Signal v Noise moves to WordPress

Today Signal v Noise announced they have moved from Medium to WordPress and there main reasoning seems to be because of the change in how Medium is ran.

I personally tried out Medium back when they originally switched and had high hopes, Medium said they were going to work for the writers but more and more you could see the tide shifting between what they said and what they did. I left and haven’t looked back. Granted I might not be getting the visits running my own thing but it’s mine and I can do what I want and make it suit my needs.

I love this quote from their move:

Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

I’m hoping for a blogging resurgence and have been loving being a part of it. Now if I could just figure out how to get people commenting on the posts instead of replying on the social share. haha

Anyone Can Draw

Although I love drawing I am not very good at it, but I don’t let that stop me. The act of creating something, even something terrible, brings me joy so I keep doing it.

If you are like me, remembering that you can draw almost anything with a circle, a rectangle, and a triangle then it allows you to break down an object into it’s most basic form and recreate it. Thinking of it like this also allows you to draw objects super quick which is great for taking notes.

Shortcuts

Some people believe the only way to learn a skill is by the hard knocks of trial and error and spending hours stuck on frustrating problems that an expert just knows.

Granted this way of learning works and I know this from experience. That is the path I took into being a developer. Now that I’m older my time is much more valuable to me and I can’t spend countless hours learning a new skill.

Instead I try to find the shortcuts to get the results I want. As an example, I’ve been wanting to get better at creating drawings on the iPad. I found an app that will do everything under the sun, but just learning the app is daunting. My first step was to find a YouTube video helping get the basics and I found an engaging teacher who also had a course for sale. I picked it up for $10 and it goes through everything from the basics to the advanced. Everything I needed.

From spending the money and watching a dedicated course I’m already farther ahead than I would have been going alone. The next time you want to learn a new skill look for the shortcuts and figure out how to take advantage of them.

An Easy Way To Save

 

It’s always hard to bring down your standard of living but you need to do that in order to save more money. If that doesn’t sound appealing the next time you get a raise take the extra money and put it all in your retirement account or an emergency fund that you can’t easily access.

Your standard of living will remain the same and you’ll automatically save more.

Set your Terminal to Red for Production

Making mistakes in production is one thing that always scares me. This problem multiplies if you use a lot of terminal tabs but a quick and easy solution is to make production red so it’s immediately noticeable where you are logged into.

For the image above I’m using Termius on iOS which supports this and allows you to set it on a folder level and then any ssh connections under the group inherits the color.

It’s a really simple way to help distinguish which connection you are logged into and can be a life saver. This can done in other terminals too, just do a web search to find instructions for your app of choice.

Triggered

A few times a month I’ll get emails that trigger me. The writer isn’t being totally rude, but just the way its worded screams of selfishness or little slights.

Every time my instant reaction is anger and I want to fire back to let them know how bad of a person they are. We all know how well that would end.

Instead I’ve been swallowing my reaction and responding in complete kindness. This works amazingly well and usually their tone changes instantly.