ding!

By  on  

I've been working with beefy virtual machines, docker containers, and build processes lately.  Believe it or not, working on projects aimed at making Mozilla developers more productive can mean executing code that can take anywhere from a minute to an hour, which in itself can hit how productive I can be.  For the longer tasks, I often get away from my desk, make a cup of coffee, and check in to see how the rest of the Walsh clan is doing.

When I walk away, however, it would be nice to know when the task is done, so I can jet back to my desk and get back to work.  My awesome Mozilla colleague Byron "glob" Jones recently showed me his script for task completion notification and I forced him to put it up on GitHub so you all can get it too;  it's called ding!

Once you have ding, you can do cools stuff like:

# ding somecommand
ding docker-machine start default
ding ./start-local-environment
ding ./refresh-environment

If the task completes successfully, you'll hear a positive sound; if the command fails, you'll hear a more negative sound -- a simple, yet useful and meaningful detail.

There's not much to explain except that ding is awesome and should check it out!

Recent Features

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Select Dropdowns, MooTools, and CSS Print

    I know I've harped on this over and over again but it's important to enhance pages for print. You can do some things using simple CSS but today's post features MooTools and jQuery. We'll be taking the options of a SELECT element and generating...

  • By
    Do / Undo Functionality with MooTools

    We all know that do/undo functionality is a God send for word processing apps. I've used those terms so often that I think of JavaScript actions in terms of "do" an "undo." I've put together a proof of concept Do/Undo class with MooTools. The MooTools...

Discussion

  1. I wonder if an even better solution would be to use macOS’s “say” command since this is macOS specific script and “say” is always available. That way you wouldn’t have the requirement of keeping those two .mp3 files in the directory as the script.

    It’d be awesome if he made this brew installable as well :)

  2. Scott Rippey

    What a great idea! I’ve been using the say command as an audible indicator when my Docker builds finish, but this is way more convenient, and even reports errors!
    So here’s an alternative, which I put in my .bash_profile, and has no dependencies (other than macOS):

    ding() {
    	EXIT_CODE=$?
    	if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
    		time $@
    		EXIT_CODE=$?
    	fi
    	if [ $EXIT_CODE = 0 ]; then
    		say Hooray
    	else
    		say We\'ve had a problem
    	fi
    }
    
    

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!