

- Start i3 in tabbed mode

- Open a window for coding

- Open a browser to search for some coding question. It opens in a new i3 tab, filling the screen like it would in a non-tiling WM

- Open a terminal to try the sample code (new i3 tab)

- Google the error message you get (new i3 tab)

- Use rofi to search for "code" and press Enter. Your coding window tab is activated and the coding window fills the screen

- Realizing the sample code you found would be useful here, along with the test terminal, tile those windows alongside your coding window. Now you can quickly refer to them and switch between them with spatial keybindings

- Switch back to the error message browser using rofi to check something. It's not part of your core workflow right now, so don't worry about tiling it

That's probably obvious to anyone who's used a tiling WM for any length of time, but tiling was daunting to me until it clicked. I spent too much time thinking about optimal window arrangements. Thinking of tiling as an optional finishing touch rather than a focal point made it much more useful/practical.

Cross-platform PowerShell is fantastic. It's one of the first things I install on a new Linux box nowadays. I don't think I could go back to a string-based shell. Objects are so much cleaner and easier to manipulate.

Plus you get a huge standard library out of the box with its .NET integration.

It's really impressive what Microsoft has done with it.