Month: December 2014

Learn You Some Smarts for Great Good!

Like to code? Like to learn? Live in Portland? Well then you ought to join me in my great journey to the dark west hills of the lands of Hillsboro and Intel! I’ll be taking the following grand journey from Portland out to Intel to give a presentation on Pluralsight and teaching, learning, and getting smarts for great good! If you’d like to join me RSVP on the meetup invite here and let me know, I’m happy to transit out to the location with you.

Afterwards, as is standard operating procedure, we’ll have dinner, drinks, and food across the street at . Sure to have good conversation and laughs, as I always endeavor to do.

Ride Out With Me…

If you’re interested in riding out with me, join me at the Old Town China Town MAX Stop at 5:00pm. We’ll depart on the MAX Blue Line out to Hawthorn Farms Intel Campus. Afterwards, if interested I’ll be riding back too after the meet and post-meet meet at Morgy’s Pub & Grill (across the street).

What I’ll be Talking About

Pluralsight is one of the leading online educators of online, video-based, technical content in the world. In my presentation I’ll dive into how Pluralsight maintains integrity of its courses, insures learning, encourages quality, and helps keep the whole system moving forward in a seamless way. This presentation will be a small diversion from the technical components we often discuss as developers and instead a dive into the actual systems of learning, training, and production that are often on the edges of what we see as developers – but benefit greatly from when we want to learn something new! The core three things I’ll be covering include:

  • How video & doing helps us learn quickly.
  • How video is produced and the tools of this trade.
  • How to produce effective technical content to teach.
  • How to effectively use technical content to learn.

Once I finish the talk I’ll provide a wrap up here on the blog. My intention is to do more than merely post the slides, I’ll work to put something together that’s actually useful.

Speaking of Pluralsight

I’m also working on a new course right now! Ok, at this very moment I’m sipping a Black Forest Mocha at Coffee People while typing this blog entry while waiting for arrivals at the airport, but you know what I mean. I’ll have a basic outline and material for that course posted soon. For more on this pending course and other code event happenings, subscribe to the blog (scroll up and click the settings hexagon above) and or follow me on twitter @adron.

Starting an Ubuntu Dev Tools List

I’ve recently setup a completely clean virtual machine for doing web, system, and related development on Ubuntu. Here’s the shortlist of what I’ve installed after a default installation. The ongoing list of tools and related items I have installed on my Linux dev box I’m keeping here, and it will be kept as a living doc, so I’ll change it as I add new tools, apps and related changes. So lemme know what I ought to add to that list and I’ll add it to my docs page here. Here’s what I have so far…

Other To-dos

  • Always run sudo apt-get update once the system is installed. It never hurts to have the latest updates.
  • I always install Chrome as my first app. Sometimes the Ubuntu Software Center flakes out on this, but just try again and it’ll work. I use the 64-bit Chrome btw, as I’ve noticed that the 32-bit often flakes out when attempting installation on my virtual machines. Your mileage may vary.

What this enables…

At this point I can launch into about any language; Java, JavaScript, and a few others with a minimal amount of headache. Since it’s a Linux instance it gives me a full range of Linuxy things at my disposal.


Default Java Installation

  1. Run a ‘sudo apt-get update’.
  2. To install the default Java JRE and the JDK run the following commands.

    [sourcecode language=”bash”]sudo apt-get install default-jre
    sudo apt-get install default-jdk[/sourcecode]


Oracle Java v8 Installation

  1. [sourcecode language=”bash”]sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer[/sourcecode]


WebStorm Installation

  1. I download the application zip from JetBrains and then run

    [sourcecode language=”bash”]tar xfz WebStorm-*.tar.gz[/sourcecode]

  2. Next I always move the unzipped content to the directory in which I’d like to have the application stored. It’s good practice to not keep things in the download directory, just sayin’. Generally I put these in my usr/bin directory.

