tl;dr - Launching a new site called That Tattoo, that interviews people about one or more of their tattoos. So what prompted this? I was in Berlin recently, having a glass of wine on a bar patio. The couple at the table next to me were Americans and one of them had an excellent tattoo on his arm, that captured my interest. As they were getting up to leave I mustered the courage, I am at the English end of Australian polite and introverted, to ask him where he got it done and what it meant.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been helping build Empatico. We’ve hired a great team and built an awesome product which is having real impact. I’m super proud of what we’ve achieved and I’m confident it and the team will go from strength to strength. So when, a couple of months ago, Chad Fowler talked to me about a role at Microsoft, that confidence allowed me to entertain the idea.

In line with my recent posts on Bash, Bash options, and other command line tools, I thought I might do a post on another CLI plugin I use regularly: autojump. Autojump is a way to navigate the filesystem faster. It works by maintaining a database of directories you commonly cd into. Once you’ve visited a directory, you can return to it via the autojump shortcut, saving having to type or complete the full path.

So I am notorious as a clumsy typist, especially in instances like demos or on stage at conferences. I’ve also been known to comment indelicately about my mistakes in front of large audiences. So when I stumbled across The Fuck it was like I had found my keyboard people. Note Yes. I know. To some of you “fuck” is a bad word. It’s not to me but see later about how you can alias it if you’re concerned.

I recently posted some Bash tips, a couple of which used the shopt built-in command. The shopt, or shell optional, built-in is interesting. It allows you to configure some additional, optional, shell behavior. You can use the command for the current session or you can use it in the ~/.bashrc file to configure options for every session. Let’s take a quick look at how to use the shopt built-in and some of the available options you can try.