Tag: productivity

Typing fast is not so important

Posted on by Morgan

In response to https://www.rugu.dev/en/blog/on-typing-fast.

HN comments.

What to say on this ? I like typing and feeling productive. But the two are unrelated.

TLDR; We need to slow down a bit, as programmers, and as technologists.

I believe there are virtues to typing fast, for the impatient programmer, for the prolific coder, for the over busy person, and because free time is never given to anyone. I tend to be quite impatient at times, because I see fast builds and fast code as solved problems, at least with boring tech.

I nurture other virtues like removing code, remove dependencies, pipeline steps, YAML soup, hundred lines setup instructions and docs, frameworks and libraries. You can shift to simple scripts, binaries and code, that is efficient and -- most important -- that your understand, can maintain and validate and which can fit in your screen without needing to scroll through long files nor switching between tabs and editors to understand it.

There are benefits to pushing releases faster, but it has nothing to do with typing more code faster. Do not push buggy code at first. Understand the code you write and make it boring, readable, concise, because you understand it an you know enough to improve it and vanish some complicated concepts.

Because you focus on the user experience, on quality, on the business, not on the code, you will be able to explain the business that it's more important to do the right thing than having to rewrite the things three times later and debug it four times. You know how to defend your case because and you know the impact of a badly designed solution built too fast. You already prefer quality code, and you know enough about the business to explain how risky it is to push bugs faster and have to spend all your valuable time debugging your code or peers code.

Do I enjoy more YAML and code on a daily basis ? Certainly not. Duplicated code and YAML makes me puke. I'm happy if a colleague thrashes some code I wrote, because in the end we do not need to keep it all. An a good CI pipeline should likely be 2 lines long, not thousands lines long (hello GitLab/GitHub and other YAML soup lobbies). More code is more fragile and harder to validate and rework. Good code takes lot of rework, or maybe more thoughtful upfront design.

Also, do you really want to type the whole day ? Is it your only way to solve problems ? Some things are not so urgent nor important.

  • A single line of code added or removed can make a whole day better. A simple "NO" can avoid tons of bugs.
  • Reading code, learning about boring and legacy tech, will teach you valuable lessons.
  • Discussing decisions and designs with peers, and even in the middle of other things, will lead you to connect more dots together, and lead to opportunities and more collaborative ways to solve the problems.
  • Reinventing the wheel, simplifying solutions, solving problems, thinking, writing, do not require typing faster.
  • Programming do not require typing faster.
  • Authoring good books and novels do not require typing fast.
  • The best work is not always the result of fast work. A good movie/tv show script, a good (comic) book, a good music release, requires thoughtful work.
  • Maybe feeling emotionally pressured to react/rant on internet or social media leads you to type faster.
  • Maybe a bad manager wants you to answer faster to what appears to be urgent/important. But maybe you have to reconsider the urgency.
  • Maybe we do not need to reach 120% productivity, nor 600%, nor 100%. We are not machines.

We do not need more code/bugs in the world, nor more pressure to deliver more in fewer time.

We need more quality and care. We need to take the time to think and discuss code. And sometimes consider doing nothing and maybe waiting for some technology to mature rather than succumbing the hype... hello LLMs and their carbon footprint that ruin long efforts, while a few good IFs could have done the work.

I tend to see myself as a slow programmer, I mean thoughtful one. For a decade at least. And I believe this is rarely valued. Yet an important virtue for me is to take the time.

And reconsider our ways for solving problems rather than trying to convince the world to speed up a little more. We already suffer with enough crap to fix, alerts, dark patterns, slow code, bugs, security incidents, broken tests, broken pipelines, fix(ci) commits everywhere, git conflicts, ignored specs, overlooked docs...

Do we want more code delivered by heroes (or glorified code addicts) through harder and faster work ? Do we want your value determined by your typing speed or the count of hours spent at work ?

Do I really want to pressure peers and myself even more by typing always faster and more, energized with caffeine (which I love too much)? No thanks.

I'm not a luddite, nor for status quo, yet... less is a viable option.

  • Maybe the problem is not so urgent.
  • Maybe this feature will make everyone even more busy with the bugs and side effects and consultancy.
  • Maybe this extra feature or dependency will introduce too much risks and maintenance.
  • Maybe teaching you how to reach the same goal with this alternative way is as efficient.
  • Maybe this work can be avoided with a phone call, a chit-chat or a boring old idea or tool.
  • Maybe you do not need to be a code hero, especially as code is expensive.
  • Maybe you can solve the problem without a computer.
  • Maybe you need something simpler.
  • Maybe your problem was already solved many times before. Do not repeat the cycle or history.
  • Maybe we deserve a more disconnected world, long live local and offline first.
  • Maybe I want a world where I'm not urged to switch apps and copy paste the MFA within a 30 seconds time frame.
  • Maybe I can cultivate patience by watching someone type slowly, and it's fine.

Or if you insist, let's do it the right way, and think of a minimalist, solid and boring way to do it.

Related: Silicon Valley S01E05 - Typing speed

Markdown: a text adventure

Posted on by Morgan

Seriously I wonder what is wrong with us, computer scientists and computer hobbyists. I thought I loved markdown, that I needed to keep telling the world about it, but what renders in Gitea is not rendering the same in GitHub, nor in Obsidian. I'm likely idiot, let's find out.

The guide at https://www.markdownguide.org/book/ already starts by confusing its readers, looking for simplicity, with prompting the user to pick between normal or extended syntax. The top menu also mentions hacks and tools and books. Woot ? Aren't we talking about a simple text format and about making things simpler ?

This can't be so complicated, at least I thought. Then I visited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown#Implementations and fallen of my chair -- note the >dramatic< tone here, but I'm only sitting in my sofa and avoiding sleep, I'm all fine.

I hope we are solving this problem. Likely, the smart people figured it out... < o> < o> https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=variant+markdown&sort=byDate&type=comment. Woot.

Damn, even on Markdown supposed to provide a simple and better source format and publishing tool than HTML, we experts can't agree. Myriad of tools and implementations each extended by a few more artisanal tools here and there, millions of hours wasted ?

They are plenty static site generators and people crafting them and enriching markdown with details to hopefully generate, well, mostly valid HTML ? Or not ? Last time I checked, only an handful of those would take care of this goal.

We could chose to go back to working with text or HTML without tools in our way. This blog post for instance is almost just text and links, nothing much I require from markdown. This likely makes this portable. No transpiling needed, no tools.

It's NOT SO HARD and still readable. This blog post also has links that do not require remembering keyboard shortcuts on Mac for [Title](...) nor combining any special key.

Markdown is like sharing a recipe, but everyone reinvents a different complicated meal.

Simple is however better.

Default settings for watches in Changedetection

Posted on by Morgan

I'm addicted to Changedetection for spying on website changes and internet search results for specific keywords, Occasionally also for monitoring price changes. It's quite handy to discover new links added to web directories, or stay updated with some websites that do not provide any RSS feed.

Context

  • I'm watching hundred of URLs.
  • I often spy on webrings and blogrolls to discover new interesting links, and also on search engines results for specific keywords.
  • I'm self-hosting Changedetection through Cloudron.
  • I'm mostly following through those watches via my RSS Reader, Miniflux.
  • For some specific changes, like weather bad conditions, I subscribe via ntfy.

Anyway, I've developed a few habits that fit my workflow so well for every new watch, which are:

Settings > General

This is where we set defaults for all future watches, it's pretty obvious you must start here. Here is my current setting:

  • Time between check: By forcing a convenient interval between checks, you try to find a balance between information overload and staying current. Pick your poison, but don't hesitate to override this setting at per-watch level.
  • Extract from document and use as watch title: it's convenient to let Changedetection take care of naming your watches based on the webpage titles rather than leaving the sometimes very long and non human-friendly URL as a default description.
  • Random jitter: this is handy to avoid stressing your I/O too much.

