Gaston Garcia

This is where I’m spending a few minutes each day lately. Bits of Ruby and fun ways of looking at things.

• Nanoc
• Heroku
• The Changelog Podcast
• Peepcode Screencasts
• Remi Screencasts
• Github

As a guy that works daily on websites there’s one thing that’s been the most important these weeks. Seems like in the Ruby community people are actually exploring how to use programming to their advantage. How do I do stuff quickly? How could I write less HTML and do more work? How do I use programming to make things better?

I don’t know. It’s just kind of stupid that people are not asking these kind of questions all over the place! So even though I still don’t get most of anything I read and try in Ruby, it’s been enlightening to have new ideas about the web and how to use it.

Geoffrey Grosenbach, producer of the PeepCode screencasts gave me some quick advice on how to get started with Emacs (here).

Unless I have some really urgent work to get done, for which I’ll surely fire up Textmate, I’ll give Emacs a try. I’m already an every once in while VIM user and remember it was hard to learn it.

Anyways it’s good to not be that mechanical and always do the same things in the same way. My baby always reminds of this. So just as today I brushed my teeth with my left hand, I’ll switch Editors for a few days. I’ll see what happens.

On the Nuby on Rails website I came across this post on Emacs. I was in a good mood with my mind full of curiosity and then a thought hit me. “Could it be that I somehow missed the good parts of Emacs?” I remember having used Emacs before, when I was using Ubuntu all the time. I tried as hard as I could to use it, but it was pretty damned hard.

So last night I went ahead and installed the Carbon version of Emacs. I started the tutorial, worked on it for some time, and then I simply closed it. “What a nightmare!”

I just don’t get the whole Ctrl+V command for moving around. It’s just not a comfortable position for my hands. Which finger are people using for pressing the Ctrl key? Do I have to take Hand-Yoga lessons from a Guru to feel ok with it?

: ) Nothing like VIM.

As you can see. I have no problem with the whole editor war thing.

These days have been full of my Mac Terminal. It’s been both exciting and frustrating. I had previously used the command line quite a bit, in a brief period of my life when I decided that I was only going to use free software, and therefore used Ubuntu for like 4 months in the beginning of 2006. (This period ended basically in frustration at having to use Gimp for my graphic work as a web designer at the time.)

That time spent in Ubuntu was good none the less. I read Neil Stephenson’s “In the beginning was the command line” (which is maybe the coolest computer book). I learned to move around in my hard drive, I tried to install Apache (unsuccessfully), I tried to install MySQL (unsuccessfully), I tried to create a development environment (failed too). I learned to love VIM. I asked for help in message boards. It was a tough time, but hey, I was making it tough for myself. My all free software approach was too strict, and it wasn’t easy. (Plus it’s a habit. I’ve been a fundamentalist on almost anything I’ve decide to take on, only to have to learn to take it easy.)

So these last few days I’ve been learning Ruby. I’ve started reading Why’s “Poignant Guide to Ruby“. I also purchased Rails from Scratch part I from Peepcode. And I found the Learning Rails podcast (which is what I would recommend to a real beginner. The Peepcode screencast is of superb quality, but it’s not for a newbie. It’s so damn easy to get lost in a single keystroke when you’re really new to something. The pace of the Learning Rails podcast is more appropriate to someone who’s learning from scratch).

I’ll probably get the Meet the Command Line screencast. It’ll help me feel even more comfortable with the Command Line. And I don’t have time to waste for learning, all programmers and web developers I admire are involved in projects that require skills that go far beyond just coding HTML and CSS. SASS, HAML, Compass, Rails. It’s useful to feel comfortable moving around your computer, invoking scripts and installing stuff.

Now from these last 10 days I do have to remember something. I should expect a bit less results as I move along. Learning is a slow process and I get frustrated easily. I have to step back every once in a while and say “Alright, that didn’t work either. No problem. Do something simpler.”

Now I’ve for some reason you’re reading this and are new to programming, these are links that have been encouraging to me these days:

• I have no talent
• In the beginning was the command line
• You can teach yourself how to program