Many would not guess it, but I am a minimalist at heart. I don’t like looking around and seeing all the crap I’ve accumulated. So this year, I’m going to do something about it. This year, I’m working towards only owning 100(ish) things, and I’d like to encourage you to too.

The 100 is easy. The “ish” requires some explaining, but I feel it is the key to making this workable.

Dear Esperanto Beginner:

I love Twitter, butI have not found a good place for a beginner to practice their Esperanto there. So, I made @praktiku.

Say hello to @praktiku and practice with me. You don’t need to be skillful, just willing to practice.

Kara Esperanto Komencanto:

Mi amas Twitter, sed mi ne trovis sekura placo por komencantoj praktiki sian Esperanton tie. Do, mi faris @praktiku.

Diru saluton al @praktiku, kaj praktiku kun mi. Vi ne bezonas esti lerta, nur volanta praktiki.

Changelogs are an invaluable, and often neglected part of any software project. So, how do you do that?

A good changelog helps you users to understand:

• Why they should care about your latest version
• If any of your changes affect the problems or frustrations they’ve been having.
• If there are any changes that might affect how they use your app / library.
• Why your efforts are worth their continued support.

A great changelog does all that, and shows the personality of your team.

Let’s start by taking it as a given that a Changelog file is something very valuable that every product should come with. Even if your “product” is a library for other developers.

With that in mind, the question rises of “How can I make it really easy to generate one”. Many developers have had exactly that thought. There are many free and some paid solutions that will “Autogenerate your changelog from your git commits/tickets”. The simple fact is, that no matter how well they’re written, you shouldn’t use any of them.

At its core, being a manager is about power. I feel that many managers fail to understand what that power is for.

A manager is a lot like being the King or Queen of a tiny, tiny kingdom. The sovereign of a country can impose their will upon their people, but that’s not their job.

A sovereign’s job is to keep their people safe, happy, and prosperous. The more prosperous the people become, the more power they gain. The more power your people have, the more power you have. The more powerful and successful the people are the more powerful the sovereign becomes.

“Follow Friday” has been a longstanding tradition on Twitter. It’s a great idea. People you follow, make curated recommendations of good content. Well, the world needs balance, and I’m instituting Weeding Wednesday.

Weeding Wednesday is a day for reducing internet noise.

This Weeding Wednesday watch your Twitter feed from a different perspective. Don’t look for the great posts. Look for the “meh” posts, then unfollow anyone with a low cool to meh ratio.

Where to start creating a Terminal Emulator from scratch

Before I get started I need to link you to this great answer on the Unix & Linux Stack Exchange which explains the differences between a Terminal (tty), a Console, and a Shell. That knowledge will be key to writing a terminal emulator.

VT100 (and beyond)

Setting the stage with a little background.

Most terminal emulators claim to be VT100 emulators. VT100 came out of DEC somewhere around 1977. There were a number of subsequent versions (52,102,220,330,420,510,520). The problem is, that VT100 is a rather limited subset of what people expect:

EDIT: As of Monterrey Apple has completely locked down the files you need to edit.

There are 2 ways I know of to do this, and neither of them is as good.

1. use TextExpander. You can tell it that when you type cx to “expand” it to ĉ. You’ll probably have to copy the character you want from here or any other page with it. Then do the same for all the other characters that need ˆ. Here is a public snippet group with the Esperanto Diacritics that I’ve put together. Just type cx to get ĉ, and so on for all the characters that use the ˆ or ˘ diacritics.
2. use Keyman. They specificaly have a QWERTY Esperanto keyboard layout. However it’s not what you think. It doesn’t give you press-and-hold menu, and it doesn’t actually let you type a ĉ. what it does, is exactly the same thing as Text Expander, only with +h or +x. Basically, what you get is an incredibly limited free version of Text Expander, that only works with the QWERTY keyboard layout.

In short, buy Text Expander, because you’re going to get a ton of other cool functionality and it’ll work regardless of what keyboard layout you use.

I was recently asked to provide a letter of recommendation to a past coworker who is trying to get in to grad school. The experience was excessively time-consuming, and left me with little belief that any of these schools are worth attending because their systems were (with one exception) all painful to use, and (with no exceptions) all looked like shit. If you can’t teach your students how to build a decent system for letting people upload recommendations, then how the @#$% can I expect you to teach anyone graduate level concepts? I know that some of the following schools are actually quite good, but they show no evidenced of it in the code they offer up for professors and professionals to use.

There are lots of great tools out there. Far too many to try. Here are the ones that I’ve tried, and found worth recommending. Mostly they’re

OS X

Developer Things

Quiver is a “Programmer’s Notebook”. I’ve recently switched to it from CodeBox which seems to have been abandoned by its developer. I’ve got some minor quibbles with Quiver, but overall it’s pretty nice and I’ll be bringing all my code snippets and reference material over to it.