3 productivity quickies - Memory Training - Shape Up break - TDD workshop

I'm soft-launching memocortex. It's an app to learn one of the most awesome memory techniques: The Mnemonic Major System. With that technique, you can quickly memorize 100 things at a time.

It's a very soft launch which has its reasons. For example, I just educated someone today to do the visuals together with me. So 285 images are still to go, but we have 15 fun visuals for memory training done already.

Nevertheless, it's in a good enough state to use its main feature: shoving multiple major systems into my brain. And it's a good enough basis to start a discussion with people interested in memory improvement.

Shape Down

I'm taking two weeks off from all my side projects to recalibrate and decide on the next project in the best Shape Up manner.

But I wouldn't be me if I hadn't already had an exciting roadmap for these two weeks. Exciting for me.

📕 Read Shape Up - I'm mentioning it quite a bit, so it's time to extend my

🎧 Listen to Never Finished - "Can't hurt me" by Goggins was a very inspiring book, so Never Finished might be a good boost before the next Shape Up development phase

👀 Catch up on open tabs, watch-laters, and bookmarks 🙈

🛠️ Shape the next project - AFAIK, in Shape Up, the 1-2 weeks of downtime are there to decide for the next project, define its scope and source requirements, and define its (time) budget...

🏖️👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

TDD workshop's next iteration

I'm iterating on my TDD Ruby and Rails workshop, which seems interesting for many people from different walks of life and experience levels. It's currently a private 1-on-1 workshop that includes:

• pre-experience and showcase from you
• intro into different aspects of TDD from me
• practical examples from the real world for different TDD styles
• coding part 👨‍💻👨‍💻

We usually make our way along a presentation. If you are interested, here are the Slides

For you to try out next week

1. I'm not searching GitHub repos a lot, but here's a tip from a colleague that seems applicable if you do:

https://grep.app is a crazy tool if you happen to search GitHub repos a lot. So much faster than GitHub's search, but the best thing – it supports regex.

1. I never change git's default editor from vim to something else, so I know a few shortcuts like :wq for exiting, but last week I learned something new:

vim: :x only writes when the file changes, and shift+z+z should do the same. In contrast, :wq always writes and is one key more to hit :))

1. Remove comments in your PR reviews 👀

That's a game changer if you review PRs inside of GitHub: in the /files review view, press i in PR review files view, and you see the code without comments. This is particularly useful for my own tricky PRs where I sometimes comment quite a bit 😁