walls.corpus

By Nathan L. Walls

Tool Sharpening: Oct. 21, 2014

Tuesday, 21 October, 2014 — development improvement

For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post

Environment + Process tweaks

  • Updated TextExpander shortcuts for phrases I typically drop into work chat windows
  • Added a number of TextExpander shortcuts for creating future Tool Sharpening posts, largely around standardizing snippets for podcasts for consistency
  • Upgraded my Mac to Yosemite (Mac OS X 10.10)
  • Upgraded home projects to Ruby 2.1.3

Project work

I made a little bit of head way with Issue #32 of my Pomodori project. Being honest, I’m not putting the kind of time or attention to this that I would like.

Skill improvements

Bash

This past week, I was preparing a software release. While we have a good deal of automation around this sort of work, there are some cases where the progression to release gets into a condition we haven’t automated for yet. In one of these cases, I needed to remove git tags we placed on the repositories for the release and further steps in our automated process.

Before, I’d likely just suffer through doing this three or four times, because it’s just at the edge of being worth writing a script. However, my coworker Steve Gambino reminded me that Bash is perfectly capable of solving this issue. It’s also a tool I could stand to get more familiar with for situations such as this.

1

for i in $( ls -1 ); do cd $i; git tag -d R36.0.2-20141016; git push origin :refs/tags/R36.0.2-20141016; cd ..; done

I ended up using variations on this for loop multiple times and I didn’t have any of the dollar auction costs of, “well, this will be the last time I do this, so it’s not worth writing a script.”

tmux

This past week, I had couple of tmux panes that I wanted to capture the buffer for and paste into BBEdit for separate examination. Rather than tediously scroll and copy and scroll and copy, I searched for a better way. As it happens, thoughtbot developer Chris Toomey had some additions to .tmux.conf that are very helpful for this sort of situation. Perfect.

Screencasts, podcasts and presentations