Flourish Open Source Conference at UIC

Flourish is an open source conference to be held at the University of Illinois at Chicago on Saturday, April 5, 2014. The conference is run by university students and tickets are free.

Why go to Flourish? Because…

How .gitignore Works

Earlier today I ran into a Git issue within a RubyMotion project. I added a directory to the project’s .gitignore file, but Git seemed to ignore my ignore. Expressed more clearly, Git continued to track a directory that I explicitly told it to ignore.

What?

Either there was a bug in Git, or my understanding of .gitignore was incomplete. It was time for me to dig in and learn more about .gitignore.

CocoaConf Chicago Recap

One purpose of a conference is to help you to spot trends while there’s still time to reap the benefits of being an early adopter.  
~Brian Marick at SCNA 2013

Early adopters on Apple’s Mac OS X and iOS platforms flock to CocoaConf, a multi-city conference for developers. Tickets are slightly easier to get than WWDC; CocoaConf consistently sells out.

CocoaConf’s presenters are practicing developers, actively building real software every day. They come to CocoaConf to share their experiences in a wonderful upward-spiral of technical learning. Here are a few highlights from the latest CocoaConf, held March 7-8 near Chicago.

Fixing MacVim on OS X Mavericks

Experience told me to delay upgrading to OS X Mavericks for as long as possible because the upgrade would likely break my dev environment. Sure enough, the upgrade broke MacVim.

~$ which mvim

~$ 

The ‘nix which command returned a null response when asked about MacVim. Not cool, Mavericks!

What Is Open Source?

Entrepreneurs, especially those outside of software development, may find this article useful.

When Performance Matters

Over seventy percent of the web servers on the planet run Linux, the open source operating system. Google, Facebook, and Amazon all run Linux. They bet their companies on this decision every day.

Given that thousands of successful companies have bet their livelihood on open source, an observer might ask these questions:

• What is open source?
• Why should one care about open source?
• How can a company profit from software that is given away for free?