WordPress is awesome, why’d you switch? So, I’ve been really hating WordPress as a blog engine lately. Tons of spam, lots of emails from spam accounts signing up and trying to post comments, etc. We had some discussion at the office recently about what blog engine to use for our corporate blog, (we ended up using WordPress) but through the process I decided to evaluate Octopress as an approach to static content serving for my personal blog.

I have been working on migrating my company’s Pivotal Tracker to JIRA. We love most of the features of JIRA, but we were really missing the nice updates to our Campfire room to tell us what is going on with our issues. Sure, we could use an RSS feed plugin for Campy, but that is not real-time enough. I didn’t want to write a huge plugin just to send messages to Campfire (it seems like such a simple thing to do!

If you’re like me, you end up doing a lot of testing in virtual machines. I run several VMs that do various different tasks for me so that I don’t have to sully my Mac with packages I rarely need, etc. So what I do is create a VM and give it a local hostname defined in my /etc/hosts file. Recently, after my upgrade to OSX Lion, I started running into an issue where it would take over 5 seconds to connect to any of my VMs using any protocol (SSH, HTTP, etc).

I have recently upgraded to OSX Lion, and I have to say that I love everything about it. Except for one thing. In many apps, the key repeat has been disabled in favor of the new press-and-hold popup for getting alternative characters. This is fine for most apps, but for apps like PyCharm where I use vi key maps, it becomes very, very frustrating. I came across this little tip to re-enable the key repeat, and my life is measurably better (first world problems, I know…).

We use a Campfire at Needle for our day-to-day communication between our tech team members and other business members. We really like Campfire’s ability to store files, conference call and keep transcripts even when you are not logged in. We get GitHub commit messages, Pivotal Tracker story updates and more scattered in our conversations. These one-way updates are very nice, but I thought it would be nice to be able to have a bot that sat in the channel and could take commands from anybody and do more complex tasks for us without us ever having to leave Campfire.