• What will you build?
• How will you build it?
• What is the outcome going to be?

I was building an app that took the visitors IP address and looked it up by location and displayed on a map, changing the size of the dot based on the number of visitors from the same city in real time. I planned to have a basic node server with express and socket.io for the real time interaction and google’s GeoChart. The outcome will be an app deployed to heroku, and I will be more familiar with socket.io and 3rd party API.

Having all these figured out, makes it much easier to start your project and fill out the package.json file!

Everything was going as planed, check in in the morning, everyone reported they had something to work on and we went hacking away on our respective parts. Did a few more check ins along these lines, got the app deployed, we had a functional backend, working frontend filled with dummy data and our authentication was going along nicely. We did not have any major rebase issues or merge conflicts, everything was going smoothly! Than out of the big blue it hit us… The parts don’t fit!

When you are working on a project any you make small adjustments and workarounds to be able to meet deadlines or just to have a working prototype, those were one of the biggest contributors to our surprise. The other one was the simple fact that we all thought we had the same idea and were on the seam page, but in reality, given the complexity and abstract nature of programming that was not the case. After shipping the product, we made the following takeaways;

• Whiteboarding, you can newer have too much of that! It really helps to ensure you and everyone else knows what the plan is
• Be consistent with dummy data, best thing is to through it into a test, that way everyone will have access to it early on, and you wont run into issues after all separate parts are ready, but take in different data
• Always look at the product as a whole, not just part of the backend, frontend, routing, authentication etc…

What else helps small virtual teams in collaboration, let me know in the comments!

Isaac Asimov, one of the greatest hard science fiction writers, made the previous statement. Let’s accept this for now, with a few additional statement to handle the complexity of our world.

• Information is a finite set, with fixed number of elements
• Information is constant through out time
• Storage and computing power is available to work with all these elements

There are n! permutations in this set, but this contains all past, present and future beings along the countless number of different variations. Comparing a human being’s ordered information to a similar, but non human one, would really blur the line between machine and human. Would we be able to tell if one particular sequence is a representation of a human being or not?

According to Elon Musk, a human’s are like computers, the hardware is the body and the brain, while the software is the way we think. Learning is simply the process of “downloading data and algorithms into your brain.” If would know the actual and specific way our brain works and tackles problems, we would get closer to solving this mystery, with the added benefit of streamlining the algorithm we use. Is there a way to do this?

Several things can be do to aid in this, being mindful, self aware. Get into the habit of stepping back to analyze some everyday task you frequently do and see if you can break it down into its building blocks. Is there room for optimization?

Insert mode, is as it suggests, where you can actually type normally and insert text into the document. Command mode is more like the functionality you get with command + <key>, or ctrl + <key> on a PC.

The easiest way to start playing around with VIM is to type

$ vimtutor

into the terminal, this will open up a built in tutor for the text editor. The only thing to know is that typing the semicolon than q and pressing enter will quite the tutor without saving anything.

:q

For everything else just follow along, it should not take much loner that 30 minutes and you will have a basic understanding of the popular and powerful VIM editor!

First off, get homebrew and install everything with it! This will make your life much easier! You can use Cask to search for even more things to install! Here are a few commands to use:

$ brew doctor

this will check if everything is working fine on your machine,

$ brew update
$ brew upgrade
$ brew cleanup

this update brew than upgrade updates your installed programs with brew and lastly brew cleanup will get rid of any older versions you might still have on you computer.

$ brew list --versions

This vill list out everything you installed with brew and there respective versions. If you have not done so already install chrome on your mac with the below command:

$ brew cask install google-chrome

if you install programs with the help of cask you can use update, but than you have to use a workaround to force update them as there is no official way to do so (yet, they are working on it). So what you can do is, you manually choose which one you want to update

$ brew cask list
$ brew cask install --force <name of cask>

or you can force all the installed casks to reinstall with the newest available version

$ brew cask list | xargs brew cask install --force

hope this helps!

Let me know if you have any tips and trick in the comments below!