Vacation to the alps that divide Switzerland, Germany, Italy and France was an opportunity for your author to take a break from many things. 🚌 🏔️ There's one thing he didn't take a break from: good habits. Habits, when developed, turn out to be the larger part of waking life. When we decide to take a more intentional role to our day, the time traps that threaten to pull us under their Morphean spell lose their power.

In this month's newsletter, we reflect on tools you can adopt as a developer or other tech-adjacent person to foster good habits and keep the wind going in your sails. Good habits don't mean work: they can be as enjoyable as a nice cup of tea. 🍵

Jira's performance getting you down?

Linear is The Way

At various times in your career you may have used Jira, Asana, Notion, or GitHub to manage team sprints. Forget them. The only tool you should be using is Linear.

Why? Because it has keyboard shortcuts for every operation. Because it is *performant*. Because it is deeply opinionated about how sprints should be done and that opinion happens to be correct.

Never lose your work on Git with Dura

I will admit it: I am afraid of Git, mostly because undo operations are not something native to the Git nomeclature. 🙀 I want every to commit to be Perfect (bahahaha). Well, never fear, my fine readers, Dura auto-commits your work for you, bypassing any perfectionist streak you may harbor.

Commit often, commit early →

Speaking of undo in Git...

Jujutsu actually gives you a functional undo feature in Git. It's the usability hack to Git we've all been crying for. Git commit without fear.

Rewinding hangovers not included 🥴 →

Get a manageable interface for devs to work with complex systems

Bret Fisher is a Docker captain and the man from whom I first learned Kubernetes years ago when I was but a wee DevOps Engineer. (Check out his Kubernetes Mastery course). Our very own CEO, Jón Eðvald, went on his show to opine on the importance of fast feedback loops, our origin story, and faster onboarding of devs through an implicitly tested system — Garden.

Tune in 🎧 →

*Photos for this edition were taken from the author's recent vacation 📸

🌸 Cabinet of Curiosities

What your author is thinking of this week:

• Ok, I can't take hold it in any longer. Baldur's Gate 3 is the sequel to an almost 25 year old treasure of a videogame whose opium fumes of fantasy I huffed as a young child. 🐉 Now, I refuse to actually buy the game because I know it would consume me and, well, I have no vacation left to spare. But you can enjoy the fruits I cannot. And by all the reviews out there (some are calling it the best game of the decade) you should.

• The power of good habits does not mean I don't enjoy fruits of after-work leisure activities. I spend my hours building a webshop in pure Python for my beloved wife and hacking on my infinitely hackable flavor of Linux, Guix System. If guilt-free activities sound like a pleasure to you, I can only encourage you to read internetVin's article on taking up a transformative act like committing to make music for 365 days. The mind under such a rhythm changes in ways you'd never imagine.

• Finally, here's a short story from my all-time favorite author, Gene Wolfe to enjoy with your cup of morning tea.

   

  I won't spoil it.

✍🏻 By Tao Hansen

I am happiest when I help others. That’s why I’d love to help you wherever you are in your container development story, even if you’re brand new. Please reply to this email or reach out on Twitter if you find containers scary, unapproachable or just would like to rubberduck 🦆. And don't forget to join our Discord where you can chat with our community and get help with any bugs or feature requests ✨