Computing On The Edge - 202344

Coding On a Train

Most people is happy of going back to an in-presence, interactive reality, which includes a lot of sweat and commuting back'n'forth towards some part of the town most filled with offices.

There are upsides and downsides to it as everything else in life, of course.

One of those is to get some shorter sprints sitting on a train, where you might have the time to implement a feature or two.

Or, take a nap.

You don't have to decide beforehand, it is very flexible, "agile" like some would like to call it. You can start warming up opening some power-hungry IDE and then go: "let's sleep over it, I'll find a better algorithm later".

The Zen of coding on a train includes some ancient knowledge like mastering the commandline, so that you are not in the embarrassing position to have to use a mouse pointer and, depending on your dexterity, to take over a seat that has your dominant hand free.

If you are right-handed, you don't absolutely want someone to sit on your right, vice-versa if you're left-handed.

It seems obvious, but you will realize that with some simple experimentation, trying to pick from a drop-down with a neighbour eating chips and wondering what the hell you are doing in a GUI.

Terminals are mostly encouraged since they are just so much more boring: none cares what you write if it's a text terminal, plus they won't hinder your ability to move and implement new stuff.

Try and master Vi/VIM, in a very short sprint you can sketch a feature by cobbling together commands in a shell script.

But then, if you're up to something serious, you can go

First time I looked at some code I thought: "let us look at some C library to use, because this is too ugly".

The second time I thought about Go, after realizing code completion and syntax checks are fully usable in a vi console, my train of thoughts became: this is fantastic, and here is how to do it

Reading Tips for the week


Data Engineering

The System Design Primer

What every developer should know about database consistency

Embedded Systems

Minimal FreeRTOS with Platformio



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