Changing up the terminal

Agis 👨‍💻 — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 22:50:25 +0000

As iOS developers, we don’t use the terminal that much so when we use it we don’t expect a lot from the classic one (terminal.app)

That was my case as well until I started using it a lot more cause of my University classes and also working on open source projects like Cocoapods. I knew that I needed a better option, but I didn’t know where to start and that’s why I write this piece. It includes my thoughts on the new terminal setup & a tutorial on how to get started and customize yours.

Another reason that made me want to change my terminal was a screenshot of @mennenia’s terminal. I really enjoyed her setup and the colors of the themes.

Download iTerm 2

Before customizing the terminal we need to download a better alternative from the classic one. Many developers prefer iTerm2. It has a lot of advantages and you can download it here

Setting up the Hotkey

For easy access to the terminal, you need to set up a hotkey for it. This is one of the reasons I love iTerm2.

Go to Preferences (CMD+) and to the “keys” tab
Click on the “Show/Hide iTerm2 with a system-wide hotkey”
Choose the key that you prefer (I use alt+space)
Another thing you can do is change the opacity of the background (I prefer the opacity at 100%)

Try it!

Fish

Working on different projects at my University I need my shell to do a ton more than it actually does right. Searching the internet and asking a couple of developers I found Fish.

Fish suggests things/ previous commands as you type. Also, you can autocomplete using the right arrow.

I highly suggest downloading Fish using homebrew brew install Fish. If you don’t have homebrew I recommend you download it and learn more about it. If you don’t like it you can find more installation info about Fish here.

Customized Themes

Last but not least I wanted a new terminal setup because my previous one was not so pretty haha.

Fish has an “oh my” version which allows for easy theming. Check it out here
First I followed Maxim’s setup and I chose the agnoster theme. Because it helped me read better the lines and I was impressed by the customization.

Another thing you can do is to download iTerm2 Profiles and themes from here. I decided to go for the n0tch2k because I like that it has some bright pastel colors.

After a couple of months using the n0tch2k theme, I decided to make the toothpaste theme made by Cat Noone available to iTerm2. I already using it on Xcode and I was super impressed.

Fonts

Now that you’re done with the theming of your terminal, it’s time to pick a “powerline” font that you like. I followed Maxim’s advice and I went for the HACK font. You can find and download all the fonts from here

Conclusion

It was so fun writing this post and sharing my process behind how I changed the terminal and how it helped me learn more about Fish among other things.

Enjoy what you read? Spread the love by liking and sharing this piece. Have thoughts or questions? Reach out to me on Twitter or in the comments below. This post was originally published on Medium.

The Insecure Developer

Agis 👨‍💻 — Fri, 26 May 2017 12:52:20 +0000

I couldn’t decide how to start this story. I’m thinking about to share my story about feeling insecure and how I try to overcome this feeling.

Feeling insecure

If you need to know something about me is that I’m super insecure in many areas in my life and of course as a developer. I feel that I’m not good enough or I don’t know enough of my craftsmanship. Insecure or maybe well known as imposter syndrome hits me hard many times from when I started as an iOS developer.

Storytime

As a University student, I was searching for an internship for this summer. I applied to a couple of companies but I got rejected from almost all of them. That feeling struck me hard, made me feel more insecure and stupid. I failed a lot of the coding challenges.

The last couple of months were quite stressful for me. /1
— Agis ðŸ‘¨”ðŸ’» (@agisilaosts ) February 9, 2017

A couple of tweets I wrote about the experience I had with the coding challenges.

I was super stressed out and in many of them and didn’t have the chance to even complete the solution to the given problem. I wasn’t fast enough and this feeling along with all the others made me question myself even more.

Coding challenges in a whiteboard (Quizzes, and puzzle questions) are WRONG

I intentionally mentioned coding challenges for an internship or a full-time job because I found that many people after “fail them they’re becoming sad or more insecure about themselves.

The feeling of rejection

Being rejected one time for an internship or a full-time job position can be so hard to swallow, but what about 9–10 rejections one after the other? That was exactly my position, imagine how I felt.
Reading emails like: “Thank you for your application but we decided to not continue with you in the next phase or “thank you for your interest in our X company but you’re not diverse enough for us”, made me feel sad and useless.
I know that is kind of hard to reply to every single one of the applicants about why they got rejected but I think the recruiters need to add that to the process. For example: What the heck means, “You aren’t diverse enough”?

Overcome the feeling of being insecure

1. Talk to your friends & coâ€Š–â€Šworkers

I can’t and stress this advice enough. Talking to them will help you relax and get motivated for your work.

Getting advice from friends will help you understand that, for example in the situation, I explained above with the coding challenges the problem is not related to you but the problem is related to this useless process that many companies have to make other developers anxious and sad.

I want to relate this advice to my situation: When I felt weird & sad I talked to Cat Noone and she really helped me with her advice like how this is a normal feeling & that I have to overcome it by continue working on stuff that I really love.

Also, I talked with Viktor Wu from Gitlab recently because of the Out of office hours initiative and I understood that it’s ok to not be good in this kind of challenges. It doesn’t mean that you’re not good enough.
This kind of puzzles & quizzes will not help in your career or in what you will do in your everyday job in any way. Our conversation helped me be more confident about my skills.

2. Keep trying, until you achieve your goal

I’m maybe one of the most insecure people that you may know but at the same time I’m super dedicated, motivated & I work hard. I’m the kind of guy that I will fail a lot but I will keep pushing & move forward until I achieve my goal. I think that you should try and do the same. That’s a weird combination, right? Hah!

It’s kind of hard to do that but I want to share my thoughts & story behind it.

After I got rejected so many times I was sad but after that, I kept pushing and I sent more applications about internships positions. I was confident in my skills aside from the fact that many people/companies didn’t have the same idea. At the same time I was working on a weird bug on Iris’s iOS application and after fixing it made me feel more confident.

If you want something so badly like I did, you need to work hard and at the end, you will achieve it, no matter what other people think.

Last but not least I want to mention that is good to feel insecure & at the same time work on improving your skills. In my perspective and like Cat Noone mentioned is better to feel that way than feeling over confident about yourself and your skills. I want to see “insecurity as an advantage of a human being than a vulnerability.

I hope that this post will help people to overcome their fears and improve their skills!

â¤ï¸ Agis

This was first published on my Medium page

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