Today was my first day of training as a Course Manager at Udacity. It was really great. I’ve only met a handful of people and they’ve all been amazingly kind. The office is a pretty relaxing place. I haven’t gotten into the nitty gritty yet, but I’m excited to learn how to use the teaching and organizational tools of Udacity and actually interact with Udacity students.

I had to set up a new work computer for myself, and I didn’t expect it to be so tedious. I really relied on 1Password, Alfred, and Emacs on my own computer, and not having them is a total punch in the gut. Not only did I rely on those programs, but I got really used to the customizations I made, like keyboard shortcuts and Alfred workflows. I should really prepare my own personal set of dotfiles for my preferences (such as this popular one by Mathias Bynens or the amazing magnars’s .emacs.d directory. Now I gotta learn how to organize my settings for readability and easy setup in the future. Right now it’s a whole kludge of preferences that only I really understand. The lesson to learn from this: personal computers are truly personal, and organization and documentation are really important if I don’t want to repeat tedium in the future.

To start, I’m gonna see if I can get any tips from Zach Holman’s words about dotfiles.