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Friend of Code for Boston Anne Meeker testified to the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress recently. As a former Congressional intern many of her ideas and suggestions hit home. Congressional offices receive a lot of correspondence so her suggestion to create APIs and data standards around the correspondence is some great low hanging fruit. The clunky system I used from Lockheed Martin held a lot of data, but was not most usable. If you are a political or civic tech nerd, it is worth watching the full video.

One of the biggest improvements to working with code is switching to tools that use syntax highlighting. By giving different colors to parts of the code based on whether it’s a variable, class, method, etc. it becomes dramatically easier to read and understand. As a coder it is worth finding and switching to tools that do syntax highlighting. For the command line I like to replace cat with bat. Despite the clear value of this, many tools lack highlighting. Yesterday I found a post from Logan at Panic as to why it is so challenging to implement syntax highlighting in an app.

As a part of my volunteer work with Code for Boston I am helping to launch the Urban League Heat Pump Accelerator Project to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps in the Boston region, with a focus on equity.

One of the best ways to become more efficient at using your computer and more effective as a coder is to master the command line. While using the included tools on MacOS is great, I now have a pile of favorite extra tools I have installed on my machine. Some highlights:

• Homebrew for managing app installations.
• fish shell has a learning curve but provides lots of convenience features and is much easier to customize than the default zsh shell.
• yq for quickly filtering YAML and JSON files.
• ripgrep for quickly searching for files across many directories.
• tealdeer for getting concise man pages that give useful examples.
• youtube-dl for downloading video or audio from YouTube.
• 7-Zip for a higher compression than ZIP open source compression tool.

Low and no code tools are being developed and marketed as a solution to allow non-technical users to build applications. Given how expensive and challenging to hire software engineers are, this seems like it should be a boon to organizations looking to wield the power of software without hiring coders. The reality is many of these tools are only able to replace basic software engineering projects, while the needs of their users grow. Basic web applications that used to built in Rails by entry level software developers are now AirTable apps or Tableau charts. The jobs for these basic apps disappear, but when organizations need more customization they are stuck hiring more expensive senior software engineers. The result is a software talent pipeline that is getting choked off at the entry level.