Anyone who is even a little bit serious about their music listening habits puts together a top whatever list around this time of the year. I have been doing this every year since graduating college and passing it around to friends and family. This year I decided to take vacation between the Christmas and New Year holidays and I have used some of that extra time to put together this article rather than a simple ten line list.

There has been a lot of chatter regarding a promised release of TextMate 2 this year (2011) or before Christmas (presumably 2011) and Allan Odgaard’s questionable promise that TextMate 2 would be a free upgrade to existing TextMate customers. The fact remains that if you purchased a license for TextMate and then spent a few hours to get to know it, you probably loved it. I did, and I do.

The promise of a TextMate 2 upgrade was nice but after the vaporware dramedy that ensued in the years following the announcement it seemed irrational to expect it to be realized. Many people complained. Many people remained highly satisfied with the powerful features and relative stability of TextMate. Others jumped ship to explore alternative text editors.

Lately I’ve become a bigger fan of the Google Chrome dev channel. The WebKit Web Inspector hasn’t quite stolen my heart but I can no longer claim total fidelity to FireBug and its swarms. After spending more and more time in Chrome’s console I have developed a mean squint, though. The default console font is just too small for my liking. What can I say? I like big fonts, and I cannot lie.

We are committed to [the qwerty keyboard], even though it was designed to satisfy constraints that no longer apply, was based on a style of typing no longer used, and is difficult to learn.

I developed an interest in the Dvorak keyboard something like ten years ago now. The exact date that I decided to go cold turkey on qwerty is fuzzy at this point, but an article entitled, “Roughly Nine Or Ten Years With Dvorak,” just didn’t have the same ring to it. So here I am, ten years later, still annoying my friends and colleagues when I forget to swap their software key mappings back to qwerty when I’m finished borrowing their computers.

This article addresses my experience with the Dvorak keyboard over the course of the last ten years. It does not aim to convince you that one keyboard is better than another. This is the story of my journey as qwerty keyboard user toward Dvorak keyboard curiosity, competency, and expertise.

Recapitulation

Nearly one year ago, I addressed my family and friends regarding a career decision that I was about to make. A lot of thought went into my decision and the choice to share some underlying details with them publicly. I put a lot of value in my family and friends’ input regarding all big decisions in my life.

Countless hours were spent then wrestling with point and counterpoint offered both internally and interactively while I tried to reign in emotions and remain objective. It was a difficult and stressful process. Naturally, I’m a very analytical thinker and I take pride in making informed, rational decisions. I challenged my pragmatism a year ago by deciding to jump into the relative unknown to see what kinds of opportunities I could make for myself.

Today, I revisit that process as I prepare to make another big decision.

Simplifying Large CoffeeScript Project Builds With Cake

Introduction

In my last post I described some methods for test-driving CoffeeScript development. If you caught the buzz, by now you may have a sprawling CoffeeScript codebase that is quickly outgrowing a simple

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coffee --watch --compile

command for production compilation and deployment… you’re ready for a slice of Cake!

Test Driving Client-side Development with Jasmine & CoffeeScript

Introduction

As the development of our new cloud based Social CRM system has progressed we have watched the amount of JavaScript in our repository grow. Much of this code is jQuery or jQueryUI and is entirely related to the presentation layer. There are various methods and tools for automated user-interface testing available to modern web application developers but they can feel very heavyweight.

For logic in our JavaScript code we wanted a fast and lightweight framework that can make our client-side testing as painless and enjoyable as possible. That’s a tall order, and one that required a couple ingredients to achieve.

This post is for my mom, dad, & sister, and any other family or friends that find their way here. I have recently changed jobs, and my immediate family have all asked me, “why?” as well as, “what are you going to be doing?” In this short post, I will answer those questions.

Let me start by saying that I don’t have a formal design background. I have a couple of degrees from an engineering university and I think I can generally recognize good design.

My sister, Jacqui, does have a formal design background and recently graduated from Parsons The New School for Design (with Top Honors!). I attended her graduation ceremony in May and she now has a job on Madison Avenue in NYC. My grandfather worked on Madison Avenue for many years as a graphic artist as well. I, however, have never worked on Madison Avenue or earned a design degree. I’m hoping I have the art gene.