Trip Picks

NYC Coffee Shop Hipster

This week I decided to take a long weekend off work and spend it in New York City. This will come as no surprise to most of you - while I was out of the office, our application servers began experiencing issues, and, for all intents and purposes, became unusable. Luckily I brought my work laptop and didn't have any set plans for my trip so I was able to remotely work with IT to resolve the issue.

I spent a few hours working from my Airbnb but eventually hunger overtook me so I hit the streets with my laptop in search of every New York tourist's breakfast of choice - bagels. I stopped in Bagelsmith, the nearest bagel shop, then wandered further down the street in search of caffeine and free WiFi. This is when I found The Bean Coffee Shop, the place that would become my emergency response center for the next 8 hours; fortunately I stumbled into the perfect place to set up a workstation. I was working remotely. From a coffee shop. In Brooklyn. I was in wannabe hipster paradise.

For my picks this week I want to thank the IT team at my company for getting our servers back up and running, Bagelsmith for providing me with the New York breakfast of my dreams, and The Bean Coffeeshop for providing me with caffeine, treats, and a perfect location for remote work.

Vim Command of the Week

I have one additonal pick this week - a nifty Vim command.

Having no plans for my trip, I decided to spend my final morning editing a previously written blog post. During this editing session I learned about a new useful Vim command, ge.

From Vim's Help:

ge      Backward to the end of word [count] |inclusive|.
gE      Backward to the end of WORD [count] |inclusive|.

These commands allows you to move to end the of the previous word or WORD respectively.

It took a while for me to discover these commands because there are alternatives command combinations that I had figured out earlier in my Vim training.

Prior to learning about these commands I would generally just go back a word (b) or WORD (B) then go to the end of the word (e) or WORD (E). Occasionally this can be done with only two keystrokes (be or BE) if you are between two words or want to go to then end of you current word (but you should just be using e in that case). Most of the time your cursor will be on the next word, requiring you go to go back two or more words.

This slight difference between combining b and e and using ge may seem minimal but that is what make Vim nerds love Vim!

While some may beg to differ, I had a great trip, made more memorable by the panic attack I faced at the start and topped off my the brownies points I won from my CEO for helping out while out of the office.