Notes

A collection of thoughts, ideas and everything else that doesn't need a lot of words.

Post type: remembered Dev Lids

After seeing a short Twitter thread about laptop stickers and what others’ laptops do look like, I remembered this fun site, collecting only that: Stickered laptop lids.

If you’re into that kind of thing, knock yourself out!

Post type: remembered Thinking of “You Got This”

Over the last few days I have remembered and thought about Jeffrey Zeldman’s article “You Got This” in which he wrote about learning new things and how it can be quite hard, how it’s different to 20 years ago, when we first learned all the things web. I’ve started to learn Vue.js to get a better understanding of what all the talk is about. It’s hard in some ways, especially because some of the concepts are quite different to how I learnt to build for the web. It’s “easy” in some other ways and I really enjoy the process.
I’ve had quite a few moments in which I was about to curse for the rest of the day, but eventually I figured things out and made it work. I do enjoy the process and since this is not the first time, I know how the process usually goes. It’s all about patience and putting time into it. What I’m trying to build is now slowly coming together and I keep thinking “You got this”.

Post type: remembered SVG to PNG Export Automation

Today I had a short conversation about Apple Keynote on Twitter. One of the drawbacks with Keynote currently is that it's not possible to import SVG files. In some cases this can be quite cumbersome, but instead of converting all your files manually, it can be done by setting up a folder action (macOS only). The folder action then allows you to simply drop images into a folder and they will be automatically converted to PNG format.

The tool behind the Automator folder action wrapper is svgexport which can also be found on NPM. In case you prefer, you can also run svgexport from your command line without the need for folder actions.

Today I remembered that I set this up some time ago and it has saved me a lot of time in the past. I hope it's going to be helpful to you, too.

Update: As Frederic has pointed out, the upcoming macOS 10.15 release might exclude Automator‘s default installation or even remove it completely, the latter which I doubt. Let‘s see.

Post type: remembered Learning Styles

Yesterday I replied to a tweet about learning resources for JavaScript. In my reply I said “…depends on your learning style…”.

It reminded me of the different learning styles of people and their different preferences when it comes to consuming new information. I love to read books and can learn by reading very well.

I used to have a lot of discussions with my business partner Jane back in the days, where she would ask me how something works and I’d be replying with “we did have a book on this topic, if you wanna learn it”. Books have always been her worst enemy for learning and she always “hated” me for that ;)