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Making Hard Things Easy

jvns.ca

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Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#51

Post by eviks »

thwarted wrote: post #7
zvmaz wrote: post #2

Excellent talk. She seems to be a very likable person. She is right about Bash being full of "gotchas" and trivia and memorizing them all is very hard, but I think it is nice to memorize some trivia. For instance, I tended to forget the order of the arguments of the find command, and I would lose time trying to remember its syntax when I'm in front of a machine with no readily available internet connection. So I comm…

I tended to forget the order of the arguments of the find command, and I would lose time trying to remember its syntax when I'm in front of a machine with no readily available internet connection. The man pages are readily available. The bash man page is huge and hairy, but comprehensive, I've found it pretty valuable to be familiar with the major sections and the visual shape of the text in the man page so I can pag…

Comprehensiveness is not a benefit if it's poorly searchable

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#52

Post by eviks »

norir wrote: post #14

I really disagree strongly with the take on bash. The best solution is not to add tooling on top of bash or memorize its idiosyncrasies. It is to not use bash. That is the only way to escape its pitfalls.

Indeed, especially now when you have so many great alternatives, use python as your shell if you like

Many bad designs are too entrenched to be fixed with some tooling

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#54

Post by dgb23 »

zoogeny wrote: post #34

I have no idea why but I wanted to hate this article. Maybe jvns shows up on HN too often and I was in a bad mood. But this is a great article and as someone with 20 years of development experience is about as true as any meta-level discussion on programming could be. The selective vision thing is so true, both for `dig` and for `man` pages. I can't count the number of times have I `man ` and just felt overwhelmed by…

> I'm also a bit sad to hear that Strange Loop is now finished? I only found them last year or so and it seemed like so many of the talks were exceptional quality.

You might want to watch Alex Miller's talk that has been uploaded recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suv76aL0NrA

And yes, it's sad that it ended!

However he made a very good case for why sometimes it's good for things to end. If you watch the whole talk it all makes sense.

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#55

Post by jroseattle »

I both agree and disagree with her sentiments here. Not in a right/wrong sense, but just what I found works for me.

I agree with having helpers to understand how tooling works. Any resources that increase understanding of how to use a tool to it's full capability is productively beneficial. (Hat-tip to anything that unpacks all the `curl` switches.)

Here's where I have disagreement: an old boss of mine once said "don't worry about the tricks of the trade; learn the trade." That's very contextual, but sometimes understanding the core first makes the rest of it easy. And understanding the core takes both effort and increases cognitive load, so I understand why one might not go that route.

So, for me, I always try to keep a balance between trying to back my way into execution via those helpers, and recognizing when I need to take a step back and learn at a bit more core level.

Her down-to-earth approach is refreshing, that's for sure.

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#57

Post by eschneider »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #36
asicsp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I maintain a file with commands that I don't use often (ex: increase volume with ffmpeg, add a border to an image with convert, etc). I even have a shortcut that'll add the last executed command to this file and another shortcut to search from this file.

If you’re already putting them in a file, you might as well put them in a shell script on $PATH: at a certain point I started writing shell scripts and little utilities for relatively infrequently used commands and other tasks (e.g. clone this repo from GitHub to a well-known location and cd to it)

Keeping a ~/bin directory with all your personal shell shortcut scripts has been my go-to for years. I tend to make a lot of project-specific shortcut scripts for anything that I want to remember/becomes a common task.

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#58

Post by dgb23 »

norir wrote: post #14

I really disagree strongly with the take on bash. The best solution is not to add tooling on top of bash or memorize its idiosyncrasies. It is to not use bash. That is the only way to escape its pitfalls.

Many have tried, nobody succeeded.

Bash scripts are extremely useful and productive for their niche. You'd have to change a whole lot of things to match that.

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#59

Post by kristopolous »

zoogeny wrote: post #34

I have no idea why but I wanted to hate this article. Maybe jvns shows up on HN too often and I was in a bad mood. But this is a great article and as someone with 20 years of development experience is about as true as any meta-level discussion on programming could be. The selective vision thing is so true, both for `dig` and for `man` pages. I can't count the number of times have I `man ` and just felt overwhelmed by…

https://cheat.sh is your lifeline

Also I made https://github.com/kristopolous/mansnip

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#60

Post by dgb23 »

TheClassic wrote: post #27

I expected there to be an abstracted, general, repeatable tldr that can be reapplied as a mental model. I haven't digested the whole thing, but after skimming, I can't identify what it is.

She illustrates several (not one) general techniques that can be applied in different situations.
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