North Liberty OpenHack on Thursday, May 12th at North Liberty CoLab, was a dedicated time to be in a productive environment with a group of peers for when you need that second set of eyeballs. Held every second Thursday of the month, it is a great time to finish side projects that were stashed away on github, bitbucket, etc; learn new languages and/or frameworks; contribute to open source and more. If you make small consistent progress you will get something done. You just need a dedicated time and space, and that is what this is for. Attendees were Aaron Van Noy of Big Ten Web Design, Sarah Dunlap and Chris Ortman. It was an intimate setting great for tech discussion and learning. We spent most of our time learning about Ruby on Rails, but with some banter between Sarah and me about Search Engine Optimization.
Some of the Mac Applications covered at the OpenHack
iTerm2 is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm. It works on Macs with OS 10.5 (Leopard) or newer. iTerm2 brings the terminal into the modern age with features you never knew you always wanted.
tmux is a terminal multiplexer. It lets you switch easily among several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal. And do a lot more. See the manual.
Dash is an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager. Dash helps you store snippets of code, as well as instantly search and browse documentation for almost any API you might use (see full list). It’s worth buying the full version!
