QuizzaciousOtter

Wow, thanks for posting this. I actually considered switching to PieFed because people say a lot of good things about it but now I know I won’t. I can’t treat codebase like this seriously.

Unfortunately the majority of the society, who are tech illiterate just like your wife.

I think someone just redacted your DE.

I have never tried Swisscows but I just want to say that Kagi is fantastic. Absolutely the best search experience I had in years.

You might want to check out fatrace. It can tell you exactly which processes access the given filesystem.

Most ebooks I bought recently come with a warning that the buyer’s data is embedded in the file to deter from sharing it online. TBF it cannot be hard to remove it but I didn’t bother to check how it’s implemented.

I think Linkwarden is fantastic but should be described and advertised more as internet archiving software than a bookmark manager. It really should be obvious to anyone that it’s downloading the webpages, not just saving links. I

3 is not related to using git in any way. I’m not really sure what you mean in 4. I didn’t mean making a lot of changes, I meant that you should not wait with committing until you have a finished feature / fix / whatever. Commit after each refactor, commit after adding a new testable unit. It’s always better to have more checkpoints. If your team does code review, they will appreciate atomic commits too.

1. Use git for any code you write. Yes, even a simple script.
2. Commit and push often. More often than you think is reasonable. You can always rebase / fixup / squash / edit but you can’t recover what you didn’t commit.
3. ???
4. Profit.

Seriously, once you commited something to the repo it’s hard to lose it. Unless you delete .git. But a this point frequent pushing has your back.

I know git can be hard to grasp in the beginning. It was hard for me too. I highly encourage everyone to put in the effort to understand it. But if you don’t want to do that right now just use it. Just commit and push. It will pay off.

Following tutorials and courses is definitely a very popular way of learning programming but I personally hate it. For me, the motivation was always a problem to solve, and programming was just a tool to solve it. Of course, you probably need to follow some kind of guided experience to gather the absolute fundamentals, but to get better you just need to apply this in practice.

The first ever problem I decided to solve with programming was organizing pirated video files into manageable directory structure. I knew almost nothing about programming at this point and my thought process was something like this:

1. Which programming language should I use? Search the web, read a bunch of articles, make a decision. I chose Python.
2. Ok, first I need to find the files to process. Search the web for “get files in a folder Python”. Read a bunch of answers (never just a single one!). Apply the solution.
3. Now I need to somehow discern between movies and series episodes. Search the web for “check if text contains text Python”.
4. Repeat until you have a working program…

Now, the most important part of this is to have an idea for a project which either solves a real problem of yours or just is exciting to you. Some examples of my projects:

• Due to weird grading system used in my school, calculating GPA was pretty inconvenient. I decided to solve this with programming. I wanted to make the solution easily available to my teammates so I created a web app.
• I wanted to control my smart TV using a computer. I knew it can be controlled using Android application so it seemed likely that I can do the same using my PC.
• I bought a smart lightbulb and I was playing with setting it to different colors while listening to music. A thought suddenly popped up: “hey, can I make it blink to the music?”.

When starting most of these projects I had no idea how to approach the problem. So I just searched the web until I knew it. In the beginning you will probably be searching and reading much more than writing code. But that’s a good thing! Programming (or rather software engineering) is not about typing out code, it’s about breaking down the problem into smaller chunks until you actually know how to solve each of the chunks with the tools you have at hand. Once you have this understanding, writing code is usually rather easy.

I always wanted to play with those cool pipettes you see in lab stock photos and videos. I don’t even know why but they just seem so cool.

Chrome is just faster than Firefox. I use Firefox, but I do it despite its performance, not because of it.

I mean, I am applying various kinds of science but I’m not actually doing any science so I’m not thinking about myself as a scientist. What I do is solving problems - I’m an engineer.