Friendly reminder that you can disable Homebrew's default auto update behaviour with HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1.

HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 brew install git-secret

If you want to set and forget the setting, add it to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc.

export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1

Last week I remembered the scroll-margin property existed.

I was adding anchors to the headings of a page so visitors can directly link to a section. However, when that link was visited, the heading was glued against the top of the viewport. I prefer some margin between the browser chrome and the text to let it breath.

There's a CSS property for that: scroll-margin. It does nothing in most cases, but when you visit a URL that points to an anchor on the page, it will offset the element from the viewport.

h2 {
  scroll-margin-top: 1rem;
}

You can read all about scroll-margin in the MDN docs.

An interesting thought exercise on working together, what's the optimal number of people to work as a team without spoiling the broth?

Let’s say you have 100 people. They can break into groups of any size. Each group gets 100 toothpicks. The goal: build the tallest structure with the toothpicks. What is the optimal group size?

↗ chriscoyier.net

I always enjoy reading about other people's processes.

99% of the time, this is how my note-taking process goes:

• I’m catching up on my RSS feed (on my phone in the Reeder app)
• I read something that strikes me as interesting, novel, or insightful.
• I copy/paste it as an blockquote into a new, plain-text note in iA writer.
• I copy/paste the link of the article into iA writer.
• I finish reading the article and copy/paste anything else in the article that strikes me.
• I add my own comments in the note as they pop into my head.
• I move on to the next article in my RSS feed.
• Repeat.

And:

I like to let my notes sit for a couple days (or even weeks). I find that if I come back to a note and still find it interesting/insightful that means it’s worth keeping, so I put in the work of cleaning it up and publishing it.

Time is underestimated as a filter for content.

↗ blog.jim-nielsen.com

I'm in the process of cleaning up some npm packages that haven't been touched in a while, and part of that is pruning all the cruft that has been accumulated in package.json over the years.

I was looking for a canonical order to sort the keys by, and thought the order the npm docs specify the configuration options made sense.

Of course, after manually sorting one package.json file—which probably took 2 minutes—I decided to spend 30 minutes to find our how I could automate sorting the other two.

Luckily there's an npm package for everything. With the sort-package-json package you can go sort your package.jsons in a logical order.

npx sort-package-json **/*/package.json

That's all I had to do to keep my monorepo clean and tidy.