"Tools we use to reduce cognitive load"
The essence of the software literacy revolution
"Share Tools we use to reduce cognitive load"
The essence of the FOSS revolution
Just one line and it was like a road to damascus
Making Hard Things Easy
81–90 of 202 posts
Re: Making Hard Things Easy
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://cheat.sh is your lifeline Also I made https://github.com/kristopolous/mansnip
This looks like https://tldr.sh in a browser.
curl cheat.sh/awk # is the intended behavior, and it frequently goes into way more detail than tldr does. Both great tools!
Re: Making Hard Things Easy
#83The part that resonated most with me is "Show things that are normally hidden".
Tools that do this make things clearer almost immediately. Consider the developer tools in a web browser. Do you remember the "dark ages" before such things existed? It was awful because you had to guess instead of seeing what was going on.
Tools like Wireshark that show you every last byte of network packets that it has access to AND parses it to help you see the structure. This isn't just for debugging networking data; it's hugely beneficial in teaching networking concepts because nothing is hidden.
This is also one of my favorite things about open source software. I can view the source to understand what's causing a bug, to fill in knowledge gaps left by the documentation, or just learn more about programming concepts. Nothing is hidden.
Re: Making Hard Things Easy
#84Excellent 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 came here to say Anki is my lifeline for grokking difficult things like DNS.
It was in fact on jvns.ca's book recommendation that I got Michael W. Lucas's _Networking for System Administrators_, and strip mined it for Anki cards containing both technical know-how and more than a little sysadmin wisdom.
It might be one of the highest ROI books I've ever read, considering I actually remember how to use things like nectat and tcpdump to debug transport layer issues at a moment's notice now.
Re: Making Hard Things Easy
#85Excellent 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 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.
I like `fzf`'s default override of Ctrl+R backwards search for this purpose, along with the fish shell's really good built in autocompletion.
I've been thinking about updating the GIFs in my fzf tutorial to show off fish, but I think I'd rather leave them with ish just so I don't dilute the pedagogical message.
Re: Making Hard Things Easy
#86To make hard things easy you have to find the right way to abstract them so you hold only some bits of the hard things in your head and all the frequently-used details too (maybe), and everything else you have to look up as needed. That's what I do, and that's roughly what TFA says. The problem is that people don't necessarily bother to form a cognitive compression of a large topic until they really have to. That's b…
The problem is that we're still using these ancient shells when we have better ones. Users shouldn't be wasting time memorizing arcana like "set -e". At least we have search engines now...
I'm quite partial to the fish shell myself for this reason.
But I SSH into a lot of embedded systems these days, where you don't exactly have the luxury of installing your own shell all the time. For those times I like to whip out the "minimal safe Bash template" and `sftp` it to the server.
Re: Making Hard Things Easy
#87This is a talk turned into a web page done right. It seems like it should be a simple thing to do, but often the results are confusing and hard to read. Not here, well done!
I'd love to know if jvns has a library or something she uses for this. I've seen this kind of slide thingy on https://boringtechnology.club/ too, and I'm really curious!
Re: Making Hard Things Easy
#88Julia has to be one of the most likable people in tech! Every time I read one of her articles I feel that same bubbly rush of excitement I got when I was a kid, just starting to unfurl the secrets of reality through my own little experiments. Absolutely lovely.
Re: Making Hard Things Easy
#89TiL: The shell does not exit if the command that fails is a part of any command executed in a && or || list except the command following the final && or ||. Reference: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#index-set
"Fails" is a higher-level concept than the shell is concerned with. Failure conditions and reactions are entirely at the discretion of the programmer and are not built as an assumption into the shell. The only thing /bin/false does is return 1. Is that a failure? No, that's how it was designed to work and literally what it is for. I have written hundreds of shell scripts and lots of them contain commands which quite…
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Re: Making Hard Things Easy
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
A large Justfile ( https://just.systems/ ) of random recipes might be a way to make it both executable and searchable (at least on zsh, you can get an autocomplete list of completions from the command line).
Can you think of a single CLI tool that would let me commit a past incantation to a file and retrieve it later? Especially one that syncs well across devices. The best I can think of is Atuin ( https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin ) but I wasn't super interested in using it - I kind of want something more lightweight.
I've been using a little set of bash funcs I called `hs` for this for a few years:
https://github.com/mikemccracken/hs
your snippets are stored in a git repo that you can sync around how you like.