tl;dr:“Let's find out how well you know computers! All of these programs have a variable number in them. Your mission: guess how big number needs to get before the program takes 1 second to run.”
tl;dr:“It’s very useful for me to know what behaviour to expect from a random new terminal program that I’m using. Instead of “uh, programs could do literally anything”, it’s “ok, here are the basic rules I expect, and then I can keep a short mental list of exceptions”. I’m just writing down what I’ve observed about how programs behave in my 20 years of using the terminal, why I think they behave that way, and some examples of cases where that rule is “broken”.”
tl;dr:“The reason why “pipes get stuck” sometimes is that it’s VERY common for programs to buffer their output before writing it to a pipe or file. So the pipe is working fine, the problem is that the program never even wrote the data to the pipe!”
tl;dr:“Here’s a table of all 33 ASCII control characters, and what they do on my machine (on Mac OS), more or less. There are about a million caveats, but I’ll talk about what it means and all the problems with this diagram that I know about.
tl;dr:“Yesterday I was thinking about how long it took me to get a color scheme in my terminal that I was mostly happy with, and it made me wonder what about terminal colours made it so hard.” Julia asked people what problems they’ve run into with colours in the terminal, and shared some of the problems and fixes.
tl;dr:“I wrote about how much I love fish in this blog post from 2017 and, 7 years of using it every day later, I’ve found even more reasons to love it. So I thought I’d write a new post with both the old reasons I loved it and some reasons.”
tl;dr:Julia asked her network what was confusing about working in the terminal, and one thing that stood out to me was “editing a command you already typed in”. Julia shares why this is hard and some tips she’s picked up along the way.
tl;dr:“Job control” is a set of commands for seeing which processes are running in a terminal and moving processes between 3 states: jobs in the foreground, in the background and jobs stopped. Julia asked her network for reasons people use job control, sharing responses here.
tl;dr:Julia discusses various strategies she’s put into place when facing an unclear error messages in Git. “I’m going to go through a bunch of Git’s error messages, list a few things that I think are confusing about them for each one, and talk about what I do when I’m confused by the message.”
tl;dr:(1) Fear can make you overly conservative as a programmer, afraid to make important changes. This leads to worse software in the long run. (2) Better tools and processes reduce fear to make changes e.g. version control, automated testing. (3) How an organization reacts to mistakes is critical i.e. blameless postmortems. (4) Some fears spread to others if not addressed. (5) Fear creates "local maximums" - it prevents you from making big improvements and keeps you stuck in a suboptimal state.