Bart van Zon Software developer

About

I'm a Dutch software engineer with a focus on backend development using both Ruby and Elixir. With a history in promotional and telecom applications I have an expertise in scaleable applications.

Unavailable for hire

I'm currently unavailable for hire.

Code

My main development languages are Ruby and Elixir, but I have worked with JavaScript, PHP and more.

Tools

Docker, Git, Linux, Photoshop, Vim and many more.

Blogging with Vim

Writings blog posts with Vim is awesome! Obviously, if I thought otherwise I wouldn’t currently be writing this in Vim. Writing posts on my local machine works perfectly for me as interruptions aren’t as big of a problem as they would be when I’d be writing in some textarea online. I can just close the file, pick up whatever is interrupting me and continue whenever I want. Another nice thing is that I often write posts while traveling by public transport and writing the posts on my local machine means I don’t have to rely on the internet the public transport offers (which actually isn’t too bad in the Netherlands). Another thing that blogging in Vim makes possible is that you can just open a single terminal screen, set it to fullscreen and write without any distractions.

Blogging in Vim wouldn’t be half as cool if you wouldn’t be able to deploy your markdown files straight to your blog from the commandline. Blogging from your terminal, everyone wants that right? Or is it just for weird developers? Ah well… Octopress makes this possible! You can write your post in markdown, run a rake command and tadaaa: it’s deployed and online for everyone to read! To get started with Octopress it will take some minor configuration, or if you’re anything like me a lot of configuration but once setup it’s a great way to blog. The Octopress site has plenty of guides explaining where to get started and where to start tweaking if you want a custom solution.

There’s a couple of downsides of writing in Vim which are fixable by setting your configuration properly. By default there’s no line breaking in Vim so if you would just start typing away all of your text will end up becoming one long giant line of text. This is fixable by typing :set textwidth=80, keeping your lines under 80 lines is a great convention while coding. But it works great for keeping your texts readable as well. This is a setting I do not have in my .vimrc because I only want this set while writing blog posts, automatic line breaks are probably a bad idea while coding. I do have the setting :set colorcolumn=80 in my .vimrc which shows where the 80th character is in every line so I can (attempt) to stay under the 80 char limit manually while coding.

If you already started on your post without setting text width or if you copy-pasted something and ruined your formatting you can select the text using visualmode and type gq to reformat all of the selected text. Obviously it would be even better if you use gg{motion} to achieve the same with less keystrokes but personally I often use visualmode for this action.

For me one of the biggest loss when using Vim is the lack of spell checking, because English isn’t my native tongue I definately definitely need it (and to be honest I a need it when writing Dutch texts as well). Of course spell checking is something you can turn on, and with plenty of supported languages. To turn spell checking on and highlight the incorrectly spelled words use the command :setlocal spell spelllang=en_us. You can then navigate forwards (]s) and backwards ([s) through these incorrectly spelled words and by using the z= command you’ll open up the list with correct spelling suggestions. When writing tech articles there’ll probably be a bunch of words that are not in the list and thus incorrectly marked as incorrect. You can add these words to the wordlist by using the zg command. There’s an enormous amount of alternative commands when fixing your typo’s and spelling errors, be sure to check out the relative help files at :h spell.

Most of these settings have shortcuts which make them easier to type out, Vim help will tell you about them. For example :help textwidth (or even :h textwidth, we are lazy devs!) will tell you that setting :set tw will do exactly the same! And while you’re in the help files anyways :h set will tell you that you should use :se tw=80 next time you’re setting your text width!