alifity [ playground ]

If you are living on ruby world, railscasts probably sound familiar on you ears. Railscasts is a screencast blog created by Ryan Bates, that gives you guidelines, tips, and many others. I have downloaded all of episodes, and have watched most of them, then I think of just one word to describe all of it, awesome!.

Benefits of watching railscasts, are surely, to improve you coding skills on Ruby on Rails. If you watch other aspects of it, you will find other ‘things’ , that I am sure, useful for you too ;). Below are the other ‘things’:

Zsh

Several episodes of railscasts, I see that Ryan using terminal that has title ‘zsh’ on it. Since I am bash user, I discard zsh for along time. Recently I give zsh a try. At the beginning, zsh look weird for me, but I only need 2 days to be familiar with it. Now my default shell changed from Bash to zsh.

Zsh is cool shell, it is incorporated many of the useful features of bash, ksh, and tcsh into single package. So, this shell is longer to load than others. Read this zsh complete guide to start and hack zsh and you’ll find that this is a wonderful shell.

Monaco font

On railscasts, default editor that used is textmate. If you see deeply, you will find that textmate has a good looking font. Because I am not Mac user, nor textmate user, so I try to googling it. Then I found the answer on stackoverflow. Font used by textmate is named Monaco, and you can download here. Let me repeat it, this is a good looking font, absolutely :D.

Shortcuts.. Shortcuts

Watch an railscasts episode, and you will impress how Ryan used shortcuts well. How he does auto complete on textmate, how he changes multi windows, reloads browser.. what a super time saver!. This behavior reminded me when I was learning how shortcuts on Vim works. Just like type less, do more.

Focus on Specific Area

Unlike another screencasts that cover all of desktop, railscasts using only portion of screen. This technique, I believe to minimize distraction, and keep user focus on right thing. This technique is outside of programming attitude, but can be guidelines if someday I create a screencast ;).

Thanks to Ryan Bates and Railscasts, because of you I find new excitements of how to choose right stuffs, use stuffs effectively, and how to be a better programmer.

This is a long road, and something can change in the future, so just enjoy it!