Recent Small Techie Pleasures

I've had the pleasure recently to discover and rediscover a set of apps that have renewed my joy of computing. Below is a hodgepodge of command line tools, frameworks, web apps, and devices that I've been learning and playing with, and I've found that getting to know them well has been super useful and made me more productive.

None of these apps is big news; I just have now had the chance to really explore, learn, and appreciate them. I don't claim credit for finding a lot of these myself; a good friend and colleague recommended a bunch of the ones below to me, especially around vim, tmux, mosh, and zsh.

1. Vim: Wow, I don't know how I lived without macros, "ciw," find/replace with regex, and a whole host of other little niceties. Practical Vim and vimcasts are great resources.
   


2. Hadoop: The framework and infrastructure seem a bit bulky, but it gets the job done for processing massive data sets and helping to do analyses.
   


3. tmux: How did I go through college using only ssh and losing my session upon each logout? Multiple terminals in one, window splitting, and saving my session between disconnects. Awesome.
   


4. mosh: Doing ssh over wifi or poor connections sucks. mosh pretty much solves the problem.

1. zsh and oh-my-zsh: I finally bit the bullet and tried these in my Linux VM (see below). Spelling autocorrection, path expansion, and the git plugin in my path were my personal WOW moments upon first use. Definitely not going back. Here's a great overall productivity guide that my friend sent me regarding vim, tmux, and zsh.
   


2. VMWare Player + Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon: I remember running Linux Live CDs in college and building my own Fedora and Ubuntu machines back in the day. Being able to run Linux in a VM instead of Cygwin seemed like a fun thing to try, and it was a breeze to set up. All the stuff that's a pain in Cygwin (especially python-related) works perfectly in native Linux (duh). I'm surprised how much more usable and faster Mint in a VM is than when I tried the older Linuxes natively before. Times have changed for the better. This guide to the installation was helpful.


3. Django, Fabric, South, Virtualenvwrapper: This collection of tools makes web programming a breeze. Jeff Knupp's guide is the way to go to get started with all of these. If you're learning Django, the Django Book is a great guide. I recently completed a project without Fabric/South/Virtualenvwrapper, and new stuff I'm playing with now is way easier with these tools.


4. Bitbucket: Free private hosting of your repo and super well-written tutorials. 'nuff said.
   

1. Stitcher app: I looked at a few podcast and radio apps, and I really like the snappiness and UX of this one.
   


2. Nike+ Fuel Band: I had a Fitbit before, so this is pretty similar. I got the Fuel Band as a gift, and what I really like about it is its fully wireless (Bluetooth) sync with my phone and the fact that I only have to charge it every 2 weeks (incredible).
   


3. Alfred: Really snappy and useful Spotlight-like app for Mac OS.

1. Toggl: Super easy and free time tracking online with great reports. Works in HTML5 on phone too.
   


2. Trello: I'm a big fan of ToodleDo for my own to-do list, but I've recently been using Trello for some shared "boards" with other people. The UI really well done, and I know how much work went into making all the little details of the interactions of creating/moving/labeling cards work just right (and the embedded checklists in cards are super useful).

---