I’ve spent a huge chunk of this week writing Wizards Use Vim. A lot. Whenever I have any Dad free time I write. Since the announcement last week I’ve published about 14 new versions of the book. These are some things I’ve been working on this week:

• I’ve shaped and reshaped the content of the whole book
• I’ve broken it down into 3 different paths: Apprentice, Master and Grandmaster to give you that awesome sense of completion and achievement after each part. (And because it is cool to be called a Grandmaster).
• I’ve reviewed and thoroughly improved:
  • The preamble and the introduction
  • A Taste of Vim
  • Here Be Dragons, a chapter on the biggest pitfalls when learning Vim

I’ve also been creating a lot of art drafts for the book. Here are some of them:

By the way, remember that as a subscriber to the newsletter you get a free version of the book. Read this short book, learn Vim and boost your productivity as a Software Developer inside Vim or within your favorite text editor via plugin (lots of editors support Vim-like plugins e.g. Visual Studio, Visual Studio, Atom, Sublime Text, etc…)

If you’ve downloaded the book and are wondering whether or not to read the book right now (I have several readers ask me that very question) I’ve got an answer for you. It all depends on what you want to get out of this book:

• If you want to tag along and experience how a book gets made and is slowly improved over time, provide feedback that has a bigger impact then read the chapters from Proposal or Draft onward.
• If you want to read a version as closer to the final version as possible and still would like to provide feedback and impact the book then Candidate and Finished are the ones for you.

Here’s other things I did aside from writing Wizards Use Vim:

Writing

• I wrote an article that has been sitting in my drafts for a month: Exploring Vim: 8 Great Books To Improve Your Vim Fu where I review and recommend a bunch of Vim books I’ve been reading over the past months.
• I announced the new book on dev.to and in the blog.

Reading

I finished Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy and there was a bit in the end that I found very compelling and that I want to share with you. It was about building resilient (love) relationships and goes like this…

(…) A key was buried in the couples conversations which often started with bids for attention, affection, support or laughter.
We are making a bid whenever we say: Ey! Look at that bird or Are we out of butter?
When a partner makes a bid we have two choices: To turn away, or to turn toward.
To turn away is to be dismissive or ignore the bid.
Turning toward means engaging.

Sheryl Sandberg - Option B

Engage. My friend. Choose to engage.

I’ve also been reading:

• Mastering Vim: Building a Development Environment with Vim and Neovim by Ruslan Osipov. Yet another book on Vim. It is pretty good thus far. As a differentiating factor from other books I’ve read on Vim, it takes you linearly from beginner to advanced with lot of helpful tips along the way and advice on plugins to make a modern development environment based on Vim.
• The Colour Of Magic. I want to instill the whimsical nature of Terry Pratchett novels in Wizards Use Vim and so I’m re-reading this book from Discworld and I’ll probably read lots more in the weeks to come.

Listening

I’ve been listening to:

• Command Line Heroes! I finished the second season with an awesome episode on open sourcing the Mars Rover, and open sourcing Science in a wider sense.
• The Kevin Rose Show with two super interesting episodes: Dr Rhonda Patrick on cold stress and longevity hacking and Jason Fried on Work Life Balance.

Watching

• I started watching Pacific Rim Uprising, enjoyed it, then Teo woke up and I still don’t know if the Kaiju invaded earth or not. I enjoyed this one a lot more than the first one.

Things That Inspired Me

• This tweet by Igor Minar and the awesome work by these two front-end devs that created the two most popular codepens of 2018.

Cool Stuff

• Learn JavaScript Online is a new website where you can learn JavaScript by completing a series of challenges. It is pretty neat.
• This pixel grimoire series is a great, great resource to learn Pixel Art by a world class pixel artist: Pedro Medeiros

And that’s it for this week. Have an awesome Friday and an even more awesome weekend!