How many skills will you master in your lifetime?

Setting the Stage

I came upon the thought of ‘Mastery’ the other day while musing with a close friend of mine. A loose thread that I was happy to pull, and pull, and pull until I had unraveled the entire picture and was left to ponder the mess I had made for myself. It stuck with me in the peculiar way that errant, persistent thoughts do, until I finally decided to give it the lead and see where it took me. Following that thread lead me down a rabbit hole of research papers, unfounded conjecture, and undalterated hearsay. But, it also produced a number of very interesting insights worth sharing. In trying to determine what exactly it is behind both learning and masterin...

“Write what you know. That should leave you with plenty of free time.”

― Howard Nemerov

Check out the Resources page.

Okay, okay, I lied a bit. I can't cover everything that makes a great dev environment in one post— but... I can get you part of the way there with a better terminal.

Let us assume the following scenario:

You're a developer, or maybe you're a designer. On Windows.

Your friends laugh at you whenever you bring up the subject, so you have no idea what it's like to have a streamlined terminal environment with all the bells and whistles that OS level customization and workflow optimization has to offer.

Fear not!

For those of you who can't (or won't) switch, you too can have a reasonably attractive and at least halfway usable terminal environment.

I wrote this post primarily with web development in mind, you software devs out there should probably stick to Cygwin and MinGW. For the most part this post will focus on customizing a console to your needs using lightweight, psuedo-portable tools.

Ready? Great, let's go.

The Final Prod...

Build Momentum

It's easy to get caught up in all of the inanities of web development. The gold rush of startups, the maker culture and the attitude of the 20 something startup hacker bootstrapping the "Next Big Thing". Sometimes it gets hard to separate the signal from the noise with all of the buzz— but it doesn't matter, you've read all the top 10 lists and StackOverflow posts you need to in order to get started.

You're on the cusp of a great wave, hat in hand and eyes to the stars. Everything is all set...so why hasn't it happened yet?

Well, to get there you're going to have to drop the entitlement and start moving. Getting from point A to point B is a lot harder than just having passion and a pretty good idea. You can carry your magnum opus on an ensemble patchwork of sticks and duct tape, but you have to have taken that first step for anything to come after.

Stop Procrastinating

Sometimes, you're a beginner, and boy do I know how that f...

Today marks a minor milestone in the lifespan of Whisper, a small project I've been developing on and off for quite some time. It's an ultra-light platform built for one purpose: secure, disposable, anonymous messages over email.

If you have to ask, Whisper was built with you in mind.

One of the first questions you might ask is "Why would you build such a thing, who is it useful to?", and my answer to that is: If you have to ask, Whisper was built with you in mind. Because security should be transparent, security should be seamless, and most importantly it should be easy. Your average user shouldn't have to think twice or know the importance of something like HTTPS to enjoy its benefits.

As a user, understanding the importance of security is already difficult, but learning to actually use secure tools is even moreso. We have had tools like PGP/G...