Hello New World

Sun, Sep 7, 2014

A new job means setting up new computers and getting comfortable in your environment. As a seasoned ops guy I’ve shied away from getting too comfortable in any given environment, because when you’re dealing with a constantly growing production environment less customization is better. Vim is a good example. It sucks to log into a machine, fire up vim, go for your favorite keymapping (like F3 for NERDTree), and realizing it’s just not available. Which you do over and over again out of shear force of habit.

You could write your custom environment into a configuration management manifest/recipe/playbook/etc, but the less packages you’ve got installed the better. Just ask your security team.

In my new position I’ll still have a number of servers to deal with, but they won’t be production. I’m also switching from a mostly task-based workflow to a project-based workflow. I’ve always preferred Mac OS for my daily desktop (my first foray into Linux was dual-booting YellowDog on my Wallstreet Powerbook). So here’s what I set up first on my freshly re-installed Macbook Pro, my essential apps:

Homebrew.
Dropbox (mostly so I could sync my 1Password vault, see below).
1Password (mostly so I had easy access to my github credentials, but 1Password is invaluable to me).
iTerm2 (with the Solarized theme).
The latest vim and Macvim (via homebrew).
My vimrc. I use vim-plug; I highly recommend it. It’s probably time to do a documentation and organization exercise on my vimrc though.
Golang (via homebrew) I think I’ll have more opportunities to use this language.
pip (via easy_install), virtualenv (via pip), and vitualenvwrapper (via pip).
Evernote - Extensive notes will be important.
Alfred, a useful launcher/mouse-free utility.
Hugo, which I’m using to create this site. Built with Go.

I’m sure there will be a lot more I’ll remember I need as I go along. I might go back to using Wunderlist, for example. I’ve already got a workstation with plenty of RAM running Microsoft Hyper-V for virtual machines as needed, and I have an ESXi host for testing from an initiator side as well. But the lab side is a subject for a whole other post.