Being a Sci-Fi aficionado, the concept of time travel is often in my mind. I love all of the concepts...like the time loop, which I recently discovered in a super old film The Time Travelers from 1964.

The best part of that movie, was that they didn't have the budget for fancy special effects (and after all it was the 60s), so they asked magicians for help, who were able to perform wonderful effects within a tiny budget. Sometimes the best special effects are just slight-of-hand tricks.

The thing is...what would I actually do with a time machine? Barring the obvious invest in early Apple, Microsoft or Google. Would I change anything? I think this an easier question when you're younger and you think that only if you'd have asked the right person out that your life would have been better.

As you get older, the It's A Wonderful Life paradox, where the protagonist changes the past to then realize that even with its hardships the world was better just as it's always been.

The scariest horror movie would be someone who keeps on trying to change the past, to realize valuable things they would lose so they would keep going back, messing their lives further and further.

I wouldn't want to skip meeting my wife, for example. I'd be terrified of not having any of my kids. I'm real happy about the job I have, but there were plenty of decisions that could have screwed that up.

If I did have a time machine and invested in a FAANG company, I'd spend the whole time up to the time I invented the machine trying to make sure everything else stayed the same. But the temptation, since I had the resources, of righting big historical wrongs would be too much.

I remember before I got a job at Lynda/LinkedIn, I applied at other education companies. One of these no longer does online training, while the other one gave a fantastic first and second interviews...then I heard nothing from them. I always wondered what I did wrong until I got my current job. Then I stopped caring. But what if I would have taken either of those jobs? I'm sure I'd be miserable working for anyone else.

The more I think about it, the better life is...as is. So, what about you? Would you dare change the past? What would you work hard to keep from the present if you did?

New Learning Git and Github Course

Some days, I spend a lot of time figuring out what I'm going to write about, but today it was easy because I have a new course that deals with the topic.

Travel the multiverse with Git and GitHub from Learning Git and GitHub by Ray Villalobos

In this course, I talk about how Git is like a multiverse time machine with the responsibility of documenting the history of a project, but with the ability to change it if you want to. The article almost wrote itself today.

This Week on the Toolbox

Git and GitHub Tips you should know

Here's the latest episode of The Toolbox which includes my favorite GitHub tips.

In this episode of The Toolbox, I show you how you can use CodeSpaces and CodeSwing to create a TailwindCSS' Just In Time compiler demo. Tailwind has changed the landscape for CSS frameworks. It's capable of building customized versions of CSS files which only output the code for the CSS you're using. It makes builds shockingly fast and the resulting CSS extremely small. We're talking just a few kilobytes instead of the usual hundredths.

Next Week on the Toolbox

Design CSS Components with the Tailwind CSS JIT Compiler

Bootstrap 5 launched with a javascript only approach, but not a lot of new components. 5.1 brought many new tools including experimental Grid support, placeholders, offcanvas in navs and more. In this episode of The Toolbox, we'll take a look at some of the new components and features.

As usual, I'll have lots of Toolbox shorts with cool new tools that can help you rock it as a developer. Ah yeah! mark that date (get a reminder) and get ready to go toolin'

The Shorts

Here's some of the latest tools I've found useful on the web. Everything from a great way to figure out if a DIV closes a certain element, to KidPix in JS, Wikimedia choosing Vue.js. Lots of cool stuff happening on the web. Don't forget that you can go to the shorts page on raybo.org to search for these.

Daisy UI

Tailwind is really just an engine for building components, but it doesn't include any components of it's own. Daisy UI uses Tailwind CSS and it gives you a set of components to build sites quicker. It installs as a Tailwind CSS plugin so it's easy to add to your existing project. Think of it as the missing Bootstrap-style link to Tailwind CSS.

Tail-kit

A beautiful UI component showcase for Tailwinds UI. It has a lot of smaller elements like buttons, forms, navigation and lists as well as larger templates for bigger things. Over 250 components and templates that are also React/Vue/Angular compatible.

Tailblocks

Tailwinds CSS is great, but it doesn't come with any built in components. A few industrious developers have been creating their own. This is a pretty good selection of ready to go components with everything from ecommerce, navigation, testimonials and blog elements you can copy and paste from. It also has an easy to use interface to copy and preview the blocks.