Inviting all to an introduction to the VIM Editor

Tired of those elitist VIM-using friends teasing you? Or just wondering what all the fuss is about? Or perhaps you’ve tried to use it once but it was way too complicated for you? Let a reluctant VIM user introduce you to the world of one of the most popular editor for serious programmers. We’ll start off with the basics of the textmode editor, explain why basic VIM skills are essential to budding hackers, and why you’ll be exponentially more productive using VIM over your current tool.  You’ll leave this presentation with basic VIM skills and some resources on how to continue leveling up.

About VIM

Short for Vi IMproved, VIM is a “highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing” (http://www.vim.org/). Though primarily a textmode editor that you can use in your console or over ssh, a gui version is also available. Both lightweight and powerful, VIM is the tool of choice for many a programmer even on systems that could handle a more (supposedly) modern editor with all the bells and whistles.

The thing about VIM is the barrier to entry. A lot of people have issue working with the strongly modal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(computer_interface)) paradigm and have a tough time remembering all the commands. This presentation aims to provide you with the tools and techniques to overcome this barrier as well as the motivation to want to undertake this seemingly daunting task.

About the Presentation Content

1. Quick Basic Remedial VIM Skills (bare necessities to be able to edit and save). If you pay attention to anything, or leave remembering anything it will be this.
2. Why some programmers choose VIM
3. Introduction to VIM usage
4. Peek into the features that lie ahead

About You, the participant

You are a programmer, or hobbyist coder, or server admin, or anyone that edits text files a lot. You have no experience with VIM (or the only experience you have with it ended badly) and prefer something more understandable (like nano). You’re interested in knowing why a lot of your programmer friends swear by VIM and seemingly move text around with just a few keystrokes. You are awesome.

About Presenter

Shu Zong Chen is a full time pythonista and freelance designer, who used to live day to day in nano. He actually dislikes VIM, but begrudgingly uses it because out of all the editors available he is by far the MOST productive in VIM. This fact makes him the best person to introduce VIM to the person that is having trouble getting pass the initial VIM barrier.

Instructions to Oceanit:

Oceanit (http://www.oceanit.com/) has graciously provided their conference rooms for us to use for our very first meetup. They are located at 828 Fort Street in Downtown Honolulu. (Google Maps) Parking to Oceanit is on Queen St. If you’re coming down Bishop, take a right on Queen, and the entrance will be on your right after a wide crosswalk. (If you hit Harbor Court, you’ve gone too far). It’s $2 dollars for parking through Park & Pay on each floor.

RSVP for Event

As many of you know, we’re trying to obtain a permanent space here in Honolulu. As a makerspace, our goal is to share our creative talents and ideas in both physical and non-physical aspects in a place where we feel comfortable. Whether it’s creating a tweeting robot, building a web app that displays real time tidal statistics, or just learning from people who are doing these projects, we want to provide a great social setting for all members.

This is where we need your help. We need to raise money to start the space. At the moment, we have a lot of inactive members but we need to find out who’s willing to participate and help fund the space. Our goal is $10,000 in startup costs with $5,000 coming from members and another $5,000 from a Kickstarter project. This will allow us to have at least three months of assets to pay bills and acquire equipment. I know this seems daunting but I’m absolutely sure we can raise this money. I’m going to be putting in money myself to help get the space. Many of the members whose primary interests include electronics or hardware are looking to finally have a workshop. The workshop will include benches and tools for projects. It will have a place to store projects that are just too large for your apartment. At HI Capacity, you will be available to show off your cool new hack or great design. It’s a social group in a more industrial setting.

I’ve heard feedback that the developers may not see value in having a permanent space. Many developers do just fine moving from one coffee shop to another, or just staying home. HI Capacity is offering a central meeting place for developers. This will allow you share ideas, learn from each other or show off your next big idea. We’ll be setting aside a quieter area for coders to meet and hang out. Membership will include access to both the workshop and the coder’s room.

We will be holding a member’s meeting on Thursday, August 11th at 6PM. This will be our initial fundraising event. You can meet all of the members and we’ll show you the plans we’ve been working on to get a space.

There will be food and drinks at this event. I’m expecting up to 50 people to show up, so there will be a lot of food.

The event will be at:

Google Map link: http://bit.ly/MembersMeetingMap

Parking will be at Ali'i Place. 1099 Alakea Street. It will be on the right hand side of Alakea street in the building right after 220 South King. The fee for parking is approximately $4.00 for 3 hours.

Please RSVP: http://aug11membermeeting.eventbrite.com/

Good evening everyone!

I would like to invite everyone to attend our Arduino Night IV on August 17th at 6:30PM! We’ll be learning about sending and receiving commands from your Arduino to your computer. The goal of the night will be making a program to send a command to the Arduino, making another program to receive commands from the Arduino and bidirectional command transmission.

Since the night will focus on sending and receiving commands using a computer, you should bring a laptop. At our previous nights, many of the attendees were more than willing to share, so don’t let that stop you from attending! I’m willing to share my laptop. :) A laptop is not required to attend!

I apologize for the late notice but I was hoping that Arduino ethernet shields would arrive by the time of the meet. Unfortunately, they will be delayed, so I had to shift the topic of discussion. Don’t worry, we’ll do a twittering Arduino in the future. ;-)

(The attendance information is the same from our last meet):

All attendees who want to participate in the demonstration will need to buy an Arduino kit from Adafruit Industries: http://bit.ly/i9RlbZ

The kits at Adafruit sell out quick! You can purchase either of these kits from Sparkfun. Starter kit is $59.95 or the Inventor’s kit is $94.95 Personally, I would recommend the Inventor’s kit. :)

The price of the kit will run between $50 and $100, depending which one you purchase (with an additional $10 for shipping). Please order this ASAP if you want to attend as it should take about 3-5 business days to get to Hawaii. If you came to our last meeting, you won’t have to purchase anything! :D

Note: We’ll be building on this kit in future - so think of it as an investment!

Oceanit (http://www.oceanit.com/) has graciously provided their conference rooms for us to use for our very first meetup. They are located at 828 Fort Street in Downtown Honolulu. (Google Maps link) Parking to Oceanit is on Queen St. If you’re coming down Bishop, take a right on Queen, and the entrance will be on your right after a wide crosswalk. (If you hit Harbor Court, you’ve gone too far). It’s $2 dollars for parking through Park & Pay on each floor. Sometimes the terminal doesn’t take credit, so try to bring cash or coin.

Hope to see you there!