Valticus

Quick post on my plans for this blog.

Basically, I am planning to recommend you, the reader, what I use myself - be it a computer keyboard I use, a book I’ve read or a coffee brand I like.

AI, or Artificial Intelligence, is revolutionizing technology and software development at the moment, and to no surprise. AI can help humanity in many different areas, such as diagnosing an illness at an early stage with machine learning, or assisting a driver with direction through GPS navigation, or driving you to a desired destination with autonomous vehicles. The integration of AI tools in programming workflows has transformed how developers approach coding and software engineering challenges.

While it is debatable whether or not we should trust AI to take over crucial areas of our lives (have you seen “Terminator?”), one area I found Artificial Intelligence to be particularly useful in is programming and software development workflows. Using the right AI development tools and code completion extensions, you can save yourself a lot of time while coding with AI enabled. These modern developer tools are becoming essential for programming productivity and efficient software development.

While it is true that Google’s Chrome holds the largest number of users to date, I have recently switched to Microsoft’s Edge web browser as a superior alternative for web browsing and performance optimization.

Edge can now use all the extensions I had in Chrome, and Edge has many great features built in which Chrome doesn’t. Like Web Capture, for example. Edge is also faster and loads web pages when Chrome can’t (this was recently discovered by yours truly when my network connection speed dropped due to technical issues on my service provider’s side). This browser comparison shows why many users are switching to Edge for better performance and built-in productivity features.

Tell me something - are you happy with how ClearType, the default font renderer in Windows does its job? If you are like me and have to look at your computer screen for the most part of your day, you might prefer something better.

Let me show you something really quick. This is how the fonts are rendered on my Windows machine:

Let’s face it - as developers we look at code 90% of our time we spend in front of the monitor. While there tons of fonts available for our favorite text editors, both free and paid, I have found one font in particular to be extremely enjoyable for programming productivity and code readability (and believe me - I’ve tried a few).

That is - JetBrains Mono, a free and open source font from the very same company that brought us tools like WebStorm and PyCharm.

If you’ve been following my blog you might have noticed that I haven’t written anything in quite some time. “So, what’s up?”, you might ask.

Well, long story short - lots of things have happened March through May, 2021. Most of them unpleasant to say the least and personal, so I’d rather not disclose the details. However, I’ve also done a few things related to Information Technologies.

Ever since Google discontinued Google+ (its social network) there’s no obvious way to delete unused profile pictures from your account. This guide will help you manage your digital identity and clean up your Google account for better online privacy.

However, there’s a workaround I’ve tested personally.

For a long time the only way to launch Linux commands in Windows was with Cygwin. But Cygwin is rather bulky and can take a long time to download if you are on a slower Internet connection. This cross-platform development challenge has made many programmers seek lightweight alternatives for Linux compatibility on Windows.

As I’ve mentioned before, I love Linux for its stability and reliability. So I was looking for a simpler way to execute Linux commands in Windows, and found it! This development environment setup is perfect for programmers who need system administration tools across different operating systems.

For a long time I have been a big fan of Sarah Drasner’s theme for Visual Studio Code, and even used a port of it in Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition.

Ever since I’ve started learning .Net Framework on both Linux and Windows, I ’ve also started using the default Visual Studio 2019 theme in both the IDE, and the editor. Simply because I like unity across the developer tools I use.

So, as you may or may not know, GitHub is testing themes for its website, and the feature is now in beta according to GitHub Docs.

To change how your GitHub looks, you need to log in to your GitHub account, click your profile pictures, choose Settings > Appearance and on the section that opens, choose one of the three themes that are currently available.