About a year ago, I bought a MacBook Pro. I bought it for an intern who worked for me at One Shore. But after the internship was over it sat on the shelf.

Until today.

I’ve used a Mac before. I bought a Mac Mini several years ago as a test system — so I could cover all major operating system. And I wanted to learn iOS development.

I never got around to building that killer iPhone app so I still do test consulting and use my Mini from time to time for cross platform testing or when my other computer is busy (installing updates, etc.)

I’ve always struggled working with (or against) the operating system. I’m comfortable on Windows and Linux, so I did my best to make my Macintosh as familiar as possible, which meant changing keyboard shortcuts, installing familiar apps, and working from the command line as much as possible. OS X is Unix underneath, but it felt a bit like using Cygwin.

But now I’m going to make a concerted effort to learn to do things the Mac way. I’m sure I’ll have to cheat along the way — I intended to use Pages as a word processor, but to get started, I installed Sublime Text and started typing.

(Note: I just found that vim comes installed — once I found the terminal — so I could have used that. Or TextEdit, which is Apple’s version of Notepad, which I found under Applications after installing Sublime.)

I decided to create a blog and document my process learning to use a Mac as a software developer.

I hope it will also help me get motivated to write and learn a bit about engaging a community I’m not familiar with.

This is the start of it.  I’ll continue posting on monthofmac.com once I have the domain set up with DNS and WordPress.