I love git. A lot.

Judging by the growing ubiquity of github.com in nearly every corner of digital life that can be captured in text form, I have concluded that I am not alone in this sentiment. So much do I love git and github.com that I have taken to using it for as much as possible.

My latest thing is dotfiles. You know all of those preference and settings files that start to pile up in your Mac or Linux home directory? The ones that start with a period? For a while I had been keeping the longer, more important ones on github.com, which is really helpful when using a new computer or reinstalling your OS from scratch.

Today, though, I took it to the next level. Want to know more?

I love Vim, I really do. Having used Vim for about 12 years or so, I feel really comfortable with it. Remarkably, I keep learning new things about it, but it’s easy to get sucked down the rabbit hole. I’ve written a couple of my own plug-ins (most notably my Quicktask task management tool) and I’ve customized the thing to death.

It’s easy to get carried away, though, especially as a beginner. I ran across this article by Alex Young today, which I completely agree with. Check it out: Stop the Vim Configuration Madness. Alex points out that newcomers to Vim are drawn in by its extensive capacity to be customized and overlook the process of building up muscle memory for the myriad of movement commands and Vim grammar that make it so awesome.

I started fiddling with the neat, lightweight Ruby web application framework “Sinatra” the other day. It seemed like a nice alternative to Rails and since I had also been playing with Slim for PHP, I wanted to see what it was like on the Ruby side of the fence.

I got the whole thing set up in Vagrant after no small amount of fiddling with Chef. I wanted to run it under Unicorn with Nginx in front, as is recommended by many for production deploys. After getting it all lined up, the app finally ran! Awesome, time to do some development!

So everyone uses Github now, and that’s cool, because Github is awesome. But what if Github goes down, even just for a short time, and you’re sitting there trying to get your stuff deployed or whatever? You’re basically screwed. Though Github is a fantastically stable service, it does have the occasional availability hiccup and the only real solution to that problem is redundancy.

So what’s a guy (or gal) to do? Run your own private git repository somewhere else!

Here at the day job, we are slowly moving our (production) systems away from Windows and toward (Ubuntu LTS) Linux. The company has always been Windows-oriented, mostly due to the decisions of its President when it was founded, subsequent inertia, and the skillsets of the infrastructure teams. Now, though, we have an increased Linux knowledgebase in-house, we’ve started this reorientation toward PHP and other open-source products, and Linux just makes more sense.