PRAG 101: Setting up as a Dev

Time: 1 week

Prep for this course

• Join the “Lovelace Café” Discord
  • This is Andrew’s Discord for people doing this program. Ask him for an invite.
  • (The Lovelace Café is restricted to Andrew’s personal friends, so I don’t have to worry about moderation.)

Preparing to comptooter safely

• Read my Practical OpSec page and follow its advice

Setting up your identity

• Choose your “handle”
  • This is your online nickname. You’ll use it for your domain, and your account names on all these services.
  • Choose wisely! This is the name the public and potential employers and collaborators will see you through, and you might be stuck with this for a long time.
  • No, really. Take some time and think about this, and choose this first, before going on to the next steps.
• Buy a domain
  • Probably use your handle for or in your domain name.
  • Run your domain name by Andrew before actually buying it.
  • Use Hover as your domain registrar
• Set up email on your domain
  • Just use GMail with a forward. It’s free and good.
• Create accounts and set up your profiles on:
  • GitHub
  • Stack Overflow
  • edX
  • Coursera
  • DEV
  • Bitbucket
  • Slashdot
  • Google/GMail
  • Feedly
  • Reddit
  • Matrix
  • Twitter
    • This’ll be your dev Twitter, not your face/personal Twitter. Keep ‘em separate for now.
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinboard
  • Pocket
  • And maybe:
    • A Cloud Guru
    • Linux Academy
  • And use your handle for your username on all of these

Setting up your dev box

Install

• Essential tools
  • 1Password
  • Google Drive
  • Backblaze
• Basic tools
  • Firefox
  • Google Chrome
• Dev tools
  • iTerm2
  • Text Editors
    • Visual Studio Code
    • Atom (text editor)
    • TextMate
  • Source control
    • Git
    • Sourcetree
    • GitHub Desktop
  • IDEs
    • Xcode
    • Xcode Command Line Tools
    • PyCharm Community Edition
    • IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition
    • Visual Studio for Mac
    • R
    • RStudio
  • Homebrew
  • Anaconda
• Communication
  • Slack
  • Discord
  • Riot
  • Zoom
  • Textual 7 (?)
    • Or another IRC GUI client
  • GPG Keychain (?)
  • Thunderbird (?)
  • Pocket
  • An RSS reader
    • Recommended: Reeder on macOS
• Fonts
  • TODO: Pick a selection
• Microsoft Office or LibreOffice

Yes, really, all of this. :) You’ll end up using most of it, and it’ll be good practice.

This list is for Mac users. If you’re a Windows user, the list will be a bit different. I haven’t figured that out yet, so just go through it and install everything on here that exists for Windows, and ask me about substitutes for the things that don’t exist.

Install on your mobile devices

• 1Password
• Google Authenticator
  • Or Authy (?)
• edX
• An RSS reader
  • Recommended: Unread on iOS
• A PDF reader (on your iPad)
  • Recommended: GoodReader on iOS

Configure

• Time Machine
  • Verify your first backup
• Backblaze
  • Verify your first backup

Setting up your learning stream

• Find some programming blogs and add them to your Feedly stream.
  • Now go through them every couple days!
• Find some devs on Twitter and follow them using your dev Twitter account.
• Try sending a few things from your RSS feed to Pocket and reading them there.
• Save a few pages to your Pinboard.

Setting up your dev meatspace

• Pick where you’ll code and examine its ergonomics
  • Do you have a good chair? Consider getting a good one
  • Consider getting an external monitor and keyboard, if you have money to spare
• Pick some coding music
  • Suggestions from Andrew:
    • Brian Eno, “Music for Airports”
    • Paul Oakenfold, “Tranceport”
    • Mike Oldfield, “The Songs of Distant Earth”
    • woob, “em:t 1194”

Learn the basic tools

• Learn Git basics from one of:
  • Atlassian’s Learning Git resources
  • The Pro Git online book

More stuff to do

• Create a website/dev home page
  • Options: GitHub Pages (free), SquareSpace ($)
• Start a blog on that website (?)
  • Blog about your learning process throughout this course