Scott Watermasysk

Great video on everyday leadership:

This week, I am going to do my co-hacking day in Yardley, PA. @briandonahue is going to be there and it looks like one or two others from the Philly Startup Hackers group may stop by as well.

If you can make it out, please stop by and join us.

When: May 10, 2012.

Location:
Yardley Starbucks.
1 North Main Street
Yardley, PA 190671409

Finder has always been the piece of OS X that has just felt wrong. This might be due to years of Windows use, simply over thinking it, or perhaps it really is just a turd.

For the last year or so, I had been using TotalFinder. TotalFinder is a big improvement over Apple’s built in Finder. However, I found it to be a bit flaky, especially on Lion.

I recently came across another alternative, Path Finder and it has been an absolute joy to use.

Here are some of my favorite features:

• It consistently just works.
• Document previews in the footer
• Dual views
• Great breadcrumb navigation
• Dual (side by side) views
• Favorites

Path Finder brings a ton of additional features (git,terminal/iterm, etc) to the table, but most importantly it just makes working with files simple. At $40 it is not exactly cheap, but for something you will use a couple of times a day every single day, it really ends up being a steal.

One of the best aspects of Heroku’s cedar stack is thecontrol and flexibility it offers you. Unfortunately, this also means you are on the hook for properly configuring many items in your app.

An example of this is proper HTTP caching and gzip compression.

For static asset caching, Heroku provides a great detailed support article, Using Rack::Cache with Memcached for Static Asset Caching in Rails 3.1+ on configuring your rails app and using memecached to help speed things up.

On the compression side, there is a great simple article by Gaurish Sharma, Enable gzip compression on Heroku

Total time to setup and deploy both…roughly 2 minutes.

Reminder, that tomorrow will be the second CoHacking in Princeton.

BootStrapping Design is a great read.

The best way I can sum it up is, simple practical design tips all in a convenient beautiful little package.

Reading this book will not make you a great designer. It probably won’t even make you a good designer. However, it will help you avoid some big mistakes and keep you on the right path until you can hire proper design resources for your product/project.

Definitely a must read for a would be bootstrapper.

CtrlP is a vim plugin for finding files.

Unlike CommandT, my previous favorite, CtrlP is written completely in Vimscript.

As a side benefit, CtrlP will also optionally search your open buffers. This means I can also remove the BufExplorer plugin.

I forget why, but I have always had CommandT mapped to leader+f. So to take full advantage of CtrlP I am using the following settings:

map <leader>f :CtrlP<CR>
map <leader>b :CtrlPBuffer<cr>
map <leader>m :CtrlPMRU<cr>

I have been reading Practical Vim. I am only 25% through it, but if you value productivity this book is easily worth 10 times it’s asking price.

Anyway, but to Visual Blocks. To be honest, I never saw the value in them because changes I made where not reflected on each line.

Turns out, all I needed to was be patient. When you edit code in a visual block (<C-v>) the changes are not displayed on all lines until after you hit <ESC>.

I really need to keep reminding myself of the following: If it doesn’t appear easy to do in VIM, you are likely doing it wrong.

Have a Kindle or use a Kindle App? Do you also have a Mac?

If you answered yes to both questions you need this app: Send to Kindle.

The Send to Kindle app is a simple tool which lets you easily send books (and documents) to all your Kindle enabled devices.

I have worked at home for most of the last 8 years. One of the things I try to do is get out of my home office once or twice a week.

I attended my first Princeton Tech Meetup last night. One of the things that really impressed me was the number of people who attended (nearly 100 in just month #2). In addition, I was equally impressed with the number of people who were starting business (or looking to start companies).

With no local co-working facilities, I was thinking it might be a good idea to try to setup ‘shop’ once or twice a week in Princeton.

So for the next couple of weeks, I am going to start working at the awesome Small World Coffee on Thursdays (say 10 am to 4 pm).

It is open to everyone, but you will probably get the most out of it if you are in one of the following buckets:

• Entrepreneur (or want to be one)
• Enjoy building new things
• Developer/Hacker/Designer (or some other creative)

If you are semi-local, please feel free to stop by (also feel free to ping me at scottwater@gmail.com to make sure I will be there :).

In addition, if you are looking at starting a new business and want to talk to someone about how to simply get started, please stop by.

This week’s, how the hell did I not know about this sooner vim moment: q:.

I primarily use vim via terminal these days. One of the nice things in MacVim is the ability to arrow through previous commands (just ‘:’ then up and down arrows). Since arrows do not work (which is kind of great) navigating and reviewing recent commands didn’t appear to be easily possible….and of course, I was really wrong. :)

Summary:

1. q: - brings up recent commands
2. Select a line you want to run
3. Remember that you can edit the line in place
4. Execute the command with Control+C (capital C).

Here are some good docs on Using Command Line History.

If we ever move hosts on the KickoffLabs Blog I am pretty sure I know where we are going.

Great Mixergy interview of Jason Cohen (founder of WP Engine).

Lot’s of great parts (see Robert Bazinet’s blog post on the interview). The thing that jumped out to me most is his philosophy on support which is essentially: just make the customer happy.

This very much matches up with our approach to KickoffLabs.

Technology and features are great, but they are easily copied and duplicated. You cannot (in the long term) fake caring.