Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
When it comes to organizing source code repositories, there are broad similarities — source code in src/, tests in test/ — but no universal standards. Recently I was thinking about this and wondered “What about UNIX?” Most Linux distributions follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard to some extent. The directory names are short and familiar. The structure…
There comes a point in a programming career — at least one as peripatetic as mine —at which learning a new programming language barely registers as an obstacle. I’m not talking about mind-meltingly different languages like APL, just your run-of-the-mainstream object/imperative mishmash. Grab a syntax cheat-sheet, skim the standard library docs, and off you go.
Now that we’ve covered the basics of remote work — headsets, cables, and software — it’s time to think about some of the smaller, more subtle things we can do to ensure a good remote experience for everyone. Today, that’s profile pictures.
In the first two posts in this series, I talked about hardware: networking and headsets. I’ll come back to hardware eventually, but the next thing on the checklist is software.
If you saw my last post, you’ve got your computer wired up. Time to get yourself wired up too. The next piece of hardware you need to be a successful remote worker is a headset with an adjustable microphone boom.
So you want to work remote. Or you want other people to be remote. You want space. Perspective. Distance. Escape the corporate cubicle farm and work in your pajamas. First, you need to get some network cables.
Everyone likes to complain when a build tool “downloads the internet” the first time they check out a new project. But the cost is typically amortized over many subsequent builds.
Tell me if this story sounds familiar. At your company, there is The Tool. Everyone is required to use The Tool. It is the central information hub for the entire company. Or at least it was supposed to be. In practice, it is where information goes to die.
After installing the latest *env utility, I decided to stop and count how many of these things have accumulated in my shell.
Inspired by a recent article comparing the number of system calls at start made by various compilers, I decided to do the same with my Clojure start-time experiments.