Developer Tools on jeffyang.io

Configuring Portable Dotfiles

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I recently stumbled across a problem that I never really had to solve before. As I started my first full-time job, I received a new laptop for work-related use. I also set up my development server, which is a remote computer sitting somewhere in a data center that I can SSH into for development purposes. As my preferred choice of text editor is Neovim, I have a lot of configuration files that go along with it. I also have some custom tmux configurations. What about ZSH configurations? The list goes on. One way of doing it would be to manually copy-and-paste all the configuration files. But there had to be a better way - one that doesn’t require so much error-prone manual reptition. If I start a new job at a different company, or if I get a new personal computer for myself, I don’t want to have to continue to copy-and-paste all these “dotfiles”. So I searched for a way to make my dotfiles “portable”. The solution that I decided to go with was GNU Stow - in this post I’ll explain a little bit about how Stow works.

Github Authentication with SSH

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post is meant to serve as a kind note for my future self, inevitably struggling to properly setup Github SSH authentication. If there’s anyone else out there who happens to stumble upon this post while struggling with the same issue, hopefully this post will help you out. I will go over what SSH authentication is, why you might be interested in setting one up yourself (in the context of Github), and finally, how to set it up properly.

Setting up ESLint and Prettier with VS Code

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

An important part of software development/engineering (or whatever else you may want to call it) is writing code that works as intended, and is as bug-free as can be made. However, there’s actually a lot more to writing code than just to “make it work.” This is primarily because almost any meaningful project/software that exists in the world is created through collaboration. In other words, it is important that you are able to easily read others’ code, and that others are also able to easily read and understand your code. There are lots of ways to achieve this, including manual methods. A team of engineers can manually check for code style issues during code reviews, and possibly even create a detailed documentation on the coding styles that every engineer on the team should adhere to. However, with what we are about to cover in this blog post, investing engineers' time should no longer be put into reviewing code style. Without any further ado, let’s find out how to set up ESLint and Prettier with Visual Studio Code (VS Code).