Category Archives: Software Development

Fall Tech Talks at Rackspace starting next week!

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I am really excited about this fall. Rackspace Tech Talks are back with some awesome speakers and topics. Come out and join us for some great presentations and geeky conversation. Here are all the talks slated for this fall:

  • October 4th, 6pm – Informed Design with Rackspace Experience Design Team
  • November 15th, 6pm – Large Scale Distributed Systems with Udi Dahan
  • December 6th, 6pm – Building Killer Web Apps with Dave King, Sr. Developer at Rackspace

Our first talk is quickly approaching next week! The Rackspace Experience Design team, a group of awesome designers and usability experts, will be presenting on Informed Design. More specifically, using generative and evaluative research to create FANATICAL user experiences. UX research comes in many flavors: usability testing, user interviews, field studies, A/B testing, analytics, etc. The Rackspace Experience Design Team will share examples of how to use a mix of research techniques to inform design decisions

Here are some of the details:

  • When: Tuesday October 4th, 6pm
  • Where: Rackspace, 755 University City Blvd, Blacksburg (Look for flyers to lead you to the right room)
  • Food will be provided
  • Bring a friend or two, this is a public talk open to anyone.

Hope to see you all there.

Operating System Checks in Bash

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I have been using my Mac and Linux computers a lot more recently. Syncing configurations between the two machines is pretty easy with tools like JungleDisk or Dropbox. Today I just started syncing my .bashrc and .bash_profile between the two systems. There are some configurations that need to be different on a per machine basis however. I wrote this quick little bash script to illustrate an easy way to do this. Pretty trivial but useful nonetheless.

OS=`uname`
 
if [ "$OS" = "Darwin" ]; then
  echo "Running on Mac"
else
  echo "Running on Linux"
fi

Also, uname -n will return the computer name if you want to check that as well.

Unified Branch Diff in Tortoise SVN

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In my ancient pre-windows days, I used to do a complete branch diff before reintegrating into trunk to make sure everything looked good. Well, you can still do it in TortoiseSVN in three easy steps:

  1. Open Repo Browser
  2. Navigate to the first branch, right click, and select Mark for comparison
  3. Navigate to the second branch, right click, and select Show differences as unified diff



Little tidbit I didn’t know existed in Tortoise until today. Enjoy!

Events for Software Developers in Blacksburg

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It is sometimes hard to find out what events/activities are occurring for software developers in Blacksburg. This is a super small, non-complete list of things to do.

For VT students, there are a few more.

Let me know if there are other groups I can add to my list.