I had a couple good tweet conversations about my Social Network for Coders post. @louielouie mentioned the lack of a twitter-like feed and client but also added that there is a lot of commit noise when dealing with source control repos. @evercode thought there should also be a forum-like interface or even something like Reddit. I’m not sure what would come of this but I like the conversation. Maybe some day Github will add more community features? Or maybe this should be something built as a coordination between Github and another service?

So sous vide is really fun. The idea is you cook under specific temperatures for a longer time so that you can reach the desired “done-ness”, usually under a vacuum. For example, cooking a steak on the grill for a long time is a difficult way to get there. With sous vide, Medium is just 136º for an hour. Then you sear it and enjoy. I picked up the Anova Precision Cooker on Amazon and haven’t regretted it once.

Social Network for Coders

Github is interesting to me because I think it’s a social network. It’s a social network for coders and we don’t really use it for that. One could argue that the comments and community that grows around an open source repository is people using it as a social network. I tend to agree with that. There are still a lot of cases where it’s treated like a replacement for a centralized source control system and that’s where it ends.

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I just realized that January 5 was the 6th anniversary of the Triangle CocoaHeads meetup. I actually started it outside of meetup.com for a few months with little luck. Moving it to meetup’s site really helped us grow. Well, that and having a great community, great speakers, and consistent meetings. After a couple years of inconsistent meetings, I’m trying to get that consistency back this year.

Last year I listened to a lot of books and it was great. This year I hope to to more. Also, more reading of print books. This snowy weekend I read through a book about comics, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It explores the history of sequential art and breaks down the tools used to communicate ideas. If you are interested in comics—whether it is as a reader or creator—it is well worth the read.

Ever since I started really learning how to draw back in October, I’m starting to develop a sketchbook addiction. As of now I have 11 sketchbooks and 4 of them I’m actively using. I’ve found that it’s much easier to overcome my laziness by leaving sketchbooks at all the places I frequently sit. Then I have no excuse to not pick it up and draw.

Okay, so I just backed Manton Reece’s micro.blog project on Kickstarter. Having my own little microposts on my blog has been fun—when I remember to use it. I think this is a good thing for this type of content and I hope it takes off. I was backer #49 a few minutes ago and as of this writing it is already at 71 backers.

The WhiteFox Keyboard

In 2013 I fell in love with mechanical keyboards. More specifically I fell in love with small mechanical keyboards. I still don’t really like big keyboards which is why I was so happy to learn about 60% sizes like the Poker II. That was my first, then in 2015 I picked up the Poker III. The one problem with the 60% size is there are no arrow keys. This wasn’t a big deal because I stubbornly used Karabiner to reconfigure certain key combinations to be arrow keys.

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This weekend I moved our company’s primary code repository from a private server to Github. It wasn’t easy as there were 5 years of code changes (including large database files and even built binaries). I was able to shrink it from about 4Gb to 440mb by removing large files from previous commits, moving built libraries and databases to S3, and removing unused parts of the repo. I could not have done it in a reasonable time without the BFG Repo Cleaner. Initial attempts with git filter-branch would take hours. This tool would take seconds.

Well, that’s been a year. I got all excited about blogging and then 2016 happend. Thanks 2016. Now where was I?