I’m a sucker for screen real estate, and thus I use 2 32" 4k monitors so I can see most of my apps’ windows simultaneously, instead of switching back and forth between them.

#myworkplace is pretty lean (on cables) and mean (on screen real estate). And a lot of tileception goes on (window tiling, then local tmux tiling, then 1-2 levels of remote tmux tiling) pic.twitter.com/wCqsusBfRb

— Shantanu Goel (@shantanugoel) August 10, 2020

I use the awesome Rectangle app that provides shortcuts to move/resize an app window to my liking. However, this goes for a toss whenever I disconnect my laptop, or reboot it. macOS can’t seem to reliably remember where to put the windows at such events and I’ve to keep playing this game of doing a lot of alt-tabs and rectangle keyboard shortcuts to get my app windows back where I like them. So, I spent some time recently to whip up a short hammerspoon script that allows me to do this easily.

I’m a backup nerd and like to back-up everything I do. Not just that, I like to version them too so I can go back in time to any point. git serves as a good tool for me for versioning wherever small data/text files etc are concerned and then I back this up with remote git servers like my own git server on a raspberry pi at home, a gitlab server and a github server. Prime targets for this are my dotfiles that I edit in spacemacs and my notes that I take in Joplin. The only issue though is that every time I change something, which is pretty often (since I’m a tinkering nerd too) I’ve to manually commit the changes and push them upstream. Apart from being all kinds of nerds, I’m an automation nerd too, which is a fancy way of saying that I am lazy, but I digress.

Bazel

Came across bazel build system recently at my new job and found it to be quite nice compared to my earlier mainstays CMake and Make. It’s fast and correct, just as their website says. But I also liked it because it’s explicit with very little magic. And it has a powerful query/tools system that allows you to really analyze your builds and dependencies in depth. Though examples in the wild are a bit less since it is a fairly recent entrant compared to its competitors. For a personal side project, I needed to use SDL2 and it was the first time I had to use an external/pre-built library with bazel. This post documents the process I used for my own future reference and may be help some other lost soul like me. Although, the post talks about SDL2 here specifically, the same process can be used for most other external pre-compiled modules.