ICYMI — late Friday afterrnoon GitHub held a live event to announce the beta launch of GitHub Package Registry. GitHub Package Registry is fully integrated with GitHub, so you can use the same search, browsing, and management tools to find and publish packages as you do for your repositories. You can also use the same user and team permissions to manage code and packages together. GitHub Package Registry provides fast, reliable downloads backed by GitHub’s global CDN. And it supports familiar package management tools: JavaScript (npm), Java (Maven), Ruby (RubyGems), .NET (NuGet), and Docker images, with more to come. You can sign up for the beta here.

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Inspired by the Windows 95 era PowerToys project, this reboot provides power users with ways to squeeze more efficiency out of the Windows 10 shell and customize it for individual workflows. A great overview of the Windows 95 PowerToys can be found here. This is a star-it-for-later post, since the repo won’t contain the source code until “Summer 2019”.

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No one likes to spend the day setting up and recreating the config of their text editor of choice. If you use VS Code and Settings Sync you won’t have to. Paige Niedringhaus writes: This article will show you how to perfectly recreate your Visual Studio Code IDE settings without starting over from scratch and spending hours on it. When faced with the possibility of losing (or even trying to transfer) my carefully developed VS Code setup to another machine, I knew there had to be a way to do it gracefully. I just knew the solution had to be out there, and so, I asked the internets, and it brought back Settings Sync.

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Themer takes your favorite colors and generates themes for your editor, terminal, Slack, browser, desktop wallpaper, and more. It even has a PWA UI for visual theme development as well as a CLI for automation/integration with your dotfiles repo.

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This new take on a block-style text editor from CodeX looks promising. Unlike how the common WYSIWYG editor produces raw HTML markup with both content data and content appearance, Editor.js outputs a JSON object with the data of each block of content. Here’s an example of how this news item would look. { "time": 1554306305, "blocks": [ { "type": "header", "data": { "text": "Editor.js — next generation block-style text editor", "level": 1 } }, { "type": "paragraph", "data": { "text": "This new take on a block-style text editor looks promising. Unlike how the common WYSIWYG editor produces raw HTML markup with both content data and content appearance, Editor.js outputs a JSON object with the data of each block of content. Here's an example of how this news item would look." } }, { "type": "code", "data": { "code": "" } } ], "version": "2.12.3" }

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“GUIs are bloatware” — Terminal rules…a guide to the terminal… In this post, I’ll walk you through everything you need to start making your terminal a complete development environment: how to edit text efficiently, configure its appearance, run and combine a myriad of programs, and dynamically create, resize and close tabs and windows.

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This combined with Pinboard is a nice combo! ArchiveBox takes a list of website URLs you want to archive, and creates a local, static, browsable HTML clone of the content from those websites. … It imports lists of URLs, renders the pages in a headless, authenticated, user-scriptable browser, and then archives the content in multiple redundant common formats (HTML, PDF, PNG, WARC) that will last long after the originals disappear off the internet.

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Google Analytics runs on over 56% of all websites. It’s the backbone of ad-tech across the web. Unfortunately, for site owners like me who just want to learn how people are using their website—while respecting their privacy—there simply aren’t any alternatives that meet all my requirements. So in two days, after a couple dead-ends, I built my own using React, AWS Lambda, and a spreadsheet. This is how. It’s somewhat ironic that the datastore for this project is Google Sheets. That aside, this is a well-done effort and one that I wouldn’t mind adapting for use around these parts.

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If you’ve been wanting a way to run VS Code as a cloud-IDE, code-server is what you’ve been looking for. Code-server allows VS Code to run on a remote server making it fully accessible through the browser. … Developers ready to embrace the cloud-based IDE can do so without losing features, or control. This means you can code on your Chromebook, tablet and desktop with a completely synchronized environment. You can spill coffee on your laptop without fear of losing work.

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Could this be the future of writing interactive CLI tools? If you know React you know Ink. Ink is a library for building and testing command-line applications using React components. Since it acts as a React renderer, you can use everything that React has to offer: hooks, class components, state, context, everything. Ink lets you build interactive and beautiful CLIs in no time.

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This post from Dan Abramov about why he moved off Medium summarizes both why we’re no longer linking to Medium and why we’ve never put our content there. Some of my Medium articles unexpectedly got behind a paywall. I’m not sure what happened and whether that’s still the case. But I didn’t do it myself, and that caused a blow to my confidence in Medium as a platform. I respect their need to monetize, but it felt wrong when done retroactively.

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Sam Soffes Jekyll’s a little differently. This iteration is built on top of Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby. Since I write my posts differently than Jekyll expects, I had to write several plugins to make things work correctly. You might wonder why I don’t just write my posts the way Jekyll wants instead of doing all of this work. I want to keep the details of my blogging engine separate from my content. I’d love to hear from you about your blogging stack in the discussion below. Like Sam, I’m also using Jekyll hosted on Netlify, but I’m new to his plugins.

