My Profile Photo

Chris Arcand


Principal Engineer building Terraform at IBM / HashiCorp 👨‍💻 Formerly: Red Hat, NBC SportsEngine, RubyMN organizer. Once played the clarinet for a living, now making a living to play hockey. I make pointless connections to Minnesota as a Minnesotan does.

St. Paul, MN


  1. Manually setting languages on GitHub with Linguist's (Improved) Vim Modeline Detection

    Useful even for non-Vim users: You can use Vim modelines to manually set the programming language for a file on GitHub (syntax highlighting, stats) - now with more flexible modeline syntax. [READ MORE]


  2. Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer

    “The times I feel I’ve made most difference to our team’s effectiveness is when I find ways to not build things.“ [READ MORE]


  3. Vim's new :cdo command

    Vim's new :cdo command offers new flexibility with your quickfix list. One such example is a near-native way to do project-wide find-and-replace operations. [READ MORE]


  4. Inline scoped Ruby methods with Ctags

    Adding Ctags support for Ruby 2.1's inline scoped method definitions [READ MORE]


  5. Oliver Sacks dies at 82

    World renowned neurologist and author Oliver Sacks died yesterday. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and acclaimed author who explored some of the brain’s strangest pathways in best-selling case histories like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” using his patients’ disorders as starting points for eloquent meditations on consciousness and the human condition, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82. “Oliver Sacks, doctor of ‘Awakenings’ and poet laureate of medicine, dies at 82” by the New York Times If you haven’t read Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain you need to go pick up... [READ MORE]


  6. Memoized helpers and before hooks in RSpec

    A quick overview of the similarities and differences between memoized helpers and before hooks in RSpec. [READ MORE]