> we don't have to figure it out - we just need to remember what we did
I always tell people: "You think I wrote this manual for you, but I'm not that altruistic. I wrote it for future me."
To be fair, not exactly the same thing. I typically remember I wrote it, just not what it does or how it works. :-)
you get into a task, you cram stuff in as you go, you finish it, and then you dump everything go onto another task.
i find my most valuable skill is to slow the pace to ensure retention of information
The most depressing thing is being presented with an issue and finding my name attached to a closed ticket from years before with no explanation of how I fixed it.
Guess what, current me, you're going to learn this again from scratch because past me was in a hurry and couldn't be bothered to type out what he did.
BSG - this has all happened before, and it will all happen again.
That's probably how early Alzheimer feels.
I think that the Internet has modified how our brains retain information. I don't think this is an original idea, but I've observed that I'm real good at indexing where I saw some piece of information and very poor at storing the actual piece of information. I have to physically write things down to commit them to recallable memory.
Debian (stable, at least) doesn't use his version anymore. The HISTORY section of the current manual says
> This su command was derived from coreutils' su, which was based on an implementation by David MacKenzie. The util-linux version has been refactored by Karel Zak.
Granted, I have specific code tells, which helps, but like the article mentions I have forgotten the why or the bug that I fixed that required specific changes.
Back in the age of modems, when PPP was still the new hotness, I was proud of myself for memorizing the IP addresses for a few of the services I used regularly. Two or three times I got to punk my friends when the DNS servers got messed up, and they’re sitting with me in the computer lab wondering what else we could do to pass the time when they looked over and noticed that I’m happily typing away in the very thing they couldn’t get into because The Internet Is Down. No man, it’s just DNS.
Older, sadder but wiser me knows that I still could have done that joke if I had written the numbers on a scrap of paper. I could have had twenty instead of five.
From Novice to Master, and Back Again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9098635 - Feb 2015 (1 comment)
From Novice to Master, and Back Again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443981 - Oct 2014 (27 comments)
the difference is that nothing I've ever worked on will ever be public or useful beyond a small private business which doesn't even exist anymore.
I still get nerdsniped though if certain people start copying my idioms and introduce bugs, because this looks like something I would write but didn’t.
edit: or the program the man page is documenting!
No matter how many times you do it, you will have to re-learn it every single time.
ln -s /foo/bar/baz
So you see, if you know that you can always skip the destination, then, logically, the source must be the first one!
but yea, it took me many years to wire down ln's target link_name semantics for some reason.
what helped for me was to reason about the single argument form. ln -s ~/opt/junk/bin/thinger creates a link to thinger in the current directory. this single argument form is easy to remember, if you want to create a link of course you have to specify the name of the target (from which the link name will be inferred) and since it's the only argument it has to be the first one. now if you want to give it a different name, put the name in obvious still open place, the second argument.
If bash has something like that I’m still missing it.
Obviously the brevity of bash can be its own power.
Anything more than trivial I do in a high level programming language like Go (previously I would use Ruby or Perl).
From everything I’ve seen PS is a nice direction to go in.
I wish there was a sudden upheaval and everybody used a shell that wasn’t so legacy-cruft-laden.
For scripting you can always use Python, which is lightyears ahead of PS.
If you write code do yourself a favor and write for future you. It'll help.
2. Google it.
3. Find answer on stackoverflow.
4. Try to upvote.
5. "You can't vote for your own post."
This has happened to me multiple times.
I was discussing how the only info I found was in a remote wikipedia article, yet incomplete. the guy told me he had written that article too.
good times
I wish there was even better way to preserve the context of what you were doing at the time (env variables, current path at the time etc).
PS: be sure to always have a -—help option that describes the function, just as you would do when programming
Before I began my studies in Zen, I thought a tree was a tree and a stone, a stone.
When I started to study Zen, I could see that a tree was not a tree, and a stone was not a stone.
Now that I am a Zen master, I know that a tree is a tree and a stone is a stone.
-- Source: my buddy in college
I think you come full circle to learn that you can only keep so much in your head at one time and that you're always in some sense loading up what you need for the next month or three. At least this time you knew to look for the man su command, and remind yourself of the work you did, that you shared with all these other people.
Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water
After enlightenment: chop wood, carry waterIt is true in the sense that 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science, but really, it is false and almost certainly establishes magical thinking in the layperson.
Modern computers run on electricity, and in electrical circuits such as computers, true/false is represented as a transistor semiconductor being in a conducting or non-conducting state. Current can either flow, or it can’t.
In fact, one could build a computer out almost anything that lends itself to both being on and off, and to being controlled by its on/off state (or that of another equivalent assembly).
junior dev: python is so cool!
senior dev: python is slow. No type checking. The syntax is garbage.
John Carmack: I write a lot of python and I use it exactly for what it is good for!
The idea behind the story is quite fascinating to me. If simulationists are right, it's as good or better of a "why" as "origin seeking" IMO. Not that I believe one way or the other, I just think the idea's interesting to ponder on.