Say Something Nice
One rude comment could ruin someone's day. One nice comment could make someone's week.
Last week I had a bit of a Senpai Noticed Me™ moment online.
In the digital gardens community, Nikita Voloboev's personal wiki stands above them all. Nikita contributes multiple times per day, and the Github repo has, at the time of writing, over 3,700 stars. It's impossible to not find something that interests you on there, and it's trivially easy to lose an hour of time just by sifting through the content.
While browsing the Streaming article, I found some duplicated links in the list of tools, and so I submitted a pull request to clean up those links. Nothing special.
The pull request was approved, along with this little note:
What Nikita didn't realize when writing that was my own public wiki was heavily inspired by theirs. The software stack, the decision to upload it to Github, and the deployment approaches were all based on the groundwork Nikita had previously laid.
What they probably also didn't realize is that I wore that comment like a badge of honour for the rest of the day!
Leadership courses contain a section on leadership styles. Within those styles you can roughly group the approaches into "carrot" and "stick" styles (that is – do you encourage good behaviour or do you discourage bad behaviour?). Turns out, people would much rather receive praise than reprimand. Go figure, eh?
By taking a few minutes out of their day and writing those three words (Four? Are smiley faces considered words?), I wanted to double down on my own wiki contributions. One small gesture made a difference.
Your words have a colossal impact on those around you. One rude comment could ruin someone's day. One nice comment could make someone's week. Both are equal effort. Pick the one that makes this world a better place.
My Weekly Finds
I rediscovered this album after sifting through some of my old MP3s. Burn Bright is one of my favourite tracks on here.
Folding Ideas is a channel for those that love long-form, rigorously researched topics from a man with incredible insight and a knack for wit.
I'd be remiss if I didn't recommend CyberChef at least once. This is one of my most-used tools at work. Feed any sort of input into it and run it through a "recipe" (a set of operations) to inspect the result.
I've been an avid iTerm user on MacOS for years, but Warp is taking a more modern approach to terminals. I'm excited to see where this one goes!
A shameless plug for my own wiki. I've started to collect lists of known reputable charities and review sites. I want to donate to causes I care about, but also want to make sure that my money goes to a good cause, and that's something that is hard to evaluate on your own.