On the list of things I always Google, is how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first; the source or the destination. The man pages add to the confusion by calling the "source" the target. So, the rule of thumb I now follow is cp or mv semantics.
Here's how I finally memorized it: ln has a 1-file-argument invocation, so ln -s ../../a_fine_file will create a symbolic link to that file under the current directory and under the "a_fine_file" file name. The single argument case has to have the file you want to link to as input. That generalizes nicely as the 2-file-argument invocation maintaining the logic.
Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
351–360 of 399 posts
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#352On the list of things I always Google, is how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first; the source or the destination. The man pages add to the confusion by calling the "source" the target. So, the rule of thumb I now follow is cp or mv semantics.
ln -s src dstRe: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#353I forget syntaxes of various languages or language features, so it's really handy that emacs can show them to me from stackoverflow with completion: https://i.imgur.com/dDvHfOn.gif
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#354Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is used to really confuse me too, but now I can't remember why, because everything's the same: touch $EDITOR mv cp scp mount The place you're putting something is last in each case; we can even include everything that doesn't modify its location. All I can think of that breaks the rule is `rm`, `unlink`, and `umount`. But they're hardly gotchas, and they're not reversing arguments they just don't have a 'destina…
I think "zip" breaks this rule.
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#356On the list of things I always Google, is how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first; the source or the destination. The man pages add to the confusion by calling the "source" the target. So, the rule of thumb I now follow is cp or mv semantics.
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” Yes the whole interview process is based on the idea of doing stuff for the company that you wouldn't actually do. Indeed I interview my candidate's ability to find resources, to know what considerations are needed, how to deal with IDEs, collaborative tools, the git protocol. I will fire someone on the spot for impleme…
And I think those “maker” types of roles don’t need a hard C.S. screen. But algorithms aren’t just about reimplementing the classics. There are points even in ordinary “DB front end” type of work where understanding algos will affect how you scale. You may find you’ve just been getting away with brute force approaches because that data sets were small. You can go very far like that but there may come a day when it ma…
I find this very ironic: Hiring for suitability to handle edge cases is also a brute force approach that doesn't scale.
A good algorithm optimizes for expe ted inputs and farms out cache misses and unexpected behavior to some other system.