I spent the better part of two work days this week mob programming. Solo programming is easy, you and a computer, and your favorite text editor. Pair programming (which I have never done) sounds like it would be interesting. Two minds, two differing approaches, one problem. Done right, it could be very empowering. Mob programming is what happens when there are three, four, and even five people on the Zoom call, watching one person “drive” and offering ideas, suggestions, and feedback.
I found it exhausting. It was very easy to lose track of the current thread, of the current approach to solving the problem. Depending on who was driving at the time it was very difficult to keep up with what they were doing. (Imagine an editor with 5 open tabs, each titled “UNNAMED” that the person is jumping back and forth between.)
We ultimately resolved the issue, but not efficiently, and not in a reproducible way. Maybe not reproducing it is actually a plus. I think with two, or maybe three people, you can focus on a problem and make steady progress. If one member of the group gets too close to the tree, at least one other person and pull them back to see the forest. Somehow with four people, and also with five, you end up with scattered approach. Two or three forests aren’t being seen for two or three trees.
If I find myself headed into a similar situation-two of us working and deciding to bring in another for assistance-I think the designated driver needs to be very up-front about directing what is going on. I also think it would help if the driver narrated what they were doing, even to the point of saying things like, “I’m going to open a new tab to pull up this code …”.
No more mob programming for me.
Recently at work I had to split a sub-folder in a repository into its own repository. I wanted to keep the commit history. My search online led me to Splitting a subfolder out into a new repository on the GitHub Dos site.
The instructions there are very good. In a nutshell what I did was this.
git filter-repo --path FOLDER-NAME/ command.In all the process took about 5 minutes. Not something I’ll do every day, but it is nice to know it is possible.
For the past ten years or so, my primary terminal emulator has been iTerm2. Recently I have been experimenting with other terminal emulators. The current test subject is Alacritty. Switching to a different piece of software has exposed a learned behavior that I’m not sure I’m willing to give up.
iTerm2 employs what I think of as a document model. You open the software once, but can have multiple “documents” open simultaneously. In this case each document is another terminal session. Since they are all children of the application you can cycle through them using the CMD-` keyboard shortcut.
On the desktop where I keep my terminal windows (multiple desktops is another topic for another day), I typically have three terminal windows open. In the upper left quadrant I have a window where I keep my daily log open in a text editor. The lower left quadrant has a window where my ICR client (Weechat) and Mutt email live, each in their own tmux window. Both Mutt and Weechat run on a small server in my home, so I ssh into that machine and attach to a tmux session which holds those two applications. The right side of my screen is a single terminal window where I do most of my work. I usually have several tmux session defined, each centered around either a long running task, or some recurring administration function I want to return to again and again.
Since iTerm2 uses a document model I can use the CMD-` shortcut to hop from terminal to terminal. Alacritty does not employ a document model. Each of the three terminal windows described above is a unique instance of Alacritty. In order to switch from one to another I need to use CMD-Tab. CMD-Tab brings up the application switcher, and sometimes there are several applications I have to tab past to get to the next Alacritty window. Furthermore, from the application switcher you can’t tell which Alacritty window you are about to open. When you CMD-` you are taken to the window so you know immediately which window you are at.
For now, I’m going to return to iTerm2 so I can keep my in-application window switching ability.
As a programmer / site reliability engineer / cloud infrastructure administrator I am very familiar with processes and procedures. Some are anecdotal and others are formalized. The best ones are automated, so that they are precisely repeatable.
My wife is having hip replacement surgery today. As with her first hip replacement last year, there are a number of processes and procedures at play, and a few checklists. We both appreciate the thoroughness of the preparation. Having each stage mapped out, knowing what to expect, and having people verify and explain as they go, all make the experience better.
One of the procedures requires no food or drink within six hours of the surgery. Usually they tell you nothing after midnight, regardless of the procedure time, as it is a definite, unambiguous time.
As a part of the pre-op preparation, there were several pills my wife needed to take. She is unable to swallow pills using water alone. We explained this prior to the first surgery to the hospital intake nurse, to the anesthesiologist who called the day before, and to the nurses preparing her for surgery. In order to swallow pills my wife use a small bite of soft food: a cracker chewed up, or a bite of banana.
