This weekend I gave a presentation on the Jekyll static site generator at MOSSCon. In this video I explain what Jekyll is, how to install it, and give a tour of the starter site you get when you run jekyll new my-awesome-blog.
I’ve wanted to switch my email program to Mozilla Thunderbird for a while, but I always gave up when trying to import my old mail. My old email client used the MH mail format, which Thunderbird cannot easily import. Luckily, I found a blog post that describes how to use the packf command to convert MH email to the MBOX mail format that Thunderbird uses.
I’ve spent a lot of time last year learning my tools better, and I’ve built up a list of plug-ins for Visual Studio that help me work smarter and faster. All of the plug-ins below work on both Visual Studio 2010 and 2012.
One of the coolest parts of Git is that once you learn it, you will never need to use another VCS. My company uses Perforce for version control, and it can be painful. So when I got to work on a new greenfield project, I stuck everything in Git. That worked great for a few weeks until I needed to begin collaborating with other developers who would only use Perforce. Fortunately, Git has a Python script that lets you interact with Perforce servers using a special “git p4” command set. The tricky part is getting it all set up on Windows where Git and Python are out of their normal Unix environment.
Back in November I was able to attend the Software Craftsmanship North America conference in Chicago. I signed up for the post-conference Code Retreat, which sounded like a fun day of writing code with my peers. During the conference I met many awesome people, including Mike Clement. Mike told me about the upcoming Global Day of Code Retreat on December 8th. Mike said he was going to run a session in Utah, and persuaded me to run one in Louisville.
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