    [sourcecode language=”bash”]mv /downloads/WebStorm-* your/desired/spot[/sourcecode]

  3. Now at your terminal, navigate to the path where the application is stored and run the WebStorm.sh executable.

    [sourcecode language=”bash”]./bin/webstorm.sh[/sourcecode]

  4. To add WebStorm to the Quicklaunch, just right click on the icon and select to Lock to Launcher.


IDEA IntelliJ Installation

  1. Follow all the steps listed under WebStorm, it’s the exact same process.


Sublime 3

  1. Go to download the latest v3.
  2. Run the package and it should launch the actual Ubuntu installer, setup Sublime for bash use and get it installed.

(NOTE UPDATED 1/18/2016 > The installer doesn’t seem to get it installed, so I went with this link http://olivierlacan.com/posts/launch-sublime-text-3-from-the-command-line/ which has a good solution.)

I’m so mad!!! My response to the fork of node.js to io.js!

I’m so mad!!!

No, actually I’m not. This is cool.

It’s so confusing! No, it’s actually not. Use your learnings and read this Node Forward and read Max’s @maxogden “What you need to know.” gist.

It’ll be so hard to test this and test with node.js. Not really, again, read the threads there are a million different ways that you’ll be able to setup a clean build against either while keeping both around on your dev machine. Again, repeating myself, this is cool.

Summary for Devs: This is cool. It’s not going to wreck your projects. Just read up on it and it’ll all be a most excellent journey.

Summary for Decision Makers: Read @eranhammer‘s blog post here. TLDR; is, don’t second guess your decision to go with Node.js, don’t flip out about a Node.js or io.js investment, this isn’t anything more than a healthy ecosystem at work. It’ll be cool.

No excuse not to have your branching strategy taken care of, because: git-flow

First, get it installed. This takes less than a minute, at least on a *nix based machine. I’ve no idea what it takes on Windows, but hey, at least it’s available there too! I did a clean curl and install as shown. It took about 14 seconds solely because I wasn’t typing very fast today.

12:28 $ curl -L -O https://raw.github.com/nvie/gitflow/develop/contrib/gitflow-installer.sh
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0
100 2145 100 2145 0 0 1732 0 0:00:01 0:00:01 --:--:-- 1732
~
12:28 $ sudo bash gitflow-installer.sh
Password:
### gitflow no-make installer ###
Installing git-flow to /usr/local/bin
Cloning repo from GitHub to gitflow
Cloning into 'gitflow'...
remote: Counting objects: 1407, done.
remote: Total 1407 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (1407/1407), 623.29 KiB | 428.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (689/689), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
Updating submodules
Submodule 'shFlags' (git://github.com/nvie/shFlags.git) registered for path 'shFlags'
Cloning into 'shFlags'...
remote: Counting objects: 454, done.
remote: Total 454 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (454/454), 130.91 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (337/337), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
Submodule path 'shFlags': checked out '2fb06af13de884e9680f14a00c82e52a67c867f1'
install: gitflow/git-flow -> /usr/local/bin/git-flow
install: gitflow/git-flow-init -> /usr/local/bin/git-flow-init
install: gitflow/git-flow-feature -> /usr/local/bin/git-flow-feature
install: gitflow/git-flow-hotfix -> /usr/local/bin/git-flow-hotfix
install: gitflow/git-flow-release -> /usr/local/bin/git-flow-release
install: gitflow/git-flow-support -> /usr/local/bin/git-flow-support
install: gitflow/git-flow-version -> /usr/local/bin/git-flow-version
install: gitflow/gitflow-common -> /usr/local/bin/gitflow-common
install: gitflow/gitflow-shFlags -> /usr/local/bin/gitflow-shFlags
~

For installation instructions check out the link here: https://github.com/nvie/gitflow/wiki/Installation

Now that everything is setup. Here’s the quick getting started of creating a repo, linking it up to a remote and working in a repository. The first step is to initialize a new repo.

Continue reading “No excuse not to have your branching strategy taken care of, because: git-flow” →