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Making Hard Things Easy

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Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#151

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #148
jongjong wrote: post #135

On a related note, most software is over-engineered. I think it's partly because of centralization of the industry; it's pushing everyone towards a small number of tools for the benefit of a small number of people who control them and so many of these tools end up becoming 'everything tools' and cover more use cases than they should. Companies want developers to all know the same tools; that way they are easily repla…

I agree. In some ways it feels like we have gone backwards in web dev since say the early days of ASP.NET and Rails. Back then we had browser wars to keep is busy. But now browsers are broadly compatible but we have invented all this front end complexity for web apps that often don’t need it. Stuff like DNS, IP, https can’t be helped as they are fundamental things that need backwards compatibility and are somewhat po…

You can learn both, though. As much as people like to trash talk it, I think learning from "the bottom up", as long as you remember to follow the 80/20 principle and not go too deep into unnecessary rabbit holes, is still the best approach in terms of long term ROI on your time. I got a degree in EE because I wanted to be a "true" full stack engineer; last year I finally got a chance to learn React and a lot of cockpit flight hours setting Microsoft Azure. It took longer but I feel I'm on much steadier ground to keep climbing up.

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#152

Post by nomilk »

> people share things by sharing a 'best practices (guide)' but I always love to hear the story. Every time someone has a strong opinion like "no one should ever use bash", I'm like "tell me.. what did bash do you to, I need to know!"

So true!

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#153

Post by dclowd9901 »

justin_oaks wrote: post #83

The 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 par…

Yep. Mozilla developer tools basically launched my career.

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#154

Post by carterschonwald »

raincole wrote: post #146
justin_oaks wrote: post #83

The 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 par…

The game development equivalent of these is renderDoc. I was stunned when I learned its existance for the first time.

I’m about to embark on my first real and truly massive graphics project. Thx for mentioning such a cool tool.

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#155

Post by Aeolun »

andrepd wrote: post #140
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #88

Julia 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.

Very much. I'm usually not a fan of the "omg awesomesauce"-style of overexcited blogposts or tutorials, (I much prefer the drier, high signal-to-noise ratio, concise, beautiful texts of the Landau&Lifschitz style), but her posts all make me feel that giddy rush of excitement you're talking about :)

I think because it feels authentic, rather than forced.

It’s really easy to bleed one into the other.

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#156

Post by userbinator »

justin_oaks wrote: post #83

The 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 par…

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.

On the contrary, you don't need the source, and in some cases it may even be misleading in many ways, when you can look directly at the instructions the machine executes. Tools like disassemblers and decompilers would be equivalent to what you speak of.

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#157

Post by lazide »

tripleo1 wrote: post #113
lazide wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find has a particularly bad man page to find things that way.

FWIW it's `-maxdepth 1` not `-depth 1`. But yeah, you're right.

Dude, flashbacks. Aren’t you supposed to do a trigger warning or something first! ;)

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#158

Post by saghm »

userbinator wrote: post #156
justin_oaks wrote: post #83

The 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 par…

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. On the contrary, you don't need the source, and in some cases it may even be misleading in many ways, when you can look directly at the instructions the machine executes. Tools…

Nothing stops you from doing this with open source software either, though; making something open source is strictly an increase in the information available, and at least to me that seems in the spirit of "show me things that are normally hidden"

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#159

Post by wilkystyle »

justin_oaks wrote: post #83

The 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 par…

This is one thing I love about Magit for Emacs. The UI is really clever and slick—maybe the best Git frontend that I've ever used—but the way you interact with UI is by toggling flags and options that actually map to the underlying command line Git arguments. I can seamlessly hop into the command line and feel right at home using it directly.

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

#160

Post by giantg2 »

justin_oaks wrote: post #83

The 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 par…

'"Show things that are normally hidden". Tools that do this make things clearer almost immediately.'

At least with all the DevOps shit going on now, it seems that many of the tools increasingly hide things. And the gurus who had that knowledge and could teach you are now concentrated in those tool companies instead of in your org.

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