After fourteen years of disuse, I have decided to take the effort to dust off this old domain and blog and to try to breathe some new life into it. There have been many projects that I have wanted to talk about publicly, but haven’t had the spirit to fight against a languishing OctoPress installation. Thankfully, this current era of LLM-driven development has made it manageable to dissipate old technical debt and restore things to a proper functgioning order.

I use Emacs to manage multiple different projects simultaneously. Every professional engagement I’ve had so far has had me working on multiple codebases at once. Add these to this my elisp and Org Mode files, and that’s a lot of frames to have open!

My first attempt at managing multiple projects had the unintended consequence of holding me back from fully realizing the full potential of Emacs. I ran emacsclient sessions in GNU Screen for each project I worked on. I could flip between different frame configurations, each one set up for an individual project. This worked well enough that it kept me from running Emacs as a graphical interface.

I am setting up an OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) machine as a development machine. For my own personal use I prefer using a Linux box, but between my own nostalgia for Gentoo and the peculiar yet undeniable strength of homebrew, I am perfectly happy to use it as a day-to-day development machine.

In order to use homebrew to its fullest, I edited the /etc/paths file to make things right:

/usr/local/sbin
/usr/local/bin
/usr/sbin
/usr/bin
/sbin
/bin

So far, no problems. Will report back later.

Within the next 24 hours, my GitHub Page should be accessible any- and everywhere from my preferred vanity domain, mcpantz.org. Right now I am having it redirect as a top-level domain, mostly for shortened URL length. I would love to hear of any downsides, other than some sort of fragility in long-term resource names.

Also, I need to find a decent image post, as numerous of my WordPress-era posts had embedded URLs to images that are now broken. I’m not too keen on imgur.com, and the last time I used ImageShack was the early 00’s. Does anyone have some good, modern suggestion for long-term image hosting, particularly for hot-linking into websites?

One of the most productive “A-Ha!” moments I’ve had as a developer came when I learned how to use iterators, and the dramatic effect that it has on my coding style. When we introduced the concept to one layer of code to handle a specific problem, the pattern of development proved infectious for dealing with similar workflows and managed to make our code much more succinct and understandable to newcomers.