CodeWriMo

NaNoWriMo is an event run over the Internet to help aspiring authors write a 50,000 word novel in a month. I was *this* (imagine two fingers held closely together) close to being an English major in college so I’ve got a built in soft spot for authors. I’ve wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo for the past few years but the timing has never quite worked out.

It’s almost NaNoWriMo time this year and it got me thinking about having a similar event for developers. For as long as I can remember code has been the way I’ve expressed my creativity and I know that’s true for lots of others. But it’s also the harsh reality for most that the “day job” is rarely your creative outlet. So you’re stuck trying to cram in a few hours a week of creative hacking in amongst life’s other demands.

What if you took a month and added a sense of purpose to your after-hours hacking? What if you set a few goals and had a group of like-minded people to lend moral support when you needed it?

My idea is this: Start a new open source project from scratch and go to initial release in a month. Working code isn’t enough, though. The release would also include docs and examples. The key is to pick an idea that’s reasonably do-able in 3 weeks’ of hacking leaving an additional week for polish and docs.

Is this something worth doing? Ping me on twitter (@kevsmith) or leave a comment and let me know what you think.

My Influences

1. My mom – Gave me my life-long love of books and learning
2. My dad – Demonstrated what’s possible when ambition combines with hard work
3. The PLT Scheme Community – Their commitment to quality, innovation, and civility
4. Joe Armstrong, Guy Steele, and John McCarthy – The power of a single idea properly applied
5. Dave Thomas, Andy Hunt, and Pete McBreen – “The Pragmatic Programmer” and “Software Craftsmanship” literally changed the way I think about my profession
6. Jeff Stein – One of my first coworkers and the absolute best mentor I ever had

Hat tip to Chad Fowler for taking me on this trip down memory lane.

gitpiphany

Main Entry: gitpiphany
Pronunciation: \git-ˈpi-fə-nē\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural git·piph·a·nies
Etymology: Derivative of the Middle English epiphanie, from Anglo-French, from Late Latin epiphania, from Late Greek, plural, probably alteration of Greek epiphaneia appearance, manifestation, from epiphainein to manifest, from epi- + phainein to show
Date: 2005

¹ An usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature of the distributed version control system, Git. Normally proceeded by a period marked by frustration and confusion.

Effective Emacs Grepping

Thanks to bosky101 on #erlang I discovered this uber-useful Emacs command:

M-x rgrep

When you run this command Emacs will prompt you for the search text, a pattern to select the files to search, and the location of the directory to search. When the search is done the results are displayed in a buffer named *grep*. Each result contains a line or two of context around the search hit which is useful when you have a lot of results to sort through. Clicking on a search result takes you to that line in the file.

If you’re like me and abhor typing, you can bind it to a key like so:

(define-key osx-key-mode-map [f5] 'lgrep)

I’m using Aquamacs hence my usage of osx-key-mode-map. Plain vanilla Emacs users can do this instead:

(define-key global-map [f5] 'lgrep)

If you’re interested in learning how to set up a sane Emacs environment for Erlang hacking, you can view my screencast on the subject here.

Update: Switched rgrep in lieu of lgrep since rgrep recurses into subdirs

Book Recommendations

I’m considering learning Flash and ActionScript for a side project. The problem is I’ve always steered clear of all things Flash so I have no familiarity with the community — who the experts are, which are the good books to have, what are the must-have 3rd party tools, etc. I’ll also point out that the project would be using Adobe’s latest version — AS3 and Flex, I think.

I can figure out the first and the last on my own but I need to lay a technical foundation first. To do that I need some reference material. I think what I need is one or two solid books I can read and get myself up to speed.

So, if you could only own two books on Flex and AS3 what would they be? I’m not looking for “Teach Yourself Flash In 21 Days” caliber books. The ideal book would be a solid introduction written for an experienced non-Flash programmer. Bonus points for books which also cover 2D and 3D gaming in Flash.