Building An Empire: Productivity tips to improve your computing environment

A well-crafted computing environment is key to increasing and maintaining productivity in the workplace. Rather than a one-time chore, creation of a computing environment should be viewed as an incremental process. I call this process “Building An Empire.” The fundamental piece of empire building is the continual search for better, faster, and more robust workflows.

Textual shells are well-known to be the most efficient interface for communicating with a computer’s operating system. As such, this presentation will focus on shells and related tools. For participants, a working knowledge of Bash or similar shells and Vim/Emacs or similar editors is preferred, but not necessary.

The presentation topics include:

• General discussion of keyboard shortcuts
• Getting help from the operating system (--help, man, and info)
• Compiling software from source (with the GNU Build System or CMake)
• Efficiently accessing remote resources (with Secure Shell [SSH])
• Terminal multiplexing (with tmux)
• Paths and prefixes (PATH and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard)
• Shell scripting best practices
• Distributed version control systems (Git, Mercurial, etc.)
• Software build systems (SCons, Apache Buildr, etc.)
• Customizing your shell (.bash_profile, .bashrc, etc.)
• Managing your shell customizations (with Git)
• Miscellaneous tools (autojump, ack, pyenv, rbenv, aria2, htop)

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The slides are attached, but this was a hands-on event, not a presentation. For further reading (possibly in a better form than the slides) see

• Mastering EOS the new manual for Sean's university’s computer lab, a manual on which he is actively working. Although it contains some lab-specific information and some basic skills, it also does a good job of explaining many things taught for the SEA tutorial, particularly Advanced OpenSSH. 
• Dotfiles — shell customization, etc.
• Local install scripts — compiling and installing software locally