Posts tagged "platform":

Side Project Up and Running

So the thing about knowing the platform, maintaining a side project, experimenting with new ideas and all that, is that you have to get started sometime. I always want to keep reading blogs and watching YouTube tutorials, without ever doing anything. One of my goals is to foster my internal bias for action.

Today I named my project: Regius Files. Regius is Latin, “of or belong to a king”, so it sounds powerful, is easy to pronounce, and regius.com is available. (I didn’t purchase it yet though… maybe tomorrow).

And I chose a requirements tool… Another of my goals is to do things in a correct fashion. So I will maintain a specification. I’m going with rmtoo, an open source tool, where you write the requirements as plain old text files. It supports requirements, constraints, and design decisions, and has some other nice features. Mainly I chose it because I can baseline the requirements along with the code base.

And I wrote my first requirement, which you can see in my GitHub project! https://github.com/scarlet-begonias/regius-files/blob/master/requirements/requirements/project.req

It goes without saying I chose scarlet-begonias as my GitHub user id, due to the awesome Grateful Dead song of the same name.

Definitely feels good to have something out there, even though probably it will be a slow haul, seeing as how I have to keep my day job happy.

The Emacs Platform

A month ago I wrote down my goals to achieve a deep understanding of my entire work platform, from editor to architecture; something I never did before, since I always only learned enough to get through each day.

It’s nice to have goals. How shall I meet them? Especially since my primary goal is still to get through each day. My boss does like it a lot when I meet my commitments.

So far I’m taking a depth-first approach where I take a deep dive into each plank of my platform. I can’t take this to extremes of course; everything on my to-do list is very extensive and will reward years of research; so someday I’ll have to choose another plank and dive into it.

But so far I’m having a great time with Emacs.

I can take notes (org mode).

I can maintain a blog site, like this one (org mode plus org-static-blog).

I can track my work (org mode time tracking features).

I can manage my money (ledger mode).

I get a high-quality Git interface (magit).

I can write presentations (org mode plus org-reveal).

Not that everything’s perfect. I tried the Emacs shell but gave it up and returned to konsole. Konsole is just a better fit for my needs. And I tried a couple of email clients (Gnus and mu4e). Actually I really liked both of these… but my colleagues didn’t care for it. Emacs mail clients are not able to quote the original HTML message, when replying to HTML messages; they remove all the HTML formatting. Since all Outlook users (which is all of my email correspondents) use HTML messages by default, I wasn’t really playing well with others. Even so, I did end up with a much improved mail system; more about that later.

I’ve gotten the best, most interesting Emacs advice from Mike Zamansky’s Using Emacs Series. I recommend it highly.