Terpstra Day

When I started MacStories three years ago, I had no idea whether or not the site would be successful. But I was told that, no matter the page views and the retweets, the people from the Apple community would make it worth the effort anyway. Brett Terpstra represents everything that’s great about this corner of the Internet.

Brett is the developer of Marked, a writing tool we use every day at MacStories and that, personally, I couldn’t work without anymore. But that’s not the main story. Brett gives away dozens of productivity enhancers for your Mac and iOS devices such as nvALT, Marked Watcher Scripts, Markdown Service Tools, TextExpander snippets for OS X and iOS, and a Clip to Day One service, just to name a few. Gabe at Macdrifter put together a list of all the awesome things that Brett builds, keeps up to date, and gives away for free without asking anything in return. Brett is also the guy behind the ultimate iTextEditors comparison list.

Not only that, Brett somehow manages to combine his love for nerdery, writing, and coding with elegance and kindness. I once mistakenly wiped an entire MacStories post I was editing in a Marked beta, and Brett recovered every part of it, no problem – it wasn’t something he had to do, because when you beta test software, you should know the risks (still, you should look forward to the next Marked).

From my interview with him earlier this month:

My workflow is constantly in flux. I’m what people refer to as a “fiddler.” I’m ok with that, mostly because I get a lot of enjoyment out of sharing the things I figure out on the way. If I just dumped all of that time into a hole and never made anything useful for myself or others, then I’d definitely feel like I was wasting it.

People like Brett make this little community of ours worth writing for every day, and the stuff he makes allows me to work better and more efficiently. Thanks Brett.