So Many Typos

That being said, I end up entering a lot of commands into my terminal and now I’ve got a cluttered screen where all my relevant text is at the bottom. I’ve gotten into the habit of typing clear a lot. But this leaves room for typos…sometimes so many typos. Ugh. SO. MANY. TYPOS.

My deskmate is a ‘return key’ guy. He just presses return a bunch until he’s got some whitespace on the screen and continues running commands. This got me thinking on how to combine these two methods to make one Super Method^TM.

Enter the Return Key Clear Shell Script

So now I looked for a solution that cleared my shell whenever I pressed the return key twice. And behold, return_key_clear.sh:

declare empty_counter=0

precmd_hook() {
    if [[ $empty_count -gt 1 ]]; then
        /usr/bin/clear
        let empty_count=0
    fi

    let empty_count=$empty_count+1
}

preexec_hook() {
    let empty_count=0
}

autoload -U add-zsh-hook

add-zsh-hook precmd precmd_hook
add-zsh-hook preexec preexec_hook

**This shell script works reliably and predictably for zsh on both macOS and Ubuntu Linux.

Update 2016-11-16 - The original version of this post used MacOS instead macOS. For this, I am eternally regretful of the internet points I lost. As we all know, they can never be regained.

This seems useful at first, but both Paul and I use iTerm2 as our terminal app and iTerm2 already provides tabbed windows and split panes. This weekend provided me with the motivation to learn tmux more fully and try it out in my workflow – and boy am I enjoying it.

What’s amazing about my change of heart is that I’m using tmux only in the most basic implementation right now. I use it to background apps and to afford myself more screen real estate on my cramped Macbook Air screen.

I now have a tmux session that handles my top and rails server screens and I don’t have to worry about if my ssh connection breaks or about losing a little bit of screen real estate. I even keep a split in the session for man pages I’m looking at.

So why use it over iTerm2’s splits and tabs? iTerm won’t keep your session going. If you’re pulling a particularly large repo or installing something big, iTerm could lose that connection and your session is over, as is that download. With tmux, you’re not just getting a way to manage your multiple windows – you’re gaining a way to manage multiple sessions. And that makes a WORLD of difference once you incorporate it into your workflow.

Finally, I’ve found out there is no established git command that creates the repo when you attempt to push a local repo up. The repo has to have already been created. This posed a bit of an issue for me because I try to do as much of my work as possible via the command line.

Turns out, curl is perfect for just such a situation.

curl -u 'USERNAME' https://api.github.com/user/repos -d '{"name":"REPO_NAME"}'

This command will create a new repo in your profile using the github API.

This recap is coming several days late, but day two of the conference was amazing! The second day’s talks were much more relevant to my work as a developer and I remained incredibly engaged the whole time. I basically lived at the Builders Stage! So many great talks that were relevant to my work as a developer.

My networking skills are definitely in need of some work, though. I would get nervous and scramble for things to say or ask instead of letting the conversation just flow. The most embarrassing moment was when after I shook hands with someone and made to leave, I sidehugged the man for absolutely no reason at all. I was mortified and walk ran away as fast as I could! Aside from that horror story of a moment, my nervousness while networking didn’t seem to be too detrimental.

Some highlights from Day 2:

1. Marcus Woxneryd of ustwo’s talk about the real human value of employees and company culture was amazing and quite uplifting. Watch a recorded version of this talk from Web Summit here.

2. The panel on Open Source software was really amazing. And the tag question at the very end about how to create a culture in open source that is much more open to women and other underrepresented minorities was just as valuable as the rest of the talk. It’s good to know IBM and jQuery are actively thinking about these communities and how the embedded culture in technology can be prohibitive of truly open participation.

3. Bryan Liles’ talk about continuous app deployment and the common mistakes companies — especially start ups — make while trying to push their updates was incredibly useful for me.

4. Mike Janke of Silent Circle gave a great talk about cryptography and privacy in the modern era and how government influence is constantly butting up against user privacy rights.

Honestly, the whole second day was a real home run. I’m incredibly glad that I was able to attend two days of Collision Conference and can’t wait to start utilizing what I learned (and improving my networking skills).

I have been eagerly anticipating today since I got my Collision ticket back in October of last year. I have never been to an industry conference and the naive nerd inside of me was squeeing in utter delight that I finally get to go to a conference. My coworker, Paul, and I took a whole hour to pore over the seminar descriptions and set up our joint schedules.

Day one of the conference definitely did not disappoint. We got plenty of schwag and saw quite a few really fantastic talks.

Some highlights from today…

1. Schwag! Got some pretty neat socks from GitLab and a cute desk shark and tote from ♥Digital Ocean♥. We were also able to get a book on learning the Wolfram Programming Language, which was new to both Paul and I.

2. Mikko Hypponen’s talk about web security and the reasons cybercrime occurs was incredibly interesting and thought provoking.

3. Jeff Lawson’s talk about making mistakes along your career path and finding the work that you have conviction in was inspiring to me. He was an animated speaker and was not so subtly nudging me and everyone else in the audience in the right direction for our careers.

You can follow my live tweets of the conference here.