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Compact macOS menubar icons
When Apple released macOS 11.0 “Big Sur” back in 2020, one of the changes they made was to increase the gap between icons on the menubar. During development the gap was enormous, but it was eventually toned down for release, based on the negative feedback during testing. People with a lot of menubar apps found…
1–2 minutes -
Switching from Docker Desktop to Colima
I use Docker containers to automate the setup of development environments in a standard and repeatable way. It makes it very easy to spin up applications locally during development, and especially to ensure everyone working in a team has a consistent environment. The Docker Engine is actually built on top of a few Linux technologies, including Kernel…
3–5 minutes -
Switching to Starship
A long time ago, I started experimenting with customising my Bash shell prompt. Rather than just showing the current working directory, I wanted to add snippets of useful information to my prompt. I started with displaying the currently active branch of a Git repository. Next I added code to show which version of a particular…
4–6 minutes -
Git Commit Etiquette
Clear, meaningful, commit and pull request messages are essential when working on a shared codebase. They serve a couple of important purposes: What makes a good commit? When writing your commit message, try to consider whether it answers these questions: Try to keep your commit messages small; no more than a sentence or so. Make…
5–8 minutes -
Jekyll and GitHub Actions
When deciding to resurrect this blog, I first had to do some research to choose the right software to do the job. The original blog years ago was deployed using WordPress and while I’m still a fan of WordPress I wanted to keep things super simple this time around. At work last year I redid some internal…
7–10 minutes