On the morning of the first surgery the nurse presented her with a little cup full of pills and a small cup of water. We explained once again the inabilty to swallow with only water. So the pills didn’t happen.
We explained this requirement again during all of the pre-op visits and calls. During the pre-op anesthesiologist phone call yesterday, we again explained about the need for a small bite of soften food to swallow pills. This morning we explained that to the nurse. She offered a saltine cracker, which did all the pills to be taken. An hour later, as we were waiting in the holding bay outside the operating room, we were told that due to the cracker surgery would have to be delayed. By six hours.
The procedure wasn’t followed. Had the nurse contacted the anesthesiologist for today’s surgery and asked, it might have been allowed, or they may have said, “Nope, no food”. Either way the surgery would have happened at the original 9 am time. Since there wasn’t any communication to verify the use of a cracker, the surgery was delayed.
I understand and appreciate the importance of procedures and checklists, and that there are consequences for not following them. That the surgeon and anesthesiologist are paying that much attention bolsters my confidence in their focus and dedication to my wife’s care.
The consequence of not following the no food edict is a six hour delay. The irony is that the efficacy of the medication taken at 7 am with a bite of cracker will have worn off by the start time of the delayed surgery.
Whenever my wife or I sees something like this, we’ll say, “When do people think up stuff like this?”, to which the other will say, “Not between 9 and 5.”
This house is wonderfully situated to embrace its location. I especially like that different parts of the house have distinct views.
After watching 0 to LSP: Neovim RC From Scratch I wanted to experiment with my own Neovim configuration. Fortunately, someone tweeted a very nice way to have a scratch environment, totally separate from your current Neovim configuration, for experimentation.
Bonus tip: If you want to try @ThePrimeagen's 0-to-LSP without affecting your current nvim conf, just use a scratch container
— Luigi Ketamine (@vure89) December 16, 2022
docker run -it --rm -v {$PWD}:/root/.config/nvim -w /root/.config/nvim --net host alpine sh
(don't forget to `apk add neovim neovim-doc`)
🐴🤝
Start by creating a scratch directory on your host machine. Then using that directory run this command:
docker run -it --rm -v {$PWD}:/root/.config/nvim -w /root/.config/nvim --net host alpine sh
After the image is started, run
apk add neovim neovim-doc
to install Neovim and its documentation.
The Docker instance will start surprisingly quickly, and since it is mapped to a directory on your host machine, the configuration you make will be saved. I can see myself using this pattern for other experiements.
I’ve known about the annual Advent of Code challenge for several years. I decided to participate this year; I’ve been slowly teaching myself the Go programming language and this would be a good way to reinforce what I know. Or to discover what I don’t know.
My bachelor’s degree is in “Applied Computer Science”. I was in college from 1979 until 1983. While algorithms may have been discussed in a couple of courses, I did not have a course specifically about algorithms. I graduated with a college level understanding of COBOL, JCL, VSAM, IMS, and CICS. The next decade was spent honing my use of those tools.
The problem domains I worked in were centered around batch processing of transactions, we weren’t looking for the speediest way, or the most memory efficient way, or the least costly way to solve problems. We wanted reliable, durable, functional code to generate bills, update accounts, and manage assets. We wanted code that was easy to understand and work with at 3 am when your pager went off.
Fast forward 40 years to the Advent of Code, or as I am calling it in my head, the Algorithm of Code challenge. So far I’ve completed the first three days puzzles; 6 puzzles total. My solutions produce the correct answers, but they are not elegant or pretty. My approach is somewhat brute force. Effective? Yes, but I’m convinced that someone with a better grasp of algorithms would be able to solve these challenges with fewer lines of code, perhaps more efficiently.
Going forward I plan to alter my approach to solving the puzzles. If I realize that I need to find the intersection between three sets, I’ll search for “algorithm to find intersection between sets” and try to incorporate what I find into my solution. Once I have a feel for the crux of the problem, I’ll research to see if there is some known algorithm useful in overcoming that hurdle.
A couple months ago I discovered that FrontendMasters is offering a free algorithms course. I started to watch the first lesson, but life intruded and I haven’t continued. Over the extended year end break I want to try to complete the algorithm course to gain a better understanding of what they are an how to utilize them.
In the meantime, I’ll be plugging away at the next set of puzzles, and hoping to learn a bit more about programming.