General > Group tag

This one is mostly for better organizing stuff, as I mentioned I follow those changes through RSS, I noticed it was harder to distinct between important and less important stuff because I was following the default RSS feed, but Changedetection provides distinct RSS feeds per groups/tabs of watches, and that's my preferred workflow now.

I'm trying to always set a label, I have around 15 in total, some for specific interests (privacy, discovery aka list of links, devops, music, ...) or specific people, locations and business updates. The rest is generally less important and is labelled with things like FOMO, misc, ...

Example of group tag.

Those group tags appear as labels next to the URLs you are watching.

Example of labelled URLs.

If you want to watch a whole group through RSS, link is at the bottom right of the page on the group tab.

Filters & Triggers > Remove elements

It's common on bloated rich web pages to want to focus on specific parts, like everything between <header> and <footer> sections, so I sometimes have to add footer and header. It's mostly needed for sites like eBay, 2ememain, where we can buy and sell things.

Remove HTML elements.

Filters & Triggers > default filter and triggers

my Text filtering defaults in Changedetection.

This is purely for spam reduction as I mostly want to know when something new is made.

Sometimes I also enable Sort text alphabetically depending how the page is updated by its author.

πŸ†• Those new settings have been added recently and I'm also enabling them on new watches:

Extension

Try the web browser extension for Chromium based browsers, it makes watches one-click away.

Next

I've opened a discussion in Changedetection's repository to talk about how repetitive it feels to me, in the hope we can see something like template settings be proposed in the future, at least for the filters & triggers which I consider is not too hard to start with.

Reading RSS in peace with a few Miniflux Hacks

Posted on by Morgan

I'm avid of content curation using RSS feeds. Let me share some of my tips here and some code. This is a living document so please come back for new tips πŸ™‚ and explore my other articles on this topic.

Some of those tips rely on Userscripts which are snippets of code executed automatically on web pages, and usually it's very handy to customize your navigation. I'm using the Custom JavaScript block in Miniflux Settings. But some scripts won't work because of reliance on external resources, and in that case I'm using Tampermonkey for special cases that require loading external resources (think CSP & co).

Filter categories (remove empty ones) using Custom JavaScript block

There is by default no distinction between categories with or without content, and it can be annoying. I made a user script to remove categories with no content to read.

Source

https://gitea.zoemp.be/sansguidon/snippets/raw/branch/main/miniflux_scripts/filter_categories.js

Demo

Before applying the script, we have some categories, including one with (0) unread entries.

After

The category with (0) unread entries is hidden.

Feed organizer - using Tampermonkey

This one is for grouping together all feed entries by feed/author in the main on unread, read, and starred pages. I needed this one because by default, in unread tab, the feed entries are mixed all together and I often wanna consume content per feed/author and not in chronological order.

Source

https://gitea.zoemp.be/sansguidon/snippets/raw/branch/main/miniflux_scripts/feed_organizer.js

Demo

Distinct boring from interesting feeds thanks to objective ranking - with Custom JavaScript in global settings

When opening the "Show all entries" view of a feed, this trick will show you if you shall keep this feed or not. The classification is based on the ratio of starred entries vs total. In this case, clearly, my assistant tells me it's quite πŸ₯± boring. Other values are: Thinking πŸ’­ (in case we lack data), Interesting 😍 (we star a lot of items), Thinking πŸ€” (in case we stared at least some entries). Feel free to make it yours and customize the behavior!

Source

https://gitea.zoemp.be/sansguidon/snippets/raw/branch/main/miniflux_scripts/feed_classifier.js

Demo

Fetch original content - Per feed settings

This is a trick that works well with the majority of feeds so you can fetch the whole article content in your reader instead of just the excerpt.

Filter feed entries by title / content

I've customize the feed settings to exclude specific keywords, and on top of this I've also global rules which apply to all feeds, for excluding feed entries when keywords are found in their content or title. This makes it easy to exclude clickbait uninteresting or depressing content πŸ™‚

My current setting is here as an example https://gitea.zoemp.be/sansguidon/snippets/raw/branch/main/miniflux/block.rules (RSS)

In this case I follow news with heavy metal album releases and I'm excluding specific genre like Death Metal. I'm also abusing the feature to avoid being spammed with recurrent news like Olympic games (Paris 2024). Finally there are already many reasons for me to be anxious, and I do not need more. The last rule saves me from the useless negative news. I keep fine tuning the list and I could improve this by including terms from public blacklists, like this.

Entry sorting - Application settings

This is a setting that helps well to decrease the FOMO-scrolling, by ensuring the top of your unread list stays the same. So it is very simple, sort by Older entries first! Easy.

Startup options

You can override Miniflux behavior with some environment variables. See https://miniflux.app/docs/configuration.html for more configuration options.

Those are mine and make Miniflux more indulgent to unstable RSS feeds.

export HTTP_CLIENT_TIMEOUT=60
export POLLING_PARSING_ERROR_LIMIT=6

Prompt hacks aka make the best coding out of GPT

Posted on by Morgan 
THIS WILL BE CONSTANT WORK IN PROGRESS

I've been using a paid subscription to ChatGPT Plus since May 2023 and I'm still happy with the usage. It's one of those tools you have to master to get most of the time spent with it. There are a lot of benefits to use it, of course there are also negative aspects and bugs. Some of them can be mitigated, and that's the purpose of the current post.

Disclaimer / Context of use 🧾

  • I'm ChatGPT mostly for scripts and each conversation is focused on singular topics, i.e single-file codebases if possible.
  • I don't use Open API Keys and I'm not interested to use OpenAI directly. I've been on a paid plan for OpenAI and was charged way too much for my needs. I advise anyone to use ChatGPT Plus which remain to this day worth it and good enough both for personal and professional.
  • This article was not written nor reviewed by AI/ChatGPT.

Lessons learned - Do βœ…

  • Shorten your expectations. Timebox your interactions with ChatGPT. If it takes longer than you expect to reach a solution, stop and do your homework instead, debugging yourself or simplify the problem to solve or take a break...
  • Test after each change. ChatGPT will make you lose faith by repeating the same mistakes, by removing sensitive code, by providing incomplete solutions, always verify.
  • Before running or committing anything generated by ChatGPT, always compare with the previous situation you had. Git diff the result of changes. If you have any doubt about a specific change, submit the git diff to ChatGPT for review and ask for explanations while also explaining why you have doubt (failing tests, errors at runtime, weird code removal, ...).
  • Tell ChatGPT to always decouple code in functions.
  • Instruct to use minimalist code, and avoid comments in code, respect your specific style (if you provide examples), instruct to write the code that takes the least amount of lines and space and to avoid long functions.
  • Divide to conquer: Keep one conversation per problem. Once done with the problem, validate the solution (test!), commit locally, and delete or archive the conversation to keep your Chat history clean from everything you don't need.
  • Take steps: Try to limit ChatGPT's attention to one single file or one single function at a time.
  • If you have lot of work you expect ChatGPT to perform for you, be patient and request one change at a time, then review the code diff and then the outcome, and only if it's validated, commit and move to the next step. ChatGPT sucks at multitasking. Keep the rest of your TODO list somewhere else to keep track of what remains to be requested from ChatGPT.
  • You will have a cleaner Chat if you take this habit:
    • Ask something from ChatGPT.
    • ChatGPT will answer you something, whatever it is, you will likely want to correct ChatGPT. Refrain yourself and do this instead: cancel what ChatGPT is doing, edit your last input to be more precise and re-submit it, ChatGPT will replace its unhelpful response with something more clever. And you will improve the overall quality of the discussion.
  • You will be given better results on popular topics than on niche topics / technologies.
  • Ask to only output the code that require change, e.g add this at the end of your prompt :
    just output the function(s) needing change
  • Ask to not change the existing comments, login logic, variables values in the code that is not impacted by the change.
  • If you really want to multitask, open multiple ChatGPT sessions (browser tabs) in parallel, each focused on distinct changes, so you can multitask while ChatGPT stays focused on single tasks πŸ™‚
  • One change at a time. If ChatGPT keeps making error, step back, restart from to the latest stable version of your code, and ask to make minimal changes, step by step, while you validate each increment.
  • When happy with your changes, ask ChatGPT to improve its performance or clean the code or keep it minimal.
  • When debugging your code with ChatGPT, provide stack traces, inputs, outputs and even the copy of the code that seems buggy (based on the stack trace).
  • Be suspicious if ChatGPT changes your code way too much or introduce weird changes to dependencies. Always review, check, investigate.
  • ChatGPT will likely be interesting to use only for writing very small and boring scripts to batch automate some tasks. But you are responsible for the whole, do not forget that. And test. And understand the code. Make it easy to understand and debug. If you can't explain it, rewrite.
  • ChatGPT could be good at documenting tasks or at writing tests, but for working on complex code it will mostly get 70% of the results then will suck your time and patience.

