Even though I’m no longer a frequent flyer, I am still primarily a laptop user. Pre-pandemic, I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon. It’s a nice, lightweight machine has served me well until recently; the trackpad isn’t as responsive as it once was, and some of the keys are showing their wear. For the price, it wasn’t a bad investment to see me through a year and a half.

A while back, I switched from DSL to Cable Internet. My awesome ISP, TekSavvy, sent me a loaner cable modem – a SmartRG 808AC. It worked well, despite a few quirks, but lately I’ve noted that the internet would drop out for a few minutes at a time. I was able to deduce that the modem seems to be rebooting itself, but I had no idea how often it was happening.

I’m happy to announce the first release of Author Stats, a Visual Studio Code extension that makes it easier for authors to write Markdown by providing running statistics for their work.

One challenge of working on a distributed team is keeping track of everyone’s time zone. Most of my immediate team are Europe-based, and my colleagues in the Open Source Mano project are spread across the world. That makes timely collaboration complex. I often need to coordinate a task with someone several timezones away. If I miss them, I have to wait until my next day to talk to them. Not very efficient.

Often enough, you’re at the stage in your work where you’re running potentially time-consuming unit/integration tests. You have other work to do on that project, but you’re tied up waiting for the tests to finish (and hopefully pass).