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My only real superpower is travelling well. I’ve crosscrossed and lived all over the world now, and a big part of the secret sauce has been a single, carry-on bag approach to travel. This is my setup.

« Pour voyager heureux, voyagez léger »
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(To travel happily, travel light)

Why travel light? It lowers the cost of moving, both in terms of inertia and money as well as the pain and slowness of modern travel to allow you to seize more travel opps and enjoy yourself more. I travel 25-50% of the time, and abuse my vacation time every year, so I’ve worked hard getting down to a pretty bulletproof setup (for me. YMMV) and people keep telling me to share and asking gear questions. This setup has allowed me to travel virtually indefinitely for months at a time (I think the max is about 3 months steady travel) and covers almost all my business and vacation use cases with a single carry-on backpack (the exception being trips requiring special gear like snowboarding etc., but see below). As with all things, YMMV, but my fervent hope is you can take away some ideas to make your own travelling better and enjoy your experiences more.

It’s time for the 2018 refresh of the Desktop tools I use . I’m amazed what changes year-to-year as I try to simplify and clarify my toolchain and productivity.

Some of the evolutionary changes were interesting as I started experimenting with moving off the Apple ecosystem and moving back to Linux and an environment I move directly control and can future-proof. In particular, it’s brought up interesting compromises (and opportunities) I’d have to consider before making the leap.

From the 48 books I completed in 2017 this is what I think you should add to your own lists and why (and some you just might want to). More importantly, a Do Not Read list to save you valuable time.

A lot of the books were historical, as I was trying to more deeply understand the period between 900 CE and 1600 CE and fit it into my understanding of how that led into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The rest were a healthy, non-fiction dose of science, technology, and career semi-applicable reading.

One of the best things about Padrino is the drop-in admin generator (inspired by Django’s) that makes building simple, robust apps that need to work, run, and be admin-ed by real people a pleasure to work with. At some point though, the natural limits of the default generator will need to be extended as you return huge numbers of records. This is one battle-tested approach we used to be able to paginate and search across 7000+ records via ajax and DataTables setup with will_paginate when the default Padrino admin hit its limits.

I love reading Uses This where people share their tools and workflows. I’ve sniped some great tools from their posts. And back in 2004 when I started the blog, one of my most popular posts was about the tools I’d moved over to as an Apple switcher and early adopter. Time for a 2017 refresh post.

The first thing that amazes me is how much the character of my desktop and tools have changed over a decade. I’ve also changed my tastes considerably to tool selection and usage. I’ve shifted over time to moving to simpler, well-designed tools, with a much greater emphasis on text formats and simpler syncing and future-proofing, as well as adding much fewer things judiciously rather than trying to jumping to the next shiny thing unless it has a clear and compelling value over my current stack in productivity or problems it can solve.

At some point in the lifecycle of any useful application you write, there will be a request to get something out of your system in Excel format. Here’s an easy, transparent method to get downloadable Excel reports out of your Padrino app.

Spreadsheets are still king in most organizations and Excel is still the main tool business users and decision makers comfortably interact with, often for for end user reporting, data consolidation, or intermediary analysis purpose.

The intersection of datascience and epidemiology offers amazing opportunities to enhance quality of life for vast swathes of at-risk people. A new superpower conferred by the advent of cheap, rapid genetic sequencing. It might even help us avert the increasingly likely risk of the next global pandemic.

Another great example of the power of off-book, part-time projects, NextStrain was hatched after the two researchers responsible met at a conference and talked about the idea. The reseachers who developed it, Richard Neher of the University of Basel and Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle both recently won the Open Science Prize for their contributions.

Let’s Encrypt has done an amazing job of making https the new normal for web sites and helping create a more secure and private internet by giving away free, automatic ssl certificates to domain owners.

You should be encrypting your web traffic (and need to, to take advantage of new protocols like http/2. Some implementations have stated they will only support http/2 over an encrypted connection. And currently, no browser supports http/2 unencrypted afaik.). Add to this the fact Google will start penalizing non-secured sites in search results, and https is fast becoming the de facto standard.

Padrino works great on heroku with just a simple git push heroku master, but you can get a surprising bump in performance simply from using Puma in production rather than the default heroku web server.

That also goes for using it on your local development machine, but heroku uses Procfile based spinning up of apps, so you should also test locally on your dev box, using heroku’s handy foreman before pushing it live to heroku.

It’s no secret that I read a lot. Even after you get through the technical and industry reading I do, I pretty voraciously tear through books (in 2017 so far, I’ve finished 16 books already.). My Kindle is daily carry. So, I get asked about book recommendations frequently.

These were the books I completed in 2016 and what I think you should add to your own lists and why. More importantly, a do not read list to save you valuable reading time.