Tech Productivity Issue #319 (Career Advice in 2025)

Issue #319 (Career Advice in 2025) 03/24/25

Building Cyber Resilience for OpenShift VMs
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If you work in the terminal a lot, you might enjoy this neat productivity tip from an apparently anonymous user on GitHub who calls himself "Master Craftsman". You probably find yourself constantly going back in your shell history to re-run commands you've already typed. This isn't terrible in terms of productivity, but it would be great if you could have a more visual way of recognizing a command almost instantly.

The suggestion is to add some kind of emoji icon to a command that lets you see what it is at a glance. The author provides three examples:

: ✅; ./utils/check.sh

                        : ⚡; ./scripts/tag.py

                        : 📚; ./scripts/makedocs.sh

Due to the syntax used before and after each command, the icons do nothing. They just serve as placeholders at the start of each line.

Not a bad suggestion for those who have to constantly reach for previously-run commands!

Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!

Tools & Apps

Timesible — A platform that integrates time tracking, invoicing, and team collaboration into a single platform, ensuring your projects stay on track and within budget.

SocialRails — A social media scheduling app that lets you schedule posts for up to nine different sites and apps, with up to 25 different workspaces available.

Building Cyber Resilience for OpenShift VMs — Learn from Rubrik and Red Hat to address critical strategies to safeguard your data against cyber threats. sponsor

Actual Budget — A fast and privacy-focused app for managing personal finances based on the Envelope Budgeting methodology, with multi-device sync, optional end-to-end encryption, and you own all your data.

Layer — An app to simplify your tasks and projects using mind map trees, with features like filters, an AI assistant, collaboration, calendar view, and more.

MagicRedact — An easy-to-use online tool to securely 'redact' anything from an image or PDF file, using a simple select tool that adds a black box, which you can temporarily make transparent if needed.

Waply — An AI scheduling assistant for WhatsApp to set reminders, manage your calendar, and schedule notifications and meetings for others in seconds.

Articles & Resources

Career Advice in 2025 — A great line for the current tough job market: "If you are in a role today that’s frustrating you, my advice is to try harder than usual to find a way to make it a rewarding experience, even if it’s not perfect."

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers — A debunking of the myth of the "10x engineer", which may exist somewhere, but shouldn't be as pursued as the many run-of-the-mill engineers who can do great things for a company.

Questions for the End of a 1:1 — A brief post with some good suggestions for those involved in coaching, or likewise even for those being coached.

If It Is Worth Keeping, Save It in Markdown — The author rightly believes that digital things seem to disappear more than we expect, so the answer may be to keep our own archives in Markdown format.

Rapyd.Cloud — Whether you run a high-traffic ecommerce store, LMS, or membership site, Rapyd.Cloud's enterprise-grade infrastructure keeps your WordPress site super fast with no downtime, just seamless performance. sponsor

The Art of Attention: How the World’s Most Creative Minds Stay Focused Online — Nothing too surprising here, but even applying some of this advice might be good for your productive output.

How AI Shaves an Hour Off My Daily Reading Routine — The suggestion here is related to a paid feature of ChatGPT called Tasks, which the author is using to improve his daily reading.

Suggestions?

Have a suggestion for a productivity-related tool, article, or other resource? Send me a direct message via X or chat via Bluesky and I’ll consider including it in a future issue.

Stay productive!

Louis
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