General

When using radio, you might experience a strange phenomenon: the radio clock refuses to stay correctly set. I saw this recently on a car stereo that continued to reset its clock to an hour early for my timezone. The culprit is a system called RDS, Radio Data System. RDS allows radio transmitters to encode their program information, station identification, and… the local time. Though I didn’t have a tool to debug the signal on hand, my theory is that a local radio station was sending the incorrect time of 10:15 AM instead 11:15 AM. My car was read it and preferred this data. We live near the border of the Atlantic timezone, so that’s one reason an incorrect message could have been sent. Disabling the RDS Clock Sync feature and setting the time correctly fixed the issue.

The local environment is a great place to iterate on a CircleCI configuration. You’ll catch errors faster than pushing to CI, and help drive a fast, iterative configuration process. Install the CircleCI CLI via Homebrew (or any package manager of your choice): $ brew install circleci Then, in the same directory as your .circleci/config.yml, run: $ circleci config validate # Config file at .circleci/config.yml is valid

Jira has a hidden ticket ‘Actions menu’ that is really helpful. When a Jira ticket is in focus, type .. This opens a searchable menu with ‘Issue actions’ (‘Attach’, ‘Link Issue’, etc.) and ‘Workflow’ state advancements (‘To Do’, ‘Close’, etc.). Almost any action you’d want to take on a ticket is there.

When developing a new feature in a brownfield app that hasn’t been subject to consistent autoformatter treatment, turn off your autoformatter. Autoformatting is great. I advocate for it. But it can be distracting when trying to read through your new work. The hard-won changes you make get lost in the mix of automated changes. Once you’ve got the feature working, turn on the autoformatter and get that automatic quality. This is a pretty niche piece of advice, but it helped me today.