I think I was one of the firsts among software engineers who started using Twitter in Iran back in 2007-2008; however, I am not proud of it at all. What makes me proud is that I was able to quit it 18 months ago! Also, I didn’t limit my self to just Twitter, and I also quit Facebook. Having said that, now the only social network that I am partially active in is Instagram which I have planned to get rid of soon.

What I have experienced during the these 18 months is that, the advantages of Twitter and other social networks are radically less than their disadvantages. I think we are spending our most valuable thing, which is time, making money for social network companies while we don’t get too much of them. Even if you follow, NASA, MIT, or your favorite music band doesn’t mean that your time is spent meaningfully.

But one may ask, I use social networks to stay informed about topics I like! If I quit Twitter for example, how can I keep posted about my favorite soccer club? My approach is to be as specific as possible. For instance, I like astronomy. To be able to stay informed about the latest news and stories, I have signed up for a weekly newsletter called The Space Review. Every Tuesday, I get the top most important and trending stories about space directly in my inbox. Tech and programming are another examples, I check hackernews twice a week and also subscribed to ArchLinux mailing list.

This approach works for me but it may not work for you. But the good point here is that you have control over your time and that’s the important part.

For almost 10 years, I have been using the Disqus comment management system to manage my posts’ comments. Last year, when I was moving to Germany, I have decided to hide the comment section by default. The main reason behind the idea was, since Disqus is considered a third-party and it is using cookies, and to prevent displaying the annoying pop-up informing visitors that “the website is using cookies”, I hide it until users really want to leave a comment (or viewing them). After near a year, I think that the comment section is not useful anymore; therefore, I decided to remove it completely this time.

People who blog these days are not looking for comments or impressions. They just write because they love to. I can vividly see that the amount of bloggers decreased significantly during the last 5-7 years and the main reason of that is social media. Most people prefer to just send their updates through series of tweets or Facebook posts. So, their social network get informed automatically. On the other hand, I think nearly all people who still blog are not doing it because they want to inform visitors or keep them up-to-date.

In addition to the comment section, I also removed the bootstrap CSS library. I have been using this to implement the theme. However, a few days back, I decided to implement the simplest grid system ever existed (as it was my main dependency to Bootstrap) and remove it completely.

After removing the Bootstrap, I can finally say that this blog is just pure HTML and around 200 lines of CSS. And, due to the fact that I don’t use any analytics or trackers (I removed Google Analytics about a year ago), there’s no Javascript is used as well!

As you may know, I am a big fan of science especially when it comes to physics and more specifically astrophysics. A few weeks back I was watching a video about science on YouTube and suddenly a video in the side column got my attention.

It was a video from Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, in which the interviewer asks him a very simple yet valid question about magnets. The question is about why something happens and Feynman answer is very interesting. I don’t want to spoil it so please take a moment and watch this ~7 minutes video:

It’s about 5 years that I’m using Neovim as my daily text editor especially when it comes to software development. On the other hand, I do lots of Python programming during the last 4 years and so to develop more comfortably, I had to configure my text editor as well. In this post, I’m going to explain my daily setup for Python software development.

Tools

There are a few tools I use besides Neovim that help me a lot during my everyday development.

Terminal Emulator

Since I’m developing on macOS these days, my primary terminal of choice is iTerm2. I had also tried the macOS built-in terminal but I found that iTerm2 has better integration with Tmux so that I moved to it.

Shell

In term of shell, I moved to zsh (mainly through oh-my-zsh) about 5 years ago because I found it much better in compare to bash. OMZ community offer lots of useful plugins to choose from; but, for me these are my favorites:

plugins=(
    git
    docker
    docker-compose
    kubectl
    colored-man-pages
    git-flow
)

Tmux

Tmux plays a very important role in my daily development environment. I was using the neovim built-in terminal however I realized that nothing replaces Tmux. I usually split my main development window into two horizontal panes. The pane in the above for Neovim and the second pane which is located below that is for running tests and Git operations. I sometimes use the vim-fugitive plugin but in some cases, I believe it’s move convenient to use git in another window.

Neovim

If you’re a vim user, you are probably familiar with plugin managers. Vundle, Pathogen and Plugged are the three most popular ones. I was using Vundle for a long time, but recently I have moved to Plugged because I find it more customization about more easy to use. The plugins I use these days are:

" A fuzzy file finder
Plug 'kien/ctrlp.vim'
" Comment/Uncomment tool
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdcommenter'
" Switch to the begining and the end of a block by pressing %
Plug 'tmhedberg/matchit'
" A Tree-like side bar for better navigation
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdtree'
" A cool status bar
Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline'
" Airline themes
Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline-themes'
" Nord
Plug 'arcticicestudio/nord-vim'
" Better syntax-highlighting for filetypes in vim
Plug 'sheerun/vim-polyglot'
" Intellisense engine
Plug 'neoclide/coc.nvim', {'branch': 'release'}
" Git integration
Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
" Auto-close braces and scopes
Plug 'jiangmiao/auto-pairs'

For python development, I was previously using jedi-vim alongside YouCompleteMe but after the presentation of Coc I completely hooked! Coc is a Nodejs extension host for Neovim which allows you to install npm based plugins (which is currently used in other text-editors such as VSCode) easily.

