I recently read a poll about why people use twitter. It was very interesting seeing the reasons people gave and I’d like to share my thoughts on why you should, too.

You might be laughing to yourself if you already do tweet, but you’d be surprised at how many don’t.

Network with other programmers

I’ve said before that networking is one of the best things you can do for your career. Not only can networking help you find a job, but I’ve found that programmers are generally very helpful and accessible on twitter. Programmers love it when you ask about a project they are involved with. Call it an ego thing.

One other really cool networking use for twitter: having something to talk about when you meet at JUGs or conferences. A follow request is an instant icebreaker and gets the networking process started for you.
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I have always wanted to give something back to the wonderful creators of the Remember The Milk to-do list service. It has been a great tool for me the past couple years by helping me keep organized. Thank you, RTM crew!

Over the last couple months I’ve been taking a bit of spare time to write something that I hope all of us can benefit from: GroovyRTM

What is GroovyRTM?

GroovyRTM allows you to easily take advantage of the Remember The Milk REST API using any language on the JVM. In short, you can now write apps for Remember The Milk without having to worry about all the HTTP transaction stuff, error handling, etc. As its name implies, it’s written in Groovy, which made it much easier to write and test. Continue reading →

Let me tell you how to maximize your productivity on the Bourne Again SHell while minimizing your effort. bash has a ton of tricks and shortcuts that allow you to command it with little effort, and I intend to show you the features that help me day in and day out.

Today I’m going to explain the use of features like history, brace and file expansion, and other tricks by example and give you references for later.

Master your history

Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. This is arguably one of the best productivity enhancing features of any shell.

You can check your history with the history command, which prints your entire history by default. Alternatively, you can filter the list with:
[bash]
history 10 # prints last 10 entries
history | grep cmd # searches history for cmd
[/bash]
Each entry has a number, which you can then execute with !<number>

Now suppose I want to copy a file to a directory and then change to that directory. The quick way to do that with history is:
[bash]
cp myfile.txt my/directory/path
cd !$ # cd my/directory/path
[/bash]

or if I forget to run a command as super-user:
[bash]
vi /etc/fstab # oops!
sudo !! # sudo vi /etc/fstab
[/bash]
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