Vim Cards: How I'm Learning

I tend to learn things by committing as many key items to memory as possible. The thought being that if I have a strong vocabulary down pat then my brain is free to focus on problem solving and context while I'm engaged in what I'm learning.

Over the last few months I've been learning Vim for use as my primary code editor. Initially there is a steep learning curve involved. I found that as I've developed associations between actions and their corresponding Vim commands the modes portion has come more and more naturally to me. The major obstacle for me was reading through a few Vim books and then being fortunate enough to pair program with the folks at Hashrocket to figure out the most useful commands for me.

In hopes that it might help others trying to adopt Vim I've posted my slides I study with on slideshare.net. This is my first shot at slideshare. Feedback is appreciated. I've posted it in Keynote and Powerpoint formats so pick your flavor. I also look forward to hearing back on any commands I'm missing that you think would be good additions to the deck.

I purposefully left out any rails.vim or other plugin specific commands on this one. Will probably post a slide deck with those seperately in the next few weeks.

Technorati Tags: Vim

Intern Life

After a great vacation I kicked off my first two days as an intern at Hashrocket. So far it has been even more of a refreshing and insightful experience than expected. It has been a great feeling to finish up the day feeling brain drained and stoked all at once. I couldn't ask for a better crew to work alongside and learn from. The two big take aways from this week:

1) Stoked to be again be a part of Hashrocket's Apps for America entry. Excited about being able to go through the app lifecycle from start to finish "The Hashrocket Way."

2) Follow your passions and whenever possible surround yourself with people that are passionate about what they do.

I'll be blogging more about my journey with the Hashrocket crew in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Gone Mac... Again. Not Looking Back.

I was a Mac user for quite a while and ended up back on Windows shortly after they switched to the intel chips due to work. After a while on Windows I eventually got sick of how crappy the experience was and converted my machines over to Ubuntu Linux as my primary OS. Dual booted for a while until I got a solid grasp on Linux and Wine. Then I ran MS Office on Wine. Why? B/c Open Office is a pretty crappy experience for anything other than basic office functionality. The fact that you still have to reach over to the right arrow key or hit enter in Calc to use the auto complete is just one feature that speaks to poor usability. Anyway as much as I loved the configuration of my Linux machine it was just spent too much time working on my desktop. Same for Windows. Not to mention none of the Spotlight, Quicksilver, or Gnome-DO Windows equivalents were even close to their Linux or OS X counterparts for me. Finally, Ruby on Rails and Git on Windows is the equivalent of sadomasicism. So Monday I ran down to the Apple store and got myself a shiny new Macbook Pro. 37 minutes later I had it completely updated, files migrated, software installed, and humming along like.... well, a Macbook Pro.

The moral of the story? Don't sit around wishing for a super polished Linux OS. OS X fills that need.

Not to say that if someone comes out with an awesome Linux distro that rivals OS X that I wouldn't check it out. Just don't see it happening anytime soon.

Here's to not thinking about my OS and focusing on my actual work.