Weekend learning

Although it is the weekend, it doesn’t mean you stop learning. I’ve set myself the challenge to blog every day for a month about a thing I have learned and Saturdays and Sundays are no exceptions on that.

One of the rituals I have in the weekend is to catch up on the list of saved websites I’ve aggregated over the week. These come from various sources, like:

• RSS feeds I follow
• Podcasts I listen to
• Something mentioned by a friend or colleague
• What I come across on social media

The app I use for that is Pocket. It has got a browser extension for Chrome and when installed on your phone, you can share links to it from other apps.

A lot of the collected links are things to read, which I try to do and then delete the link, or file it away if I want to go back to it in future.

Other things I tend to collect are mentions of software, Python packages and similar. These quite often involve downloading them and have a play with it. Resulting in either:

• Nah, not for me, delete
• This might come in handy for a future project, file away for later
• Wow this is awesome, keep using it

The thing I learned today falls in the latter category.

Enhanced custom searches in the browser bar

I already use custom searches in the browser bar. It is a quick way to search specific sites. For example, with typing wiki <space> in the search bar, followed by a search term I can directly search in Wikipedia.

The article from Lifehacker I read this morning explains how to take these custom searches to the next level. I tried a few things from it and have now expanded the search bar of my browser with the following keywords:

• map — gives directions on google map from my home address
• trans — translates from English to Dutch
• vert — translates from Dutch to English
• ggl — does a google search excluding results from Stackoverflow

Probably there will be more clever searches I can add…

This post is part of a series of articles about “What I Have Learned Today”; acknowledging every day the thing I have learned. Feel free to read the other posts. all opinions in this article are my own and not necessarily represent the views of my employer.