I enjoy working as a software engineer. But sometimes I do find it difficult to focus on my work. The main way that I push through in those instances is by finding ways to “gamify” my work. I have various strategies to do this but one that I’ve found my colleagues apply to equal effect is that of “Palate Cleanser Jiras.” I’ve found (and my colleagues have found) palate cleanser Jiras to be an effective way to keep up development pace on a project while keeping it “fun” to work on. Read more

Intro In my current job for the past year I have been using CMake for all my C++ development, working on financial software in a large CMake project with hundreds of executable targets and around 3 million LoC. In the course of getting up to speed on CMake, I ran into some things that surprised me. Implicit includes This is a simple one - when you specify a dependency with target_link_libraries, if the CMake rule that builds that target has specified its Public include directories via target_include_directories, then those include files are propogated. Read more

Problem Explanation Today I updated my Spotify client via Pop!_Shop in Pop!_OS. After re-launching the client, it was stuck in fullscreen. All of the keyboard shortcuts I tried to get it into windowed mode failed, but I could Alt-Tab to a different window. My Spotify was installed with Flatpak, but that’s basically transparent to the user when installing via Pop!_Shop. Troubleshooting Downgrading Spotify At first I thought that there was a regression introduced by Spotify. Read more

If you just want the solution, it’s at the very bottom of this article. Introduction In MacOS Big Sur 11.3, it has now gotten harder to update the desktop background for all MacOS desktops in one operation. MacOS provides a way to set the desktop background image for the current desktop, but it doesn’t provide a way to set the background image for all desktops, there is no “Apply Image to All Desktops” button. Read more