Jacob Jenkins

The name Evernote has become increasingly common especially amongst students. It’s an all in one information storage smorgasbord that’s available on nearly every platform. I was a fairly happy user of it for around 2.5 years (despite lack of Linux support) until around last week.

I always had this huge beef with Evernote because it didn’t take and store notes in plaintext and I hated having to rely on a proprietary application just to view some text. I was reading up on note taking apps, and came across a little gem called Notational Velocity. It’s a note taking app that stores everything in plain text, works great with Dropbox and Simplenote, and is entirely keyboard driven.

Needless to say, I’m in love.

Note: I’d like to see a Vim plugin that works like notational velocity, for when I’m on a Linux box. Though I’m starting to believe it can be achieved with ctrlp and a good markdown preview window.

Note 2: I’m actually using nvALT, which is a fork of Notational Velocity with some more added niceties.

I’m really excited to upgrade from my old Compaq laptop (which I interchangeably ran Ubuntu and Arch Linux on).

I chose the Macbook over the Thinkpad X1 Carbon mainly because of OS X. I’ve never been comfortable with Windows ever since I really got in to using Linux full time. In Windows, I always yearn for the power supplied by a Unix command line. OS X sounded like the most logical choice for a developer/designer that needs to use Unix while still being able to run the Adobe creative suite for design work.

To say that I was unsure of what I wanted to do after high school would be a vast understatement. At the start of my senior year my head was filled with possible college majors and career paths, but so many choices only bring about indecisiveness. I was starting work on my advanced placement design portfolio (which was actually composed of illustrative work) when I came up with an idea that seemed to stick.

For those who do not know me personally, I’ve always been a bit of a technophile. I run Linux, love Emacs and Vim, and have always been the turn to guy for my friends when technical problems arise. More than anything though, I love the web. Design can only get me so far though, and I want to be capable of operating on a full stack of both design and development knowledge.

I decided I was going to major in computer science during the fall of 2010. The decision was met by shock from a lot of my peers, most of which couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to just continue my design education at an art college (not that there is anything wrong with art colleges).

I consider myself a decent programmer, but I know nothing in comparison to professionals in the field. I know majoring in computer science is not going to make me a fantastic programmer, but it will give me knowledge that I can build off if I can commit myself to learning it. If I ever want to be able to put my ideas into action, I have to become a competent programmer. Sure frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django make web development a little bit easier, but I hate the idea of being stuck on a framework without the knowledge to custom tool what I’m working on. I cant just plead ignorance and never learn how the tools I use work.

I know I have a long road ahead of me, and I’ve spent the past year or so learning as much as I can outside of school (I’m at a small college currently knocking out a lot of my prerequisite courses to transfer to a university). I know there will be a lot of pitfalls, but I’ll just consider them another opportunity to learn.