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.

Boston.rb redesign

Boston.rb was recently re-designed. It went from this…

… to this:

I know, I know… you’re thinking: that must have cost a fortune! What’d you do, hire Sterling Cooper?

Nope. I’ll let you in on a little secret but I want you to hold on to your horses… it cost $0 to redesign.

That’s right. It was done using a new-fangled technique called “open source.”

Boston.rb code review

After the redesign, I lead a code review of the Boston.rb source at the Boston Apple Store.

All the slides are available online. You will need to register to see them.

Getting Strong Now

We’re psyched to have been selected to give a 6 hour training session, thoughtbot’s Rails Best Practices at the Lone Star Ruby Conference, September 4-6, 2008 in Austin, TX.

Tammer, Jon, Jared, Dan, Matt, and myself will be the trainers. With 6 of us, there will be a lot of hands-on training, and we hope that you can attend.

Flying High Now

We’ve been exploring the idea of offering classes for some time now, and we’ve used LSRC as a kick in the pants to get it off the ground. So, I’m happy to announce that on October 14th, we’ll be running our first class, at our office in Boston, MA. The first session will be Advanced Ruby on Rails, and will focus on:

• Rails Best Practices and AntiPatterns
• Refactoring
• Writing Plugins and Gems
• Using components of Rails outside Rails
• Test Driven Development

If you register before August 31st, you’ll receive $100 off the cost of registration. The session includes Breakfast and Lunch, a free copy of the book Pro Active Record, and your choice of one t-shirt from Tee-Bot.

We plan on offering sessions for Test Driven Development, Beginning Ruby on Rails, and more soon. If you are particularly interested in one of these future sessions, please let us know.