CoderMerlin Courier 2021.01.08

Within these castle walls be forged Mavens of Computer Science ...

— Merlin, The Coder

CoderMerlin Courier

Volume One, Issue Three - January Two Thousand Twenty-One

Within these castle walls be forged Mavens of Computer Science

Current Contests

Essay Writing Contest

Why is the primary role of technology to improve humanity? You can read more about the essay and prize: here.

Excalibur Award
	$250.00

Hints, Tips, Tricks, and Shortcuts

Command Line Tips

	Helpful Hint
	Slow typist? You can use the alias command. For example, to type the shortcut mt rather than merlin test you can add an alias: alias mt='merlin test' If you'd like to make your aliases permanent (rather than lasting only for the current session) you can add them to your ~/.bash_aliases file.

Swift Tips

	Helpful Hint
	Print an empty line (i.e., just a new line) with: print() Print text without the default terminator with: print(terminator:"Hello") Create a string repeating a character n times with: String(repeating:"!", count: 3)

Emacs Tips

	Helpful Hint
	Web-mode supports both PHP and HTML in the same buffer. Web-mode can be activated with: ALT-x web-mode RETURN

Git Tips

	Helpful Hint
	Tags can be easily moved by using the --force option. git tag --force J1154.Final git push origin --force J1154.Final

Newly Installed and Updated Services

Disk Space Increased

The available disk space has been increased to 1.0 GiB.

Emacs Updates 27.1

• Native support for JSON parsing
• Built-in support for tab bar and tab-line

In order to ensure you receive the latest features, re-initialize your skeleton:

jane-williams@codermerlin:~/www$ skel-init

Then completely log off before logging back on. Run emacs (without any parameters) and wait for the initialization to complete.

Vapor Available

Swift Vapor applications are now available. See Vapor for configuration information.