One Month of Coderwall Protips
On 1 January 2013, I signed up on Coderwall – a place for developers to share tips and connect with one another. I’ve been posting programming-related tips on Twitter for quite some time now and had always wanted to collect them somewhere. Coderwall seemed to be a good fit.
I ended up sharing a tip – or “protip” in Coderwall speak – each workday in January, covering topics like Git/GitHub, Shell, C, Ruby, Chef, and Vagrant. 22 protips in total. I’ve put together a list of them below.
I got 22 Protips, but Java ain’t one
- Rescue Your GitHub Downloads
- Set up Dash as default shell for scripts on OS X
- SSH client with Kerberos support in two lines of Ruby
- Terminal colors with tput
- Normalize return code to 0 or 1 in C
- Embedding POD with different programming languages
- Easiest way to parse a cookbook’s metadata file
- Get real absolute path to a directory in Shell
- Minimal C Unit Testing
- Testing code inside ruby_block with ChefSpec
- Download code snapshots from GitHub without using Git
- How the Shebang is processed by the Linux kernel
- Calculate checksum for Chef’s remote_file resource
- Speed up package download in Vagrant boxes
- Document your shell scripts with TomDoc
- Check that a remote Git repo or ref exists
- Basic TDD with SML
- Easiest way to create or empty a file in Shell
- Knife plugin to generate README.md from metadata.rb
- Simple verbose mode for your shell scripts
- Get churn counts for Git repository
- Shell library to test your Unix tools like Git does
If you like any of my tips, I would appreciate your vote, of course.
How come?
I did this to practice writing and share some useful information along the way. After all, the only way to get better at writing is to write. It’s better to produce small bits of content regularly than to fail at writing full-blown blog posts (something I’ve been struggling with lately). Writing a couple of sentences a day can make all the difference. I hope this blog benefits from the exercise. Or maybe it already has.
Update (2013-02-04)
This post was quite well received in the Coderwall community. In fact, four of my tips took over the Featured Protips for a short time. Thanks for that!
