Barbarian Meets Coding
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WebDev, UX & a Pinch of Fantasy

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Announcing Wizards Use Vim and Tons Of Writing

I’ve spent a huge chunk of this week writing Wizards Use Vim. A lot. Whenever I have any Dad free time I write. Since the announcement last week I’ve published about 14 new versions of the book. These are some things I’ve been working on this week:

  • I’ve shaped and reshaped the content of the whole book
  • I’ve broken it down into 3 different paths: Apprentice, Master and Grandmaster to give you that awesome sense of completion and achievement after each part. (And because it is cool to be called a Grandmaster).
  • I’ve reviewed and thoroughly improved:
    • The preamble and the introduction
    • A Taste of Vim
    • Here Be Dragons, a chapter on the biggest pitfalls when learning Vim

I’ve also been creating a lot of art drafts for the book. Here are some of them:

Vim's steep learning curve Can't exit Vim

By the way, remember that as a subscriber to the newsletter you get a free version of the book. Read this short book, learn Vim and boost your productivity as a Software Developer inside Vim or within your favorite text editor via plugin (lots of editors support Vim-like plugins e.g. Visual Studio, Visual Studio, Atom, Sublime Text, etc…)

If you’ve downloaded the book and are wondering whether or not to read the book right now (I have several readers ask me that very question) I’ve got an answer for you. It all depends on what you want to get out of this book:

  • If you want to tag along and experience how a book gets made and is slowly improved over time, provide feedback that has a bigger impact then read the chapters from Proposal or Draft onward.
  • If you want to read a version as closer to the final version as possible and still would like to provide feedback and impact the book then Candidate and Finished are the ones for you.

Here’s other things I did aside from writing Wizards Use Vim:

Writing

Reading

I finished Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy and there was a bit in the end that I found very compelling and that I want to share with you. It was about building resilient (love) relationships and goes like this…

(…) A key was buried in the couples conversations which often started with bids for attention, affection, support or laughter.
We are making a bid whenever we say: Ey! Look at that bird or Are we out of butter?
When a partner makes a bid we have two choices: To turn away, or to turn toward.
To turn away is to be dismissive or ignore the bid.
Turning toward means engaging.

Sheryl Sandberg - Option B

Engage. My friend. Choose to engage.

I’ve also been reading:

  • Mastering Vim: Building a Development Environment with Vim and Neovim by Ruslan Osipov. Yet another book on Vim. It is pretty good thus far. As a differentiating factor from other books I’ve read on Vim, it takes you linearly from beginner to advanced with lot of helpful tips along the way and advice on plugins to make a modern development environment based on Vim.
  • The Colour Of Magic. I want to instill the whimsical nature of Terry Pratchett novels in Wizards Use Vim and so I’m re-reading this book from Discworld and I’ll probably read lots more in the weeks to come.

Listening

I’ve been listening to:

Watching

  • I started watching Pacific Rim Uprising, enjoyed it, then Teo woke up and I still don’t know if the Kaiju invaded earth or not. I enjoyed this one a lot more than the first one.

Things That Inspired Me

Cool Stuff

And that’s it for this week. Have an awesome Friday and an even more awesome weekend!


Jaime González García

Written by Jaime González García , dad, husband, software engineer, ux designer, amateur pixel artist, tinkerer and master of the arcane arts. You can also find him on Twitter jabbering about random stuff.Jaime González García