Monday Questions is a recurring series on Approaching Normal. For
more questions like this, please visit the
archives
The text editor is the programmer’s main tool. The best programmers I
know are masters of their chosen editor, whatever that might be. Knowing
how to be productive with your editor can make the difference between a
good developer and a great developer.
So today, I’m asking you to share with us what your favorite text editor
is and why.
My editor of choice is Emacs. It’s
the first “real” editor that I ever bothered to learn well. I started
learning it right after reading The Pragmatic
Programmer
for the first time. I have a love/hate relationship with Emacs. It’s an
amazingly powerful editor - there’s very little that it can’t do.
Unfortunately, it’s as ugly as they come and a pain to customize. Lisp
is cool in the same sense that Latin is cool. Beautiful language, but
hardly anyone speaks it. I had hoped that when I made the move to OS
X, I
would switch to TextMate. I tried it, and even
bought the Peepcode screencast on
Textmate. In
the end though, I couldn’t give up Emacs. It has too many features that
I rely on that Textmate just doesn’t have, like split buffer
windows and
dired mode.
As always, post your answer in the comments below.
Monday Questions is a recurring series on Approaching Normal. For
more questions like this, please visit the
archives
Most people, it seems, listen to music while they work. Whether it’s to
aid concentration or drown out their coworkers, I see most people do it.
So today’s question is:
What music do you prefer to code/design/whatever by?
I have very diverse musical tastes and listen to just about everything,
but I find that lyrics are distracting when I need to concentrate. So I
prefer Jazz like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, or classical like Yo Yo
Ma when I need to focus.
Monday Questions is a recurring series on The Curiosity Project. For
more questions like this, please visit the
archives
As previously
noted
I recently switched my development environment from a Linux laptop to a
Mac.
This Monday’s Question is: What is your development machine?
Tell us your OS, hardware specs, etc.
Monday Questions is a recurring series on Approaching Normal. For
more questions like this, please visit the
archives
I’ve been a CVS and SVN user for a number of years. Recently I’ve been
watching all of the buzz around distributed SCMs,
Git in particular. Git has been adopted by a number
of projects lately, Rubinius being the one I
noticed most recently. I took down my SVN repository when I moved web
hosts, and haven’t put it back up yet. It seems like a good time to
switch to Git (or something similar) if there’s a benefit.
So this Monday’s Question is: What Source Code Management System do
you prefer, and why?
Monday Questions is a recurring series on Approaching Normal. For
more questions like this, please visit the
archives
I’m an avid reader, if you haven’t guessed by now. So today’s question
is What books have changed your life?
As always, post your answers in the comments below.
Monday Questions is a recurring series on Approaching Normal. For
more questions like this, please visit the
archives
I’m always on the lookout for good sources for technical information.
So, today’s question is: What are your 3 favorite technical sites?
Post your answers in the comments below.
Monday Questions is a recurring series on Approaching Normal. For
more questions like this, please visit the
archives
Feedburner tells me that I now have over
100 subscribers to my RSS
feed. That of course
doesn’t include the people who read this via Planet Ruby on
Rails. In honor of this milestone,
today’s question is: Who are you, and why are you here?. I’d like
you to introduce yourself, and tell me why you come here.
Post your answers in the comments below.
Monday Questions is a recurring series on Approaching Normal. For
more questions like this, please visit the
archives
This is a follow up to last week’s question How do you decide what
technologies to
explore?
Today I want to know What technologies are you exploring?
I’ll go first. Aside from Ruby and
Rails, Erlang
and CouchDB are the things that I’m currently
spending time looking into.
Post your answers in the comments below.
Monday Questions is a recurring series on Approaching Normal. For
more questions like this, please visit the
archives
Technology moves at such a rapid pace that there is constantly something
new that is tempting me to explore it. I find it very difficult to pick
and choose which things to devote time to learning. So today’s question
is: How do you choose what technologies to learn more about, and which
to ignore?
Put your answers in the comments below.
I’m going to start posting questions for my readers every Monday. At
least until I run out of questions.
Last week, I posted a collection of mini book
reviews.
I have a bit of an addiction to books, which should be obvious by now.
So today’s questions is: What are you reading? Doesn’t matter
whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, technical or biographical. Let us
all know what you’re reading (or have read recently).
