Best of “Today I Learned” in 2022

Well, it’s that time of year — summer and fall snuck by once again, and we’re headed toward a new year. While endings inevitably lead to a time of reflection, we figured we’d offer you a lighthearted reprieve in the form of bird facts, code hacks, and etymology. Here’s our collection of the best “Today I Learned” snippets from our day-to-day Slack operations in 2022.

1. GCal

“Find and Replace for Google Calendar?! Yessssss.” — Ben Judy, Director, Product Design

2. Chrome dev tools

“Very upset that I am just learning about how to make it so that clicking on Chrome dev tools doesn’t take focus away from the main page, therefore letting you inspect things that need focus to appear, like dropdowns or tooltips.” — Frankie Simms, Senior Engineer 

3. Pokemon Go for plants

“I might be the last person alive to learn about the iNaturalist app. I’ve been using it like a Pokemon Go for plants and trees in my neighborhood, and my walks have gotten twice as long as a consequence.” — Dayana El Azhari, Senior Product Manager

4. Updating slug fields

“If you want a slug field that is based on a title field to update in Contentful after it’s already been published, simply unpublish and republish.” — Russ Callahan, Senior Engineer

5. Using HATEOAS with REST APIs

“There’s a decent article here that compares patterns you might be used to with a regular REST API vs. HATEOAS. Since the frontend examples are in Vue.js, they should be pretty easy to understand.” — Oliver Veras, Associate Software Engineer

6. Internet in Japan

“Pretty cool look at Japan’s internet design.” — Malcolm Peterson, Associate Engineer

7. Using <hgroup>

“You can now use hgroup as a way to associate a heading with associated subheadings.” — Dakota Sexton, Engineer

8. Spam calls

“Check out this list. It’s good to remove your personal data across the web, but there’s also a healthy amount of options here to specifically delete your phone number across a few databases that spammers access to obtain phone numbers in bulk. It cut my spam calls way down, and I’m about to run the same process with my parents’ cell numbers.” — Matt Jadro, Product Manager

9. More etymology

“CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” — Matthew McVickar, Lead Engineer

10. Command report times

“Nifty thing I learned yesterday: If you use zsh (the default on macOS), you can set the environmental variable REPORTTIME=3 (in, say, your ~/.zshrc), and for any executed command over three seconds made from the prompt, you’ll get a little report about how long the command took to execute at the end of the execution output! (But it only counts system/user time, not wall clock time, so ; sleep 5 will not give output.)  — Jordan Thevenow-Harrison, Senior Engineer

11. Idiom history

“This is the source of the old Southern phrase ‘sitting in the catbird seat.’” — Frankie Simms, Senior Engineer

12. Tabs vs. spaces

“#TIL there’s a strong accessibility argument for tabs vs. spaces. Sounds like Prettier is planning on moving to tabs by default in the next major release as well!” — Preston Richey

13. DW and postgres

“One thing to note about FDW and postgres: Using the mongo_fdw and other FDW extensions requires root access to your postgres database to compile and install the extension. If you’re using a managed Postgres instance (like AWS RDS), you don’t have root access to the DB and cannot install extensions beyond the ones provided by the managed db service. While RDS supports some foreign data wrappers, it does not look like RDS supports the mongo_fdw.” — Zachary Harris, Senior Engineer

14. Emoji shortcut

“I may be late to the game on this, but I just discovered by accident that on a Mac keyboard you can press the Function (fn) key wherever you’re typing in any program, and it will toggle a quick character viewer for emojis, etc. Pretty schweeeet!” — Jordan Luckett, Product Manager

15. Logo joy

“13 years and I’m just now seeing the hand in the myfonts logo???” — Chappell Ellison, Associate Director, Digital Strategy

16. Really good alt text

“Just incredible alt text work here.” — Tait Foster, Lead Strategist

Want more? Check out TIL roundups from June 2022, December 2021, and June 2021 for more tips, tricks, and thrilling trivia!