Top all-time · #13442
Thomas Kainrad
Personal blog · tkainrad.dev · on HN as tkainradprogrammingproductivity
Thomas Kainrad writes tkainrad, a personal blog at tkainrad.dev about programming and productivity. Since 2019, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 70 times, most often “Learning all VSCode shortcuts evolved my developing habits in unexpected ways”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Personal Blog of Thomas Kainrad
Most-linked posts?
- Learning all VSCode shortcuts evolved my developing habits in unexpected ways3 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-11-15
- Managing my personal knowledge base2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-01-05
- I built a new app for practicing keyboard shortcuts2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-08
What Hacker News says?
I think your system is great, especially for this kind of daily logs and personal record of what you have accomplished. If you start to widen your scope and try to do more complete personal knowledge management, I think this system will have some limitations. Some obvious ones, such as no image support and no integrations with other software (project management, GitLab/Hub,...), and some less obvious ones that only…
Comment linking /posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-base/
on “My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file”Submitted Managing my personal knowledge base as a story · 348 points
HN discussionA couple of months ago, I published a blog post* about maintaining my personal knowledge base as a software engineer. Notion plays a significant role in this setup. I do agree with others that Notion's flexibility can turn into a problem. Therefore, it is essential to clearly define use cases and conventions. Luckily, you don't have to argue about those with anyone else if you use it as a personal knowledge base ;)…
Comment linking /posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-base/
on “Notion for everyone”Submitted Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it as a story · 253 points
HN discussionGreat thread! I sometimes wish there was a variant of Hacker News that only had blog posts written by individuals. Mine is https://tkainrad.dev I think you should read my blog because I invest a lot of effort into my posts. Not sure why I do that, as there is no reward except growing Google Analytics numbers. My three most successful articles have been - Managing my personal knowledge base: https://tkainrad.dev/post…
Comment linking /posts/using-hugo-gitlab-pages-and-cloudflare-to-create-and-run-this-website/
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted Using VueJS Alongside Django as a story · 226 points
HN discussionThis is a great thread, thanks for asking this question! My blog post about setting up a Linux workstation has a few timesavers: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/#boo... An important improvement for me was to switch from Bash to Zsh and use a variety of plugins, such as z, zsh-peco-history (better history search), zsh-autosuggestions, and zsh-syntax-highlighting. If you work a lot with ssh, it…
Comment linking /posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/
on “Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?”Submitted Using Hugo, Gitlab Pages, and Cloudflare to Create and Run a Free Static Website as a story · 55 points
HN discussionGreat thread, thank you. Already seen a few things that I will look into. For me, the transition from Bash to Zsh has been a huge efficiency boost. Mainly because of some great plugins for Zsh, such as z, zsh-peco-history (better history search), zsh-autosuggestions, and zsh-syntax-highlighting. My blog post about setting up a Linux workstation describes this in detail: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-wo…
Comment linking /posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?”Submitted People to follow on Twitter who tweet about Software Engineering as a story · 7 points
HN discussionCool idea! "Unfortunately", I have grown too accustomed to Notion's usability feautures (e.g. markdown, slash commands, organizing in databases) to switch apps again. I think it would be cool to visualize notes of other apps (Notion, Evernote, ...) with maps via APIs. Maybe even automated somehow. If you are interested in reading more about knowledge management in a software engineering context, you might like my bl…
Comment linking /posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-base/
on “Nototo – Build a unified mental map of notes”Submitted Show HN: Show the current application's shortcuts on Windows, Linux and macOS as a story · 6 points
HN discussionFor me, the transition from Bash to Zsh has been a huge efficiency boost. Mainly because of some great plugins for Zsh, such as z, zsh-peco-history (better history search), zsh-autosuggestions, and zsh-syntax-highlighting. My blog post about setting up a Linux workstation describes this in detail: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/#swi... . The best thing is, there is no initial productivity hi…
Comment linking /posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/
