Category: Tricks of the Trade

Late Sunday afternoons and evenings can be run by the Sunday Scaries. Pushing back thoughts that are really building anxiety; a growing inbox, the ambiguous meeting on Tuesday, the project that was supposed to be done by now.

A few years ago I started dealing with it differently. I just started to work on Sunday. Sometimes it was 15 minutes and other times it was hours. I balanced this out by taking time for myself through the week.

I didn’t know it then, but today I would talk about this with the Backwards Law from Alan Watts. Where pursuing a positive experience ends up being a negative experience. Accepting a negative experience turns it into a positive experience.

If I’m trying not to think about work related problems on Sunday, that is still work. I’m salaried, which legally, means I’m working anyways and always. There shouldn’t be any internal conflict here.

People have misinterpreted this conversation and said it will lead to burnout. Part of being an experienced developer, is listening to your brain & body. That Sunday night work is a free ticket to an early afternoon, long lunch, or late start. Some of my most productive weeks were started on Sunday and followed by a half day later on in the week.

This morning I was attempting to customize DoorKeeper. After an hour of prodding I wanted to wipe all my changes.

1. Git checkout .
* removes changes to known files
2. Git clean -fd
* Removes unchanged files and directories

Except that’s not what I ran. I ran clean with the flags ‘fdx’ which also removes hidden files. So I lost all my .env and config files. Sure I could spend the next hour or two hunting those down.

I though Time Machine tracked these files but I didn’t see them. Silver Bay Tech has a simple blog to follow along and have Time Machine restore these files.

Mac OS X – Restoring Hidden Files and Folders with Time Machine

Thanks Silver Bay!

I recently learned the hard way that brew update can break a PostgreSQL install. Googling around there seem to be a variety of problems and solutions to this scenario.

I was able to get back up and running by relinking my PostgreSQL installation. That seems too easy. I now live with the nagging doubt that something worse is waiting for me in my PostgreSQL install.

To quickly setup a backup process I use the command pg_dumpall in tandem with gzip. pg_dumpall creates a SQL file to recreate my databases and gzip compresses it.

In testing, a pg_dumpall produces a 937M file. Using it with gzip downsizes it to 137M.

Here is the command below. I’ve configured this in my cron jobs to happen every evening Monday through Friday.


pg_dumpall --clean | gzip -c > dev_db.psql.gz


Restoring from backup is just as easy.

gunzip dev_db.psql.gz
psql -f dev_db.psql postgres