tfnico's blog

I was a bit unsure whether I should put this post on the GitMinutes blog, but figured I'd rather not mess up the nice episode overview there. I'll share this link via the GitMinutes Twitter and Google+  feeds, and of course everyone listening will hear about it. I am a bit worried that some people will not like that I'm going in a commercial direction with the podcast. Git is an open source project, and all my guests have participated on a volunteer basis. I've received hundreds of micro-donations via Gittip and Flattr , and probably some of the donors expected the show to keep going as an independent thing. If anyone feels hurt by this move, let me know and I'll reimburse your donations at least. The main reason I'm doing this is that I want to create more GitMinutes content. Not only for the podcast, but maybe do screencasts and other stuff as well. I want to engage the community in a lot of new ways, and this will require resources that I don't want...

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config...

I just finished setting up a new laptop at work, and in doing so I revamped my personal computer automation quite a bit. I set up Boxen for installing software, and I improved my handling of dot-files using vcsh , which I'll cover in the next blog-post after this one. Since it's a Mac, it doesn't come with any reasonable package manager built in. A lot of people get along with a combination of homebrew  or MacPorts  plus manual installs, but this time I took it a step further and decided to install all the "desktop" tools like VLC and Spotify using GitHub's Boxen :   include vlc   include cyberduck   include pgadmin3   include spotify   include jumpcut   include googledrive   include virtualbox If the above excerpt looks like Puppet to you, it's because it is. The nice thing about this is that I can apply the same puppet scripts on my Ubuntu machines as well. Boxen is Mac-specific, Puppet is not. It was a little weird to get...

One of the reasons why I started podcasting , is that I listen to a lot of podcasts . It took me a long while to build up my podcatching portfolio. For half a year, I listened to mostly gaming podcasts because the only programmer podcasts I knew about was Hanselminutes and Java Posse . I simply didn't know what programmer podcasts were out there . Podcast discovery is about as well established as it was 10 years ago, meaning iTunes . Of course you can blindly google for "<topic> podcast", or you might start off with some recommendations from friends, but there still is no established way of discovering more podcasts of the kind you'd like (1). Another problem is that I see very little cross-pollination between the programmer podcasts. Even though they intersect just the right amount, I never heard  JavaScript Jabber mentioned on TheChangelog , for example (2). To help remedy this I've thrown together all the currently active, English-speaking pr...

A couple of years back I did a talk for the local .Net user group on how to use Git on Windows . I also wrote about my Git setup on Windows . Even though I don't do a lot of work in this environment, I figured I could contribute a lot of good tips and experience as a somewhat seasoned Git user. Since then a few things have happened, so next week I'm heading back to Bonn-to-Code.Net  to refresh their memories on what Git is about, and what has changed since last time. Update: Talk done. Recording and slides can be found here . So what has changed since last time then? Microsoft has fully adopted Git as their (second) version control system of choice. Git projects can be hosted inTeam Foundation Server, as well as on VisualStudio.com  (which is kind of like TFS in the cloud). You can operate Git repositories from within Visual Studio (without installing any extra Git tooling, thanks to libgit2). On the desktop, you can and should still install MsysGit if you'r...