Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

What is risk management?

risk management

O’Reilly runs a nice and simple article on what is risk management.  They look at it from the perspective of a web application, but the suggestions are generic enough to be applied universally.  The highlights are:

  • Managing risk
  • Identifying risk
  • Remove worst offenders
  • Mitigate
  • Review regularly

I particularly liked this paragraph from the identifying risks section:

You will likely find that there are obvious entries in the list, but there should also be entries that surprise you. This is good. You want to uncover as many of your risk vulnerabilities as possible, and if some of them don’t come as a surprise to you, you probably haven’t dug deep enough.

Micro – a modern and intuitive terminal-based text editor

micro-solarized

Micro is a modern console based text editor, written in Go.  Version 1.0.0 has been recently released.  It’s cross-platform (installs as a single binary) and supports a variety of features:

  • Easy to use and to install
  • No dependencies or external files are needed — just the binary you can download further down the page
  • Common keybindings (ctrl-s, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-z…)
    • Keybindings can be rebound to your liking
  • Sane defaults
    • You shouldn’t have to configure much out of the box (and it is extremely easy to configure)
  • Splits and tabs
  • Extremely good mouse support
    • This means mouse dragging to create a selection, double click to select by word, and triple click to select by line
  • Cross platform (It should work on all the platforms Go runs on)
    • Note that while Windows is supported, there are still some bugs that need to be worked out
  • Plugin system (plugins are written in Lua)
  • Persistent undo
  • Automatic linting and error notifications
  • Syntax highlighting (for over 75 languages!)
  • Colorscheme support
    • By default, micro comes with 16, 256, and true color themes.
  • True color support (set the MICRO_TRUECOLOR env variable to 1 to enable it)
  • Copy and paste with the system clipboard
  • Small and simple
  • Easily configurable
  • Common editor things such as undo/redo, line numbers, unicode support…

Although not yet implemented, I hope to add more features such as autocompletion, and multiple cursors in the future.

If you are looking for a new editor, give Micro a try.

Steven Black hosts files

StevenBlack/hosts repository:

Extending and consolidating hosts files from a variety of sources like adaway.org, mvps.org, malwaredomains.com, someonewhocares.org, yoyo.org, and potentially others. You can optionally invoke extensions to block additional sites by category.

Categories include: adware, malware, gambling, porn, and social networks.

Don’t use Slack for FOSS

“Please don’t use Slack for FOSS projects” is a compelling case for why you shouldn’t use Slack for Free and Open Source Software projects.  Make sure to read the discussion in the comments as well.  (By the way, many of the arguments apply to HipChat too).

hipchat-slack

The suggested alternative is IRC, which I agree with.  My only minor disagreement in regards to IRC is using it for companies as well.  Companies are much more fragile and sensitive than Open Source community, so it doesn’t work all that well in some places.  I think Slack/HipChat work great for company communications, but if you want to have full control over your chat system, then try out Rocket.Chat, which I blogged about earlier this year.