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Well, it depends. But the good news is Jason Etcovitch (Engineer at GitHub) examines the pros and cons of each and where they fit. He even shared a comparison table to help determine which to choose. Should your next automation tool be built in GitHub Actions or as a separate service with Probot? Since GitHub announced the beta release of GitHub Actions in October 2018, there’s been a new excitement around building automation - and that’s awesome! But I wanted to take a look at the various pros and cons of GitHub Actions and Probot, where each excels and where each might not be the best tool for the job. Click through and scroll to the bottom of the post if all you care about is the comparison.

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If you’re looking for a deep dive on GitHub Actions, check out The Changelog #331: GitHub Actions is the next big thing with Kyle Daigle. Patrick Reynolds, writing on the GitHub Engineering blog: Since the beta release of GitHub Actions last October, thousands of users have added workflow files to their repositories. But until now, those files only work with the tools GitHub provided: the Actions editor, the Actions execution platform, and the syntax highlighting built into pull requests. To expand that universe, we need to release the parser and the specification for the Actions workflow language as open source. Today, we’re doing that. I also want to point out this “we believe” section of the post to key in on their intentions and willingness to provide the community with the necessary tools to make GitHub Actions all that it can be for the community. We believe that tools beyond GitHub should be able to run workflows. We believe there should be programs to check, format, compose, and visualize workflow files. We believe that text editors can provide syntax highlighting and autocompletion for Actions workflows. And we believe all that can only happen if the Actions community is empowered to build these tools along with us. That can happen better and faster if there is a single language specification and a free parser implementation.

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This post from Gianluca Arbezzano contains both theory and code with a complete working application to understand how to build your own shared informer to extend Kubernetes beyond applying YAML via kubectl. Kubernetes increases in popularity every day but I don’t think we use all its power just applying YAML via kubectl. Kubernetes is a framework and as every framework, it exposes powerful interfaces and API usable to extend its capability with our needs. Shared Informers are what I see as the easy way to enjoy k8s as an extendible tool to programmatically build and ship containers.

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Operating Kubernetes clusters is becoming more and more taxing in terms of the number of aliases/scripts and single purpose tools one must install/master. K9s is a terminal based CLI to manage and diagnose Kubernetes clusters in a single command. It provides a unified view to navigate and diagnose K8s resources for your local or remote clusters right there in the same CLI.

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From installing Mac’s command line developer tools (Xcode), Homebrew, Git, npm, to your code editor — Michael Uloth walks you through all the steps and details to get a new Mac ready for web development. This guide is a good start and purposely leaves out items that aren’t strictly required for web development. If you’re into automation and tweaking things, then thoughtbot/laptop is another route to consider. It automates most of Michael’s steps and can also be customized to install only exactly what you want.

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This is your one-stop resource for developer tools, with a wrap up of what was hot in 2018 and what to be on the lookout for in 2019. We’ve analyzed over one million data points to bring you these rankings 😱 We’re honored to be included in both the Best Podcasts and Best Newsletters sections. 🥳

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Megan O’Keefe, developer relations engineer at Google, shares her setup for Kubernetes as well as some very helpful tips and tricks from her Terminal setup, navigating clusters, and how she gave kubectl superpowers. As a developer relations engineer for Kubernetes, I work a lot with demo code, samples, and sandbox clusters. This can get interesting to keep track of (read: total chaos). So in this post I’ll show some of the tools that make my Kubernetes life a lot better. This environment can work no matter what flavor of Kubernetes you’re running.

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Follow along as our friends at Phusion walk us through the process of creating a GitHub Actions workflow to build and publish a Ruby gem to the RubyGems registry. One of the actions featured in the version that’s currently exclusively available to GitHub employees and a selected and undisclosed group of Beta testers, is the ‘GitHub Action for npm’, which wraps the npm CLI to enable common npm commands. We set out to instead make an example workflow to build and publish a Ruby library (or: gem) to the default public registry, and created a GitHub repository, with a Docker container for a ‘Rubygems’ action: github.com/scarhand/actions-ruby

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Browser Preview for VS Code enables you to open a real browser preview inside your editor that you can debug. Browser Preview is powered by Chrome Headless, and works by starting a headless Chrome instance in a new process

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Choosing a display is tough. Here’s the tldr, but I suggest you dig into the details if that’s how you roll… tl;dr 43-inch 4K computer monitors should be the new hotness for people who like big monitors. And they should work well with almost any computer made in the last couple of years, as long as you use the proper cables.

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Koen Lageveen has a project on GitHub that let’s you test drive a handful of programming fonts which is pretty awesome if you’re on the hunt for a better font or want to see what other fonts are out there. Here’s the full list of fonts. Did your favorite not make the list yet? Send a PR.

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The thing about taking notes apps is everyone likes ‘em a bit different. Here’s what the author of Notable was after: Notes are written and rendered in GitHub-flavored Markdown, no WYSIWYG, no proprietary formats, I can run a search & replace across all notes, notes support attachments, the app isn’t bloated, the app has a pretty interface, tags are indefinitely nestable and can import Evernote notes (because that’s what I was using before). If that resonates with you, click through. 😄

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HTTP View is a desktop tool for supercharged HTTP(S) debugging. It gives you one-click setup for HTTP and HTTPS interception, and all the tools you need to quickly explore, examine and understand the HTTP your code (or anybody else’s) is sending. Open source, cross-platform, and easy on the eyes. This is definitely worth a look.

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