The world of software development is one that runs on abstractions. Developers are used to working in this world when it comes to software, but when these abstractions start to Leak Out into the real world it can become harder to manage. One of the trickier abstractions is the one between software development and wealth. It is clear that programming provides some sort of value, or else people would not be so eager to pay for it. It is a complex subject, and one I am not equipped to get into in the depth it needs, but instead I wanted to share a couple articles and a book I have read recently that shed some light on the subject.

git is a very powerful and flexible tool. With this power and flexibility comes a daunting amount of choices to make in how to manage your code with it. Here is the current setup I’ve used on both personal solo projects and professional jobs with other developers that has worked for me and saved me a lot of headaches.

Searching

Searching is one of the most important tools in a developers tool belt. In this tutorial we will go over two commands that will make navigating the file structure of your machine easier, find and grep. One will be used to search for files by name, and the other will be used to search the contents of those files.

Time estimation is one of the most difficult tasks for developers to do accurately. Programming constantly involves solving never before seen problems and dealing with incomplete information. It can often feel as if someone is asking you ‘how long is a piece of string?’ with no further information or tools. And since estimating is often necessary for project planning and billing, it’s something that programmers cannot avoid, and can be disastrous if gotten wrong. Here are five tips to help you improve your ability to estimate.

Building a command line interface into your application can be a way to add extra utility to you application. Adding cron jobs (a.k.a. scheduled tasks) to your CodeIgniter application can provide extra utility. In this article we’ll show you how to set up both in a CodeIgniter application by writing a simple appointment reminder, which will remind people if they have an appointment scheduled a day in advance.

File Permissions

In this article, we’ll take a look at how file permissions works. We’ll cover how users, groups, and file permissions work in a UNIX-based system, and how they can be used to make using the terminal more secure.

While Octopress is a nice blogging platform, using static generated pages can lead to being unable to have some of the features of other blogging platforms. One of the most common missed features is being able to have a contact us page. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to add a contact form to octopress by using Wufoo.

Node.js and CoffeeScript have been all the rage in the web development community as of late. In this tutorial, I’ll be walking though how to set up your development environment to quickly write & test Node.js apps completly in CoffeeScript, and have your development app update automatically without having to compile CoffeeScript or restart your Node.js server.

Manipulating Files

• Read Part 1 Here

Now that we have learned the basics of navigating the terminal, lets start looking at how to we affect the file system we’re working in. In this tutorial, we’ll cover the following: creating and deleting directories, copying and moving files and directories, and creating and deleting files.

Regular expressions are a tough cookie for most programmers to figure out. They are terrifying to look at with their daunting syntax. There is also nothing quite like regular expressions anywhere in programming. programmers may learn to hack together basic regex expressions, or how to cut and paste some they find online for their needs, but it can be tricky to get a real grasp of the concept. Here I’d like to explain the line of thinking that finally led to me grokking regex.