The flight of an open-source project
2013-07-15

Welcome aboard!

Those were the words that a flight attendant said to me as a boarded a plane to visit Paris for a summer vacation of wine and cheese. It was a long flight; about 8 hours. This particular plane was older and didn’t have the personal TVs installed yet. What this meant was I didn’t have any movies to distract me from working on a pet project I had going on. This little project was a single vim file in my vimrc.

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Unite.vim, The plugin you didn't know you need
2013-06-02

Unite.vim

What is this? If you’ve never heard of this Vim plugin, then this post is for you. This is one of those hidden gems in the Vim plugin world that is truly life changing. I think this plugin is so awesome that I’ve decided to write a post dedicated to it so that more people know about it.

The plugin is written by Shougo Matsushita. He has written a lot of other popular plugins, notably neocomplcache and vimshell. I use a lot of his plugins, so I started to notice when certain plugins started using Unite as a dependency, like neobundle and vimfiler.

At first it looked like Unite was just a general purpose library, but I was in for a surprise because it is so much more than that.

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On TypeScript
2013-04-19

What’s the deal?

For the past week I’ve been fortunate to work on an internal project which was purely greenfield and built on Node/Express on the backend, and AngularJS on the front-end. It was a ton of fun and I learned a lot in the process, most particularly TypeScript and CoffeeScript.

TypeScript was of interest because the application I was writing contained some pretty complex calculations. The existing implementation was in Java, and at first glance it seemed like it would be a good idea to have some type safety whilst reimplementing the algorithm.

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.NET/WPF to HTML/CSS/Javscript
2013-04-13

In the beginning…

For the vast majority of my career I’d say I was a Microsoft guy. I took Java in university and toyed around with Linux at home, but what paid the bills was my knowledge and expertise in Microsoft technologies that I’ve built up over the years.

Then Metro and Windows 8 came, and the writing was on the wall. Microsoft really screwed up. In their efforts to play catch up, they alienated their business customers and came up with solutions that consumers did not want. Despite their best efforts they could not stop the avalanche that was Node and HTML5. Everyone was moving to HTML5, and even Microsoft themselves could not ignore this as now they’re supporting hosting Node on Azure.

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Jumping on the hacker blog bandwagon
2013-04-10

Following the tutorial… Not much to say here…I went to Octopress’ website, followed the instructions, and now I have a working blog. Pretty cool. It definitely feels liberating to blog using plain ‘ol markdown text editing. So I guess the next step I’ll do is import my existing blog content, and then add some personal styling to this thing :)