Learn Forever

A few days ago, I stumbled upon a Reddit thread packed with API recommendations. The thread was long, detailed, and exactly what I needed—except I didn’t want to manually comb through dozens of comments. I figured this was the perfect job for AI. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t as straightforward as I expected.

Remember when installing Java meant one download, one version, once choice? Back in the old days, you would head over to java.sun.com or later to Oracle website to download the installer, click through a few prompts, and you were done. Life was simple.

Back then, there was typically one widely-adopted version of Java that would remain stable for years. You didn’t need to think much about version management because there wasn’t much to manage. Over the years, a lot has changed.

Samsung DeX is a desktop-like environment available in Samsung’s flagship phones and tablets. I don’t want to make this sound like ads for DeX, but it was one of the main reasons while I was deciding to switch from iPhone to a Note 10+ about a year and a half ago. With an external monitor, you can turn your phone into a desktop computer of some sort, or you can have more like a laptop experience on your phone using a few alternatives. I recently turned an old Chromebook lying around to my DeX laptop, my new ChromeDeX.

Todoist is a great multi-platform task manager, and it provides facilities to integrate with many other tools including e-mail apps. Email integration is typically via forwarding your e-email to a todoist inbox email. This, however, sends the actual content of the email to Todoist, which might not be desirable all the time. In this post, we integrate Outlook with Todoist (or any other tool, actually) by creating links back to Outlook e-mails.

Nowadays, a developer needs to deal with JSON quite frequently. RESTful web services are everywhere. Whether you need to work with Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, Neo4j, Titan, or an internal Restful API for a web application you will probably end up dealing with JSON.

Learning touch typing is a lot more challenging for a seasoned hunt-and-pecker. Years and years of acquired habits are difficult to unlearn. Additionally, having daily tasks to keep up while learning to touch type, and the fact that initially touch typing is even slower than hunt-and-peck style doesn't help with the situation. However, following a disciplined process can alleviate most of the difficulties.

Touch typing (also called touch type or touch keyboarding) is typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys. Specifically, a touch typist will know their location on the keyboard through muscle memory. (Wikipedia)

After about 20 years of programming with hunt and peck style shamelessly, I decided to learn touch typing a few months ago. I'll talk about why I decided to learn touch typing at the end of this post, but I first want to spend time on the critical question: "Do Programmers Actually Need Touch Typing?".

All new programming tutorials start with "Hello, World!" This is not actually a programming tutorial, but the hope is to share a piece of information which could be useful for someone. I wanted to start with "Hello, World!" anyway.

This is a project I delayed a very long time, and now it is time. I will try to cover a diverse set of topics including Programming Languages, Touch Typing, Editors, Note Taking and a lot more.