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Talks by Clinton R. NixonNovember 13

Page updated 2008-11-13: Talks by Clinton R. Nixon.

Relentless Automation, or Useful Stuff RoundupSeptember 3

I recently read Neal Ford’s The Productive Programmer and it was fantastic. One of the key points in it that hit home was that you should automate anything you have to do twice, even if it takes longer to automate than it would to do it by hand, as you’ll probably have to do it many more times. With that in mind, I’ve been using others’ and my own automated tasks way more often. Here’s a roundup of the most useful stuff I’ve found or created:

Quickly jumping to projects

Muness Alrubaie wrote a good post on how to automatically create aliases to cd to your projects. Being able to jump to my weblog by typing crnixon.org or to my spect project by typing spect has been super useful.

Reading gem source code

I read the source code to gems I’m working with for documentation all the time. I used to have an alias, so I could type egem capis and it would open the capistrano gem. Unfortunately, it just did an ls | head -1, so it’d grab the first gem directory that matched the argument.

gemedit is a way better implementation of that. It not only prompts you if your argument is ambiguous, but it also has bash completion built in. Add the following to your .profile and you’re set:

Extending Rails: Understanding and Creating PluginsJuly 27

Page updated 2008-07-27: Extending Rails: Understanding and Creating Plugins.

Planning for OSCONJuly 20

I’m attending O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference for the third year in a row this week, and I’m getting really excited. I normally write my preview and planning post earlier, but I’ve been slammed getting my 3 hour tutorial presentation ready.

Anyway, here’s what I’m most excited about this week:

Monday

Well, first off, I talk at 8:30 in the morning. Seriously, thanks to whoever’s responsible for that. I get to talk and be done with it and can relax for the rest of the week. Last year, I talked on Thursday afternoon, and it had me on edge the whole conference.

I was really torn on how to spend my afternoon. There’s a tutorial on Django that was tempting me, but I think I’ll be going to Memcached and MySQL: Everything You Need To Know. It’s directly applicable to my job, and a sysadmin from Six Apart and a head guy at MySQL probably know a heck of a lot of stuff. Might be dry; definitely will be full of info.

Tuesday

I’m jazzed about Tuesday morning. John Resig of jQuery fame is giving a tutorial on Secrets of JavaScript Libraries. This promises to be awesome.

Tuesday afternoon was a h

About Clinton R. NixonJuly 13

Page updated 2008-07-13: About Clinton R. Nixon.