How grep got its name

thoughtbot is pairing up with Ben Orenstein to present a Vim course, this time at WorkBar. As part of this collaboration WorkBar is offering $50 off your first month’s membership if you register for the Vim course.

One thing you will discover at this course is the history of the command `grep’. This all starts back with `ed’, the original unix editor. ed was a command-line editor that worked identically to the colon-commands in vi and vim—in fact, you can press Q to get into ed mode (then type vi to get back into vim). From the ed editor you can issue common line-oriented commands like s, d, y, and so on:

:%s/rdoc/docr/g
:/include/d

If you’re following along at home you may wonder “how can I see the contents of this file?” Well if you just want to see every line you can use %p (% is “the whole file”, and p is “print to screen”), though it’s more likely that you want to see a small series of lines. 10,20p will show you lines 10 through 20, but maybe it makes more sense to see all lines matching a regular expression.

From ed, to see all lines matching “include”, use g/include/p. To see all lines matching “docr” use g/docr/p. In general, to see all lines matching the regular expression “re”, use g/re/p.

… And that’s how grep got its name.

Sign up now for the Vim course at WorkBar with Ben Orenstein on September 1st from 5PM to 9PM.

We’ve got several positions open (Developers, Designers, and Intern)

I just wanted to take a moment to remind everyone that we still have several positions open at thoughtbot.

<p>We&#8217;re looking to hire up to <strong>2 web designers</strong>, preferably one in Boston and one in <span class="caps">NYC</span>, and up to <strong>3 developers</strong> in Boston.</p>


<p>Also, this summer, we&#8217;ve had Nick Quaranto in as <strong>a development intern</strong>, and he&#8217;s worked out so well that we&#8217;d like to get another, so we&#8217;re opening the internship position back up to find another.</p>


<p>All positions include relocation expenses as part of the benefits.  You can read more about these positions on our <a href="http://www.thoughtbot.com/jobs">jobs page</a>.</p>


<p>Our team works in a relaxed and educational environment. We use the latest web development technologies, and embrace both agile development methodologies and a “getting real” project philosophy. We limit our work weeks to 40 hours, stock the fridge with free drinks, and provide lunch on Fridays.</p>


<p>We believe in goal-driven business development (we want to understand what’s valuable to clients before we begin), design-driven product development (we want to know what a product will look like and how it will work before we start building it) and test-driven software development (we want to ensure ongoing quality and a successful post-launch existence for the applications we build).</p>


<p>If you are interested, contact us at <a href="mailto:resumes@thoughtbot.com">resumes@thoughtbot.com</a>.</p>

Turning Our Attention Back to Hiring Developers

We’re relative small, so we just only have so much bandwidth to devote to hiring. Over the past few months, we diverted our attention away from hiring more developers to finding another great designer. Thankfully, we’ve found a great designer, and he’s going to be starting at the end of next week. So, the time has come to turn our attention back to hiring more excellent developers.

The ideal individual will have been using Ruby on Rails extensively (probably since before 1.0), have an excellent knowledge of Javascript, HTML, and CSS, and experience in TDD.

Our team works in a relaxed and educational environment. We limit our work weeks to 40 hours, stock the fridge with drinks and snacks, and provide lunch on Fridays. Our project teams are small, and we have an incredible focus on creating excellent code that not only follows, but defines Ruby on Rails best practices. Everyone on the team is given the freedom to work on Open Source projects and internal products like Hoptoad, Paperclip, and Shoulda.

The competitive salary will depend on how awesome you are, includes medical benefits, 401k eligibility, and relocation to Boston (if needed). As usual, we’re looking for people who are willing to relocate to Boston, but we’re willing to consider remote work for really great people who can’t relocate. If you were going to be remote, we’d likely ask you to work in Boston for some time at the start of things so that everyone can get to know each other.

If you are interested, contact us at resumes@thoughtbot.com. Feel free to describe why you want to work for us, what your past experience is, what your salary requirements are, who your work references are, a bunch of sites you like, a list of hobbies, or anything else you think represents who you are or who you want to be.

We also have this and other positions available, check them out on our jobs page.