Moving out of the Microsoft development world

I’ve been using a dos or windows based machine for the past 15 years, and it finally came completely to an end (not counting Parallels) this past April with my macbook purchase and working at Crusher. I also did a majority of my development the past 8 years using either C++ or C#, and now I am using Ruby. For those of you out there thinking about doing all of this, I’ll tell you about a couple things that had me worried.

having to re-learn the keyboard shortcuts

This definitely has been a bit of a pain. The keyboard shortcuts are somewhat similar between the mac and PC. The approach I have taken is if I really miss a shortcut and I can’t intuitively figure it out I’ll search for the answer and find it fairly quickly. Then I force myself to use the shortcut to retrain my hands. The first shortcut I wanted was the ability to skip words while editing text. In the PC you hold CTRL and hit the arrows, but on the mac you hold ALT and hit the arrows. It also really helps if you work with other mac users, which I do now, or if you have friends who use the mac. There are some features you may just not discover if you don’t do any reading. For example, on the mac F9 & F10 are extremely useful! The PC doesn’t have an equivalent of nicely tiling windows for window switching purposes.

simply not having a windows machine around for any legacy stuff I have

Parallels completely removes this worry. Although I’m not a gamer, so that definitely helps. Although I have played worms world party here and there .. which I have missed and doesn’t run in my parallels installation I also have all my documents sitting on a NAS on my network, so things like my old outlook pst files I can access via outlook on parallels if I particularly bored.

no auto-complete in textmate

Surprisingly I’ve found that I don’t miss auto-complete from visual studio. Between the ruby reference, rails manual, and quick silver shortcuts, I find it is more informative than auto-complete because I get full descriptions or example code for a majority of APIs I’m searching for.

RoR debugging is commonly done through puts and logging

There is a debugger for RoR, but I haven’t tried it yet, because I’ve been pretty happy with puts and logging. I attempt to do test driven development, which is hard to do as a beginner, but when I do this debugging is pretty straight forward. I write a couple blocks of code, run my tests and then see if they pass. There’s plenty more to talk about here, but the main thing is I don’t miss the line-by-line debugger very often, and when I do I think it is just residual effects of years of break points.

Things that surprised me:

• I think my macbook freezes more than my PC ever did. It usually happens in conjunction with sleeping and connecting to an external monitor … at least they aren’t blue screens.
• Right-click is a bit annoying since it is required to hold CTRL and click or put 2 fingers on the mouse pad and click. Not a problem when a regular mouse is connected.
• Ruby has really nice convenient coding features .. for instance you can substract one array from another by saying ["1", "2", "3"] -["1", "2"] = ["3"]

Overall it has been a terrific learning experience, and I’m excited to keep learning. The fact that everything is open-source is terrific and also that test driven development is encouraged.