#Tools

I just recently moved the blog over to jekyll as the Jekyll team got into releasing beta versions of its 3.0 release.

Despite it’s popularity in the Rails community for a while now (enough so it raised eyebrows at me having a roll-my-own blog system), up until 3.0 I had issues with Jekyll , but the new version seems to eliminate most of my larger bugbears.

Strangely, the big catalyst behind the move was themes (and an interesting point of how policy can drive behaviour), as Google announcing it was going to start punishing sites that were not mobile responsive in its search results had organic traffic (and my search rankings) drop by half the week google pulled the trigger on it. Redesigning my theme from scratch to be mobile responsive seemed a lot more work than modifying someone else’s theme. But, while that probably clinched it, there were other good reasons too:

Since I’ve moved back to using vim+tmux in the terminal for virtually all my writing and code editing (and gotten faster in a number of respects), one of the key things I’ve missed from Sublime Text 3 has been its excellent and speedy markdown preview in Chrome.

It was a friction point in moving back to terminal vim since an old plugin I’d used before was no longer available, and the fallback I’d had to render Github-flavoured markdown was to use a combination of Tim Pope’s Dispatch and the octodown gem . It had a number of issues, one of which was the time it took to shell out and then render the preview, but more than that, it just seemed to slow everything down.

A few weeks ago, two of our officemates (this guy and this guy ) did a Level Up Lunch on visual notetaking and the Bullet Journal technique.

I like to think I am someone who seriously get things done, but I have to admit I was struck by the simplicity and clarity of the system and the possibility that even while I am great at getting things done with Taskpaper , I do recognize that I still pile things into and roll things forward into future weeks arbitrarily, often just removing the problem I had with days getting overloaded with other systems, to future weeks with Taskpaper. I really liked the idea of the Monthly versus Daily calendaring, as well as the Event logging that seemed inherent in bullet journaling. And, well… it’s always good to shake things up, so I decided to take the plunge. I’m on the cusp of the 45 day mark, so I felt I should share my findings so far.

Simple works.

Sometime around early 2012 I switched over to using Things for OSX from the spartan essentials of Taskpaper. I have to admit, at the time I was angry with Taskpaper. It was still using the SimpleText service (Taskpaper now uses the uber-reliable Dropbox) for synchronizing with my iPhone and it had done what I felt was the inexcusable: It had lost tasks I had to complete in a sync conflict and even after I recovered the file, I didn’t know what they were (partly my stupidity for not having it source controlled in git).

Sure, they make it cutesy, but you have no idea how often this actually happens. Disaster recovery in most orgs is not given anywhere near the attention it deserves. If it can happen to Pixar, it can happen to you.

So, um… do your backups kids. And make sure you have offsite backups as well! I use Crashplan myself (which works on Win, Mac and Linux) though was using Haystack’s Arq on my Mac until very recently as well. Seriously, the minimal cost is nothing compared to losing photos or critical docs. Believe me.

While I have to thank TextMate for being the editor that was my gateway drug into Rails (and back into programming), I kept having loads of issues with it (while I still think it’s hands down better than any of the new editors I’ve seen and much prefer it to a host of IDEs): It crashed pretty regularly, I found it slow and had to wait for it quite often, I was constantly switching between it and the command line and project searches beachballed all. the. time. I also have to admit to having had more than a little bit of guilt that I’d added yet another Mac-only title to my list of software. Somewhere in the back of my head I still keep trying to convince myself I’ll move back to Linux… someday cough. (Note that my purpose here isn’t to wail on Textmate. It is a great piece of software and I do owe it a debt. I just decided I needed to move past some of the limitations I’d been experiencing.).

One of the things I absolutely love about the iPad is all the mind blowing melding of interface and things you just never see combined like music, sound and visuals. OK, how can anyone not like fingerpainting sound? I mean, why have people not been screaming at me about this. So cool. Oh, and Singing Fingers is free. Download now . I am having much fun with it. Absolutely brilliant.

Oh, and works on the iPhone and iPad, but so much nicer on the iPad with the extra screen real estate.

Fact is, managing code is difficult, even with git and github .

The fact git makes branching and merging so cheap and easy creates a new problem. Go away and work on something else for a while, leave a project and come back or even get distracted with prioritizing another feature or an urgent production hotfix and suddenly, you’ve got a problem. Add in a team environment and you’d better have something agreed.

OK, not sure who thought of this idea, but I absolutely love it. Personally, I use and abuse the excellent TaskPaper for my own GTD flogging (can haz iPad verzion pleaz?), but Epic Win is sheer brilliance : Your task lists as a role playing game. Brilliant.

Done right, this could unbelievably popular. WTB now. Apparently, the twitter feed for the app says it is awaiting approval in the Apple app store at the moment. Do wonder how it’ll work and sync with my desktop needs though…

If you’re a CTO moving heavily into cloud services, one of the things that keeps you awake at night is what happens if one of your providers goes under or just becomes so unreliable you have to move. Let’s face it, lock in goes along with the cloud as the fact of the matter is you code to exploit a specific platform.

The amazing thing about Fog is that it acts as a universal interface in front of the cloud, allowing you to control a variety of cloud services though a unified API. It deals with both servers and storage already supporting EC2, Rackspace servers, vCloud and Slicehost and numerous cloud based storage vendors S3 and Rackspace Files.