Lessons learned - Avoid ❌

  • Don't trust ChatGPT outputs. OpenAI is known for dreaming and also tends to complexify solutions to simple problems.
  • Don't run nor commit anything generated by ChatGPT that you don't understand and always compare ChatGPT's solution with what you had before.
  • Don't ask too many improvements or bug fixes at once or be prepared to deal with many new errors and regressions.
  • Don't keep conversations for too long, as all the initial context will likely be forgotten about by ChatGPT and you will suffer, also it will cause a lot of scrolling and augment the size of the web page which will be slower to load and will likely crash your browser tab at some point.
  • Don't switch context / files / problems in the same conversation. It's a waste of time and you will suffer later when trying to source specific content or make sense of anything.
  • Don't share secrets/passwords with ChatGPT.
  • Don't waste your time when the LLM seems confused or unable to solve your problem. Either reshape your problem statement or restart from the latest known stable state, ideally in a new conversation. Be confident in your own abilities. Don't be too dependent on any LLM. I once wasted a whole evening and night trying to get ChatGPT to write the solution for me then trying to use it to fix the problems it caused, I was too lazy to code something by myself from the start.
  • Don't expect ChatGPT to be as efficient on big codebases and complex problems as it is on small scripts and simple problems. So use it more often for the latter and keep the fun of solving the big problems yourself.
  • Don't expect ChatGPT to understand a single thing you do nor why he generates his code. it's a dumb machine without creativity built in. It has to be treated as such and with caution.
  • When trying to help you fixing problems caused by its previous solutions, ChatGPT may enter and endless loop of replacing one solution with another, without understanding the context. Before copy pasting anything from ChatGPT, make your own investigation and check the logs of the apps that do not behave as expected, before touching the code. If you find interesting logs, then provide those to ChatGPT or make your own investigation. Do not depend on ChatGPT for too much grunt and research work. You are better than that.
  • Don't expect ChatGPT to run well and fast on huge bloated scripts. That should encourage you to decouple your code into functions and modules and specialized files/modules/components/...

Relevant references

  • The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding (substack.com)
  • ChatGPT could be used to address the fact that solving some problems is costly in term of engineering. This XKCD meme below should be likely made obsolete if LLMs are used to provide the programs to automate the tasks. For instance when faced with some painful work, I rather use LLM to write me a script to tackle the task. It will be faster than me on some occasions, which itself help removing the need for manual work for tedious tasks, also help removing the need to prompt LLM in the future for that same task, since the script is already provided.
Automation (by XKCD) Legend: "I spend a lot of time on this task. I should write a program automating it!"

via https://xkcd.com/1319/

is It Worth the Time? (by XKCD) Legend: "How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you're spending more time than you save? (across five years)"

via https://xkcd.com/1205/

Extras

  • If you lose focus on the ChatGPT session in your browser, it's likely the calculation process will interrupt.
  • ChatGPT seems stuck at generating the output ? Refreshing the page might be enough, in other cases ChatGPT might automatically continue the generation or will show a button you can hit to force this action.
  • I recommend trying ollama so you can work offline and without feeding all your sensitive data into OpenAI.

Thank you πŸ™‚