You’ve been lied to about the Newline Character The humble newline character: \n.
You’ve seen it in countless code examples. Usually something like
foo\n bar\n \n You look at that and probably think, it represents the end of a line. Or maybe you think it represents the start of a line. If you believe either of those things, I’m sorry to inform you that you’re wrong.
Fortunately, by the end of this post you’ll have a much better mental model of \n.
Once upon a time a group of friends gathered at a restaurant. We passed the time trying to devise the worst phonetic alphabet. One that, when heard, would do the best possible job of not successfully conveying the letters you were trying to communicate. This is what we came up with.
A aye
B bdellium (the b is silent)
C cent
D djin
E eye
F fore
G gnu
H heir
That sounds pretty obvious. It is pretty obvious. Anyone with any familiarity with older humans knows that they generally have trouble reading small text, or making out fine details. Every drug store has a rack of magnifying glasses. Everyone’s seen an older person doing the thing where they lift up their bifocals and start moving a thing closer and farther with their arm trying to find a spot where it both large enough to be readable but far away enough to be in focus.
[⚠️ This is a blow-by-blow ranty post about what happened when Ubiquity screwed up a software upgrade ⚠️]
This morning has been… a journey.
Our Wifi coverage has been kinda 💩 at the new house because there’s way more space between us and the Access Point.
So, let’s just run some ethernet across the floor for now! Should be quick! 🤦🏻♀️
We run it into my wife’s iMac. No problem. All good.
The Coin Game is one of the tools I’ve come up with to help myself recognize when I do accomplish something of value. It also helps motivate me to do more.
Boring tasks are hard, especially for ADHD brains. On top of this, when we do actually manage to accomplish something, we don’t give ourselves credit for it. Sometimes it feels like it shouldn’t count because of how long it takes.
(Or, The Value of Working at Lower Levels of Abstraction.)
I’m loving working in Scheme because it forces me to work from First Principles.
There’s a huge value in the convenience functions that most languages wrap around those first principles, but it’s like buying and using a car vs. building the car you’re using.
The latter is more work but you’re going to really understand how that car works and you’re going to have the perfect car for your needs.
Emacs is arguably the most powerful tool available to the modern programmer. Vim’s pretty close. Both require more effort to learn than say Atom or Sublime Text. But, the additional start-up effort pays off quickly.
Like Scheme, they both suck out-of-the-box. Unaltered they’re both horrible bare-bones skeletons of an editor. Their potential is incredible though. If you’re just going to do something quickly, and never spend the time to customize them, they are a terrible choice.
There’s a little known RPG called “Delve” that is not to be confused with Ironsworn Delve.
Welcome to Delve You awaken on a beach surrounded by the debris from a wrecked ship, you are not alone as others seem to be also awakening from their ordeal. You had no time to pack and all you have is what is in your pockets or what you can find amongst the wreckage. This begins your adventures on the island of Cragbarren.
There are a number of people who want to stay safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, but have found themselves making questionable decisions, because they’ve become acclimatized to it, and because they want to believe that their friends are healthy, because they look healthy, and reason that “of course, those friends are responsible, and I’m responsible, so it should be safe to get together and do something.”
Friends and family are the big problem.
I… really hate email.
By the time I left my last company I had successfully trained everyone around me to stop sending me email, or at least not expect me to have seen anything they sent me. My friends are similarly trained.
The thing is, I don’t actually hate email.
I hate traditional email clients and the bullshit usage patterns the force on us, and I hate the bullshit way most employers use email.