After installing Coc, I was able to install all the plugins I want to for my development environment very easily and just by using the CocInstall <package-name> command. Here is a list of all plugins I use:

• coc-spell-checker: The general spell checker for neovim
• coc-prettier: A very popular code formatter
• coc-git: A git plugin to show which line is added/deleted and not committed
• coc-pyright: The main Python plugin I use
• coc-json: JSON file formatting plugin
• coc-docker: Dockerfile and docker-compose formatters
• coc-yaml: Yaml plugin for Kubernetes and terraform files

After installing your desired plugins it’s also a good idea to do a CocUpdate once in a while to keep your plugins up-to-date.

Then I set the following the shortcuts for the Coc for more ease of use:

" Code action on <leader>a
vmap <leader>a <Plug>(coc-codeaction-selected)<CR>
nmap <leader>a <Plug>(coc-codeaction-selected)<CR>

" Format action on <leader>f
vmap <leader>f  <Plug>(coc-format-selected)
nmap <leader>f  <Plug>(coc-format-selected)
" Goto definition
nmap <silent> gd <Plug>(coc-definition)
" Open definition in a split window
nmap <silent> gv :vsp<CR><Plug>(coc-definition)<C-W>L

Like VSCode, Coc also has a setting JSON file. For example, to formatOnSave or set a code formatter and linter, you can use that file. To open the setting file CocConfig command can be used. These are settings I use for Python development:

{
  "coc.preferences.formatOnSaveFiletypes": ["py", "yaml", "json"],
  "python.linting.flake8Enabled": true,
  "python.formatting.provider": "black"
}

Please also note that black and flake8 are external tools and need to be installed separately:

python3 -m pip install black flake8

There some other shortcuts which can be set to make your life easier as well. For example, I have set one to trigger NerdTree and showing hidden files:

map <C-n> :NERDTreeToggle<CR>
let NERDTreeShowHidden=1 " Show hidden files in NerdTree buffer.

Or for better split-view navigation:

" Split windows
map <C-j> <C-W>j
map <C-k> <C-W>k
map <C-h> <C-W>h
map <C-l> <C-W>l

Nord

Last but not least I use Nord theme almost everywhere. Nord has ports for almost everything. For example, for neovim you may add the following plugin:

Plug 'arcticicestudio/nord-vim'

And then add:

filetype plugin indent on
syntax on
colorscheme nord

I hope this post helped you setup your CLI based development environment as well :)

There are some certain events that change people’s lives and all of us may experience one or some of them. For example, when one gets married, or when one becomes a parent. These events cause radical changes. You cannot be the same person after you become a father or mother. On the other hand, people want to grow. They take risks to become a better person. For example, one may take risk and start a new business. The business may fail, but at the same time it may make you grow!

Living in Iran is challenging especially for developers. During my 15 years of experience, I faced lots of restrictions. Most companies ar not allowed to provide their services to Iranians. On the other hand, Iranians can not trade with people in other countries because of banking restrictions. For example, buying a $5/month droplet from DigitalOcean, which is one of the most trivial things to do for developers, is a challenge for Iranians. Therefore, companies who are able to pay for these services are reselling them with twice (or even higher) the price. For instance, renewing a “.com” domain will cost you around $20 while the real price is just $10.

These were just some of the challenges Iranians are facing. But as a matter of fact, these are not my problem. My problem is uncertainty! You may be able buy a razor today, but you may not be able to find the razor blades after 6 month or so! You cannot plan you future because things change very rapidly and in a chaotic manner. People decide to buy a car so they start to save some money. They know they can buy their desired car in 6 months. But when the price increases everyday, one can’t plan in advance. This is what I call uncertainty.

That’s why we decided to move. We left our parents, siblings and friends to grow. To make a better future for ourselves and our children. We do it so we can gain access to resources other people in the world have. We may have to sacrifice things to be able to achieve something else. But we have done it.

It’s about a month that we have moved to Berlin. We were in a 10-day mandatory quarantine as we arrived but after 10 days we started to discover new things. One of the things that I lik about here is the German lifestyle. I like it that people pay attention to the environment and so on. Because of the COVID-19 we couldn’t discover most of attractions yey as amusement parks, cinemas, museum, concerts, etc are closed. Although we were are able to communicate comfortably in English but we’ve also started to learn German as well as some people tend to use German over English.

Moving to another country is difficult but I hope we get over this challenge as well.