Tagged with Practices and Habits

Moving to Linux

For the past 15 years I’ve been a Mac user. Like many, I loved the best in class hardware, great desktop shell, and the ability to use BSD/*nix tools without having to run virtual machines. When my 2012 Macbook pro was no longer aging gracefully, I started evaluating my options for a new machine. MacOS was no longer as appealing as it once was.

Keeping notes with vimwiki

I’ve long kept notes and ideas written down in a variety of text files across my computer. While this ‘worked’ I always found it a bit lacking, but was not willing to commit to a cloud based notes application as I prefer the simplicity and portability of plain text files.

Simplifying host identification with rainbow terminals

In my daily work, I end up having to ssh into a variety of hosts. Keeping track of which terminal is on which host can become challenging when I have 3 or 4 terminals all at a mysql prompt, or tailing log files. A co-worker of mine came up with a pretty clever solution that I wanted to share. The clever solution involves some bash, and Applescript (as we’re working off of OSX).

CakePHP 3.0 Retrospective

With CakePHP 3.0 out the door, I thought it would be good to reflect on the project. CakePHP 3.0 is the longest and largest open source project milestone I’ve ever participated in. At FreshBooks we do retrospectives on large projects as a way to see what went well, and what could have gone better. The goal is to discover things we should keep doing, and what to improve the next time around.

My quest for a new programming typeface

I’ve been working all day everyday with Monaco for the last 6 years. Monaco is a great typeface, it has a number of really great properties. It has a large x-height, and a large m-width. This make it great typeface at small sizes. While monaco is a perfectly good typeface, I wanted experiment and see if there is another typeface that would be even better.

E_NOTICE is your friend

Errors and error reporting an important part of the development and debugging cycle. In interpreted languages, there are a number of runtime errors that can really help you debug your code. Some languages like python don’t give you a way to make the errors go away, but for better or worse PHP does.