Sharing some random tidbits I learned throughout the week.

This was my first week at Shopify. All of the interns went through a commerce bootcamp so that we could familiarize ourselves with Shopify from a merchant and customer’s perspective.

  • Command–Option–Power puts your Mac to sleep.
    • Don’t want coworkers aliasing cd to exit while you downstairs getting coffee.
  • Zsh is an interactive shell.
    • Out of the box command line completion
    • Shared command history
    • Easily view command-line options
  • Created my own set of dotfiles.
    • Learned that the way you usually install these on a new computer is by creating symbolic links from your dotfiles project to ~/.
  • A payment gateway is a service that authorizes credit card payments.
    • Shopify’s Active Merchant gem provides a simple and unified API to access over 100 payment gateways including Stripe and Paypal.
  • Vagrant is a tool to build development environments.
    • Isolates dependencies and configuration in a disposable consistent environment.
    • Configuration is stored in a Vagrantfile.
  • The script/ directory in projects usually contain scripts to automate tasks.
    • Shopify has scripts to start servers, bootstrap projects and to list who worked on various files.
  • Vimwiki is an awesome personal wiki for vim.
    • I use it to take daily notes and store things like my vim command reference.
  • A GIC is a Guaranteed Investment Certificate
    • Contract that guarantees the owner principal repayment and interest rate for a predetermined period of time.
    • Usually low interest rate.
    • Two types:
      • Non Redeemable GIC’s can only be withdrawn after maturity date.
      • Redeemable GIC’s can be withdrawn before the maturity date.
  • TFSA stands for Tax Free Savings Account
    • Investment income is not taxed even when withdrawn.
    • Limit is $5,500 a year in 2016. Was $10,000 in 2015.
      • Unused contribution room can be carried forward indefinitely.
  • An RRSP is a Registered Retirement Savings Plan
    • An investment portfolio that is tax deductible and one that grows tax sheltered.
    • A tax deduction reduces your taxable income.
    • Tax sheltering means deferring taxes on investment earnings until later.
      • For an RRSP, you only pay taxes when you withdraw you money.
      • This is generally when you retire and your tax rate is lower since your income is lower.
  • An RRIF is a Registered Retirement Income Fund is an extension of your RRSP.
    • Your RRSP turns into an RRIF automatically at the end of the year that you turn 71.
    • Still tax deferred growth however you must make minimum mandatory withdrawals each year.
  • An RESP is a Registered Education Savings Plan
    • Tax sheltered plan with government assistance.
    • Cannot deduct contributions made to RESP from taxable income.
    • Multiple grants where the government will match contribution amounts.
      • CESG Canadian Education Savings Grant matches 20% on first $2500 contributed annually.
  • An IPO, also known as the Initial Public Offering, is the first sale of stock from a private company to the public.
    • IPO Lock-Up is the period of time after a company has gone public where company insiders are forbidden from selling shares.
      • Large share holders selling stock could send stock spiraling downwards.
  • Underwriting for commercial banking is assessing the credit worthiness of borrowers and agreeing to fund loans.
    • Defaulting is the failure to pay interest or principal when due.
  • Vim commands of the week
    • :h{word} searches the vim help entries for {word}.
    • f{char} Moves cursor onto next occurence of {char}.
    • t{char} Moves cursor upto next occurence of {char}.
    • Type vimtutor in your terminal for an awesome introduction to vim.
    • . repeats last change
    • >> indents
    • << unindents
    • 15G jumps to line 15