Hi Reader!

Happy New Year! I hope 2022 is off to a great start for you despite the current conditions.

What's Cookin' in 2022

Since quitting my job about two months ago, I've kept daily notes.

This new writing habit has generated lots of ideas. I'll go over 6 of them in this email:

• Office Hours for a free 1:1 with me
• Upcoming articles
• Premium version of my Ruby script
• Ruby on Mac Fundamentals Course
• More on my daily notes and where to read them
• An automation/productivity gift and a tip

Let's dive in.

Office Hours

I've started offering free office hours once a week.

You can book up to 30 minutes on any weekday between 1pm and 5pm ET. However, once someone books a session on any given week, no more sessions will be available that week. To give other people a chance to book a session, please don't book more than one week at a time.

If you want more frequent personalized coaching, I offer paid sessions as well. These are limited to 1 per day, 5 times per week. Visit my coaching page for more details on the topics I can help you with.

You can view all the sessions I offer in my SavvyCal.

Upcoming Articles

I've been working on 3 main articles that I'm hoping to publish in January:

• The 3 books every developer should read. These made a huge impact on me, and two of them are not about coding. I consider them must-reads for everyone.
• How I automate my Obsidian daily notes template with macOS shortcuts, and how I automate publishing them to my blog with Keyboard Maestro. I tweeted about this a few weeks ago.
• My 2021 year in review.

You can check out what I'm working on in my public Trello board. And if there's anything you wish I wrote about, just hit reply.

Premium Ruby Script

First, let me reassure you that you will still have free access to the original script.

You will still be able to run the command to get the latest version of the script, which I recommend running regularly. I like to do it once a week. This will keep your system up to date, which can resolve certain issues.

For example, there was a bug recently in Rubygems that caused a weird error complaining about an invalid gemspec. Read more about it and how to fix it.

As for the paid version of the script, my goal is to automate as much as possible. Here are the features that seem valuable based on my research and your feedback:

• Guaranteed successful installation even if your development environment is in a dirty state. This will eliminate the need for people to read through the lengthy prerequisites section in my tutorial, manually uninstall things, and try to figure out on their own how to fix errors.
• Set up Git with all the recommended settings, instead of telling people to do it manually. My Git setup guide is long!
• Option to automatically create a new Jekyll site and deploy it to Netlify or GitHub Pages.
• Option to automatically create a new Rails app and deploy it to Heroku.

Is there anything else you wished my script made easier or faster?

Ruby on Mac Course

I recently grabbed the domains rubyonmac.dev and rubyonmac.com (nothing there yet), where I will offer the paid script, but also a video course teaching the basics you need to master to develop on a Mac.

After going through the course, you'll know exactly how to keep your dev environment clean, and you'll be able to troubleshoot common issues with more confidence and more efficiently.

You'll learn the following:

• Why you had trouble installing gems and how my script solved your problems
• How my script works step by step. Lots of "a-ha!" moments in this one about how the Terminal and Homebrew work.
• How to use the Terminal efficiently
• Homebrew best practices to keep your system up to date and avoid frustration when updating macOS
• How to troubleshoot most gem issues by learning how Rubygems, Bundler and Gemfiles work

I plan on launching this course on March 22, which marks the 10-year anniversary of my blog.

For the story of my developer journey and how this blog was born, read my updated about page.

To make sure the course is up to my quality standards, I'll be teaching the course for free as a live workshop for up to 10 people, in exchange for your feedback. If you're interested, please fill out this application form. Note that you do not need to sign in to Google to fill out the form.

Daily Notes

I've been using Obsidian to write my daily notes, where I document pretty much everything that happened that day. I also started publishing them on my site:

​https://www.moncefbelyamani.com/tags/daily-note/​

I plan on publishing the full backlog at some point, and will resume publishing the new ones regularly now that the kids are back in school. They've been home for almost 3 weeks for their winter break!

Automation

As I work, I pay attention to things I do regularly that can be automated to save time. One of my favorite automation tools is Keyboard Maestro because it makes it easy to create shortcuts.

One of the things I do regularly is paste links in my daily notes. If I want to save a particular web page or video, the URL is not always descriptive enough, so I would need to either copy the title, or write my own, and insert it as a Markdown link.

To speed this up, I created a macro in Keyboard Maestro that gets triggered when I press ⌃⌥⌘L. It then automatically creates a Markdown link that contains the browser page title as the text, and the URL as the destination, copies it to the clipboard, then sets Obsidian in focus, so all I have to do is paste it.

I've added this to my Keyboard Maestro macros repo so you can use it too!

Another tip I wanted to share that has saved me a ton of time is using 1Password for 2FA (two-factor authentication). It's not available on every site, but wherever it is, I've set it up.

Before, I would have to go find my phone if it wasn't near me, unlock it, launch the Authenticator app, search for the site, memorize the 6-digit code, and enter it on my Mac.

With 1Password, it automatically fills in the code after I enter my username and password.

But wait, there's more!

Finally, I wanted to share a few things I've enjoyed recently:

🚴🏼‍♂️ I've been exercising regularly on the Peloton, and I'm happy about developing this new habit. I'm "monfresh" there if you want to follow me.

📚I've been listening to "How to Talk When Kids Won't Listen" and I've found it very helpful at home. I use Scribd for audiobooks, but they also have books, magazines, and sheet music. You get unlimited access to all of their content for $10/month! I've been using it since 2016 and I love it. If you sign up with that link above, you'll get 2 months free, and I'll get one month free.

🎥 Over the holidays, we watched "My Neighbor Totoro" with our kids, and we all loved it. The kids were a bit apprehensive at first, but then they opened up. We also enjoyed the 14 Peaks documentary on Netflix (sans kids).

🍗We've made this Sheet-Pan Chicken and Potatoes With Feta, Lemon and Dill Recipe a few times.

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As always, hit reply to share any thoughts, or to simply say hello. I love hearing from you.
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Thanks for reading, and enjoy your Sunday!

Moncef