Half a Mind

I’m still using TextMate 1, since 2.0 has been buggy for me. If you’re in the same boat, you might share my frustration with the recurring lag that TextMate experiences when switching focus between applications. TextMate tries to reload the entire project’s file state on focus, and this can be noticeably slow.

I don’t make an effort to remember URLs, so often I type the name of a site into the Chrome location bar, hit enter, and then immediately click on the first search result to navigate to the site. There’s at least one unnecessary click in there, so…

Posterous is shutting down, so I was finally forced to figure out a better blogging solution. Since my day job revolves around building and maintaining dynamic sites, that was exactly what I didn’t want for my personal site. Enter Middleman, the super-simple static site engine. Best of all, it uses a toolchain that’s very familiar to Ruby developers.

The internet is a maze. Sometimes in my travels through this maze, I circle back on a path I’ve already traveled. When that happens, my browser tabs start to look like this:

If you’re not familiar with git bisect, check out the docs. It’s an invaluable tool for locating the commit that introduced a failure in your git repository (via binary search). You simply test and mark different code states as good or bad, and git bisect narrows down the offending code.

I’ve been posting at the Artsy engineering blog, most recently about how we trick ourselves into sharing end users’ experiences:

I posted on the Artsy Engineering blog about supplementing our Heroku web app with EC2-hosted Delayed Job workers:

My ~/.bash_profile file contains these helpers and aliases.

# Display current git branch, nicely colored, in the prompt (with a * if there are changes)

My ~/.irbrc file contains these helpers for performing sql queries and outputting raw database (SQL or MongoDB) queries to the console. Just add them to your home directory’s .irbrc file to have these methods available in IRB or the Rails console.

Using delayed_job and MongoDB (via Mongoid)? Delayed_Job’s delay proxy is a convenient way to queue up background tasks on a model instance: