Dev Doctor: The Prelude

Recently my work hosted a Fix Hack Learn event, where it had some of the characteristics of a hackathon, but included the flexibility for folks to work on some postponed, work-related tasks or learn something new. For me and my small team (just me and a colleague), I chose to start on something to help with developer setup. I call it `dev-doctor`.

Don’t just install things

We’ve all been there. That one weird bug that seems to signal something systematic is wrong with your app. That boilerplate code that makes something more tedious than it ought to be. That inscrutable thing that makes you want to stop trying and *gasp* search StackOverflow or read a blog post for an answer. And while sometimes the answers you’ll find there might tell you how to better use what tool or framework you have at hand, occasionally they will suggest you simply install some tool, which will do the trick without any consequences.

Don’t. Just don’t. Here’s why.

Making the Future

I have the habit postponing decisions until I know enough. Sometimes this is good; I can avoid the thrash of haste by letting the information landscape settle. Other times, it is paralyzing. When operating in some novel or obscure environment, there is no way to get enough information to be confident in what next steps to take – in essence, there is no map for me to follow. My struggle is to avoid the latter, which can become an impediment if not managed.

But, what does “enough” mean?

Learning Colemak

I hated the QWERTY keyboard layout from day one. The keys’ locations seemed arbitrary, and none of the common letter combinations were comfortable to type. My hands and fingers hurt after long typing lessons. And after years of practice (22 years at this point), my maximum typing speed reached nearly 70 words per minute, not including the frequent typos. During those years, I heard of alternative layouts, like Dvorak. But Dvorak is so different, and I did not want to start down the “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing” road again. So, on I typed, not satisfied with QWERTY, but not motivated to start again with some different layout.

Then 2020 came, and I learned about Colemak.

Note: this will likely be the last thing I write about, well, writing. I thought it would be a good exercise to shake the dust off the process before I got to more interesting things.

Mac Mini with External Disk (and GPU?)

My Mac Mini (Late 2014) server has seen better days. In summer, the hard drive finally died. After checking the Genius Bar-approved price for fixing/replacing the internal one ($290 bucks, GTFO), and after looking at the steps to replace the internal drive myself, I looked into alternative approaches. Should I buy a whole new computer?

Luckily, Macs support running the OS off of any drive, including an external one. I looked into my ports and tech, and sought out a reasonably priced external drive that didn’t require external power, and could operate over Thunderbolt 2. I found both in this LaCie Rugged External drive.

The best decision I made this year was setting my little server to create Time Machine backups. After purchasing the HHD and formatting it, I was able to attach it to my Mac Mini, boot into recovery mode, and set up the new disk with my most recent backup.

After that was done, I needed to tell my Mac about its new home. Research led me to this article, and with some light configuration in System Preferences, I was booting normally again.

The only thing I haven’t worked around yet is the automatic detection of the defective disk on boot. I’d prefer it if the thing never tried to mount, but without detaching it, I suppose the OS will see it and try to communicate in some way.

My next challenge to extend the life of this machine a bit longer is to look into setting up an eGPU. I was reading about this here, and it seems like a pretty painless process. I may look into this in 2019.