The notes, October 04, 2017

I’m intrigued by folks having luck building virtualized development environments for localhost setups. It sounds like fun to work in this kind of workflow. I never want to do the legwork to make this work, though.

I did the preliminaries for this last year and ended up turning back from it. I understand Docker and virtualization superficially at best. I don’t want to impose it on teammates. It’s still too hard to search for Unix-y error messages and fix your development environment. Trying to figure out if your host Unix, Docker, or a virtualized Unix are the problem is not something I wanted to do to someone else.

Is Amazon Lightsail a move by AWS into the space occupied by Linode, Digital Ocean, etc.? Related to virtualized localhost setups: someone write me a thing to drop my dotfiles from macOS onto a Digital Ocean, AWS, etc. instance and do development from an iPad, keyboard, and SSH client.

Hammerspoon is a really cool to do all-the-things with your keyboard and some Lua. I use it to launch/switch to my most frequent dozen apps and some light Markdown helpers. But, something about it is correspondingly creepy. It can, theoretically, scoop up every keystroke. (Which probably every bit of open source I install via Homebrew could, to be honest) But maybe I could replace it with a clever bit of Alfred workflow and scripting. Catch a triggering keystroke and then give me a constrained list of apps to switch to. Yes, this is a very strange way to hit Command-Tab! I wonder how well a few custom Alfred workflows fit into a dotfiles repo.

Adam Keys @therealadam