on “Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?”Submitted Setting Up a Linux Workstation for Software Development as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIt's a mess, sure. But it is very much possible to hibernate with Linux. I have yet to find a machine where it doesn't work with the way described here: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/#hib... TL,dr: Set up large enough Swap and configure Grub correctly
Comment linking /posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/
on “Ask HN: Why is the Linux community struggling to implement hibernation?”Submitted Show HN: An Interactive Virtual Keyboard to Visualize Collections of Shortcuts as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis was very interesting for me to read. I am a heavy user of Notion and recently documented my own knowledge management practices [1]. I understand some of the Notion criticism, but I think you can get around most of it. Instead of relying on the tree structure, I organize pretty much everything in databases, which can have relations to each other. This way, you can have bidirectional linking and the user experien…
Comment linking /posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-base/
on “Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It”Submitted Extensive Guide to a Linux Setup for Software Engineers [Updated] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWelcome to Linux! ;) I have been using as my sole OS (except for some very occasional gaming on Windows) for 10 years. The longer you use it, the happier you become with your setup imo. There is a very detailed blog post about my setup that has grown over the years: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation It is about Ubuntu, but many sections apply to all distros. The most important productivity boos…
Comment linking /posts/setting-up-linux-workstation
on “One Year with ThinkPad and Linux (From MacBook Pro)”Submitted Managing my personal knowledge base as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI have a multi-layer approach that I recently documented in detail [1]. To summarize: 1. Chrome Bookmarks 2. Workona 3. Notion 4. Native Bookmark Sources (e.g. HN, Stack Overflow, Twitter) The large bookmark library you are talking about lives in layer 3, Notion. I too have issues with its Web Clipper. However, I came to realize that it is a very good habit anyway to manually curate recently added bookmarks. I do it…
Comment linking /posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-base/
on “Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?”Submitted Learning *all* VSCode shortcuts evolved my developing habits as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI have a Notion database of code Snippets for this purpose. Described this in a recent blog post: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-ba... It's nice to take a moment after finishing a project, a challenging task, or whenever you feel like it and preserve snippets that you are proud of. Going through these pieces of code later brings back memories of these past projects, teams, tasks,...
Comment linking /posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-base/
on “Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?”Submitted KeyCombiner Desktop: A Cheatsheet/Pretzel Alternative for Windows, Linux, macOS as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSurprised to see this. I have never had any problems with sleep. Used plenty of distros and machines. Hibernate has been a bit tricky for me. But a few months ago I have finally found a solution that has since worked on all Ubuntu 18.04 and later machines I have tried it on. Described in detail in a blog post at https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/#hib... Commands and config there can be copy-pas…
Comment linking /posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/
on “Why does Linux have so much trouble sleeping and waking?”Submitted Learning all VSCode shortcuts evolved my developing habits as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThank you! The site is created with Hugo, as described in this post: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/using-hugo-gitlab-pages-and-cloud... I used the Coder theme ( https://github.com/luizdepra/hugo-coder/ ) but made quite a few changes over time. These changes include a slight increase in the main container width and the addition of information on the sides. I really have a hard time reading long posts where I cannot see…
Comment linking /posts/using-hugo-gitlab-pages-and-cloudflare-to-create-and-run-this-website/
on “Using VueJS Alongside Django”Submitted Learning all VSCode shortcuts evolved my developing habits in unexpected ways as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI made a web app [1] to quickly create collections of keyboard shortcuts that can then be learned and trained. I didn't like the pre-defined drills of existing shortcut learning software, so I tried hard to make it as seamless and efficient as possible to create personal collections of Keyboard shortcuts and text snippets. They can be imported from a public shortcut database or defined from scratch. From there, you…
Comment linking /posts/a-collection-of-all-keyboard-shortcuts-i-use/
on “Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?”Submitted Learning all VSCode shortcuts evolved my developing habits (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion