

- Mac and linux developers how to#
- Mac and linux developers install#
- Mac and linux developers pro#
- Mac and linux developers software#
- Mac and linux developers mac#
You are encouraged to learn and understand how things work right from partitioning disks yourself to picking your desktop. But I quickly realised that this was the strength. Initially it seemed a very bare bones distribution and it felt like you had to do a lot of work. I liked to experiment with operating systems with VirtualBox and had started to play with Arch Linux on top of OSX. I have used most of the big Linux distros in my time - CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian. I started to loathe the weight of applications like iTunes and my 2009 iMac (with RAM maxed out) was starting to groan. Simply I wasn’t really using very much of OSX any more. I started to learn browser shortcuts for these sites and installed the excellent Vimium Chrome extension. Partly because I believe in the web as the platform I started to stop using native clients for services like Twitter. I read my mail through mutt, and use terminal based IRC and Campfire clients.

During this time I started to feel that OSX is a very heavyweight operating system for what I need. For the majority of the time I’m working in vim, a browser and the browser console. I’m using Node.js for the server and Backbone and Marionette.js for most front end work. JavaScript and the browserįor about the last 18 months I have been writing JavaScript almost every day. OSX offered tools like Vagrant that really helped to create an image that could be shared with other developers when a service orientated architecture got complicated. OSX is a great operating system for developing Node.js applications and again most of the community use OSX. After a couple of blog posts I was approached to write a book and started to write some applications with Node.js. It was a young project but I liked it as soon as I started to play with it. In early 2010 I started to play with Node.js. I moved my text editor to vim and created a dotfiles repository to manage configuration.
Mac and linux developers install#
Homebrew had just emerged and a vibrant community was making trivial to install a range of UNIX tools.

Around this time I really started to learn and value the UNIX tools available on OSX. With most of the Rails community on Macs it was a great experience.
Mac and linux developers how to#
Rails taught me about TDD and how to be fully confident in deploying an application. Ruby is a beautiful language, perhaps still my favourite language to date. Once I had created my first Rails application there was no way I was going back to PHP. At this stage my Linux skills had become intermediate. For deploying Rails applications I needed to up my Linux skills. I started to become unhappy with the level of control I had with Media Temple and the Plesk server I was using and decided to migrate everything to a blank Ubuntu server on Slicehost (now part of Rackspace). I started to play with Rails as early as Rails 1 but by the time I created an application for a client it was Rails 2 I was working against. I designed in Photoshop, did my markup in TextMate and then pulled up a terminal to maintain Linux servers. OSX was the exact platform I needed for this. I was designing, doing the markup, hooking it up to ExpressionEngine and then providing hosting services. Without realising it I was already a full-stack developer.

I was mostly creating brochure sites for clients that wanted to manage content and have a simple interface to manage content by.
Mac and linux developers software#
I realised that developing your own software is often re-inventing the wheel and largely because of following Veerle Pieters I picked up Expression Engine. I started to host sites and began to become proficient in Linux administration.Īgain OSX was a fabulous platform for this development. I knew a little PHP and before long I had created my own CMS framework and purchased a (dv) media temple server complete with Plesk. Within a few months I had clients asking me to create server-side applications.
Mac and linux developers mac#
I really had the Mac experience - it was a joy to use and completely reliable. After some pretty hefty setup costs my freelancing business had little or no overheads and the expensive hardware I purchased was completely rock solid. I was able to turn up at a client and start working straightaway. I plugged in TextMate, Adobe Creative Suite and MAMP and my setup was done.
Mac and linux developers pro#
I purchased the original MacBook Pro and found Tiger to be a great Operating System for my needs. I was mostly a front-end developer who knew how to make things work in IE. Here is why Arch is a superior development platform for my needs.Įstimated reading time: 7 minutes Table of contentsīack in January 2006 I left an agency after three years and started freelancing. Last updated Saturday, From OSX to Arch Linux Six months ago I migrated from OSX to Arch Linux.
