Over the years there are a number of tools I have used to manage projects and todo lists. I've tried may note-taking apps. I'm written notes in markdown and then org-mode. The one long running trend that has persisted for all of these things is a move toward plain text. Plain text will never go away. Plain text has no vendor lock-in. Plain text files can be opened on any system with any editor, regardless of your markup style preferences.

For the past year or so I've been using a KVM switch to be able to easily swap between my work computer and personal computer. This is great for having the same dual monitor and standing desk setup in my home office, regardless of what I am hacking on. The Problem The only problem was my custom keyboard(s) running QMK weren't recognized as a keyboard by the KVM, and only work in the USB hub port.

My blog is in danger of becoming only about Emacs with a dash of musings on JavaScript, but I think it’s important to document my findings after working solely in Emacs as a Software Engineer for the past five months. This is by no means a complete guide to getting set up to work as a JavaScript developer in Emacs, but should give you the tools you need to find your own path with some ease.

Two hills I’m prepared to die on are the superiority of modal editing and the near limitless power and customization of Emacs. While vscode, atom, etc are nice and have decent communities building plugins around them, I’ll be configuring emacs to take me on my journey to learn javascript. There is a built in javascript mode with very basic functionality but we want better highlighting and parsing plus syntax checking. This is where js2-mode comes in: http://elpa.

I’m a huge fan of Emacs and a huge fan of programming using Clojure. I’ve been trying to avoid Javascript, but it’s reach is everywhere and learning it will definitely help my day job efforts helping teams create cloud native applications. One hurdle I faced in setting up Emacs for Javascript development was paredit inserting a space before opening parens in Javascript and JSON modes; leaving me with things like console.

Emacs is an operating system. Emacs has a never-ending learning curve. Emacs is a way of life. All of these things are both a joke and largely true. As a die hard Vim fan, I never thought I’d fall into such enthusiastic use of Emacs, yet I have and don’t want to look back. I started down this path because of my interest in learning Common Lisp and then Clojure. The Emacs tooling for lisps is superb and once I learned you could configure text editing in Emacs to behave identically to Vim, I set out on my spirit quest.

Since I just recently made a getting started with Clojure in Sublime Text video, I decided to also make a video showing how to get started with Clojure in Github’s Atom. I hope you enjoy it as well. Clojure in Atom

After the last Clojure MKE (Milwaukee) meetup, I decided it would be good of me to make a quick video showing others how to get up and running with Clojure on Sublime Text. I hope you enjoy it. Clojure in Sublime Text

Keeping email well organized is a challenge all of us face. Tags, Flags, and Inbox Zero. This short article isn’t going to solve all your email woes, but will give you a quick tip to help you on your way to email nirvana. Mail.app on the Mac has a nice built in feature called Flags. Using flags helps to categorize and even note the priority of a message. Rather than keep a taxonomy floating in your head, I’ve written a quick tutorial over at Tuts+ to show you how to give email flags meaningful names.

The beauty of developing with popular web frameworks like Django is that a lot of repetitious work has been done for you, so you can focus on building your site. It’s also great to know that the core of what you’re running has undergone the scrutiny of a large open-source community and should be less susceptible to large security holes. Whether you’re a developer or not, one thing that is not inherently simple is knowing how to get these web frameworks up and running outside of your own development or testing environment.