Projects
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Getting Unblocked, Faster: 5 Lessons from Journalism (and One Bonus Lesson) That Can Help You Ask Better Questions
Most loyal readers of this site know that before I was a software engineer, I was a journalist. I pivoted to my new career during the pandemic and have zero regrets! But there are certainly times I am grateful for my journalism training.
Frequently those times are when I need to get unblocked. I believe I can get unblocked faster than the average person at my level because my former career has taught me how to ask questions. Here, I’d like to share those tips so that you, too, can ask better questions.
1. Find your expert, and embrace the directed question
If you’re writing about the pandemic, you need Anthony Fauci on the line. If you’re debugging React, who’s your subject-matter expert?
At work, I try to notice who’s really good at certain tasks, whether or not they’re the official on-call for that task or service. I don’t hit them up all the time, but if a question in a public channel goes un-answered, or something is extra-urgent, I’ll send a quick DM.
Outside of work, I try to do the same, although sparingly. This blog is made using Jekyll, and for the most part I don’t have to know any Ruby to maintain it, but you absolutely bet I took notes when a woman in my local women-in-tech meetup was solving leetcode problems with Ruby one-liners.
Where else to find your expert? If your company has a formal mentorship program, get matched up with a mentor, and find out what they’re great at. Then say, for example: “I know we meet [biweekly, or whatever the time period is], but I’m new to [thing], and I know that’s one of your strengths. Would it be OK if I reached out outside of our set meeting times if I have a question about [thing]?”
Are you part of a tech meetup, Discord, user group (are those still a thing)? Sometimes a polite, respectful note to a helpful person there goes a long way.
All this does not overrule the idea that public conversations are, in general, better than private ones, because if your conversation is public, more people can learn from the discussion. But realistically, sometimes you just gotta get an answer.
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Teaching a Reinforcement Learning Algo to Play Queens
Once you have created infinite games of Queens, you need to play infinite games of Queens. I don’t have time for that, so the next logical step is to teach the computer how to play, taking humans out of the equation entirely.
A very cool data scientist I know recommended getting to know reinforcement learning algorithms. These are the AIs that do cool things like speedrun Mario. Why not train one to beat Queens? Why not, indeed. Ignoring the part where I have no experience in machine learning and don’t think much of my math skills (I was a middle school mathlete, but I still don’t think much of my math skills), this should be fun. Follow along with me as I take my first steps into machine learning.
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Site Updates for September
Frequent visitors to the site may have noticed some minor layout changes around here.
I’ve moved my list of projects to the top of the main page. Crucially, it is now mobile friendly as well.
Projects also have tags on them now to distinguish between
apps(something that may be useful),games(a full-fledged, playable game) andtoys(things I made to mess around with). I may add more categories later.On the backend, projects are now a Jekyll
Collectionwhich in theory gives me more control over how to render them. And, if you reshare any of my posts, they now have improved open graph metadata. -
In Which I Go Down a Complete Rabbithole About Bash Completion
Ever wonder what is actually going on in your shell when you type, for example,
cd ~/myp, hit<TAB>, and the shell completes~/myproject?Neither had I, until recently.
This was supposed to be a post about the next chapter of Efficient Linux at the Command Line, which is about navigating the file system. However, the author dropped in the idea of the bash builtin
completein a sidebar, and I might have gone a little off the deep end.In the source code given for writing a custom bash function, the last line added to the user’s config file is:
complete -W "work recipes video beatles" qcdwhich would mean if someone typedqcdfollowed by two tabs, the terminal would print all the available keys: in this caseworkrecipesvideoandbeatles.What is this? What’s going on here?
If you type
completeby itself, you get a very long list of what looks like nonsense:complete -F _longopt mv complete -F _root_command gksudo complete -F _command nice complete -F _longopt tr complete -F _longopt head ...and so onThis is, it turns out, a list of what completion command is run when you run one of the bash commands at the end of each line. In other words,
complete -F _longopt mvmeans, if you typemv <tab><tab>complete will run the function (-F)_longopt._longoptand the other built in completions are very long bash functions that mostly call other functions, and if you want to spend a lot of your next three-day weekend retracing my steps, you are welcome to it. For the purposes of this post, however, I’ll talk about an overly simplified completion, because I already spent more time on this Labor Day weekend reading about this than I ever imagined I would. -
Leveling Up on the Command Line
I am lucky in that my first exposure to computers was through the command line. I wasn’t a wizard by any sense when I realized that I could type “echo hi” and the computer would ‘talk’ back to me*, but it means that I feel more comfortable in a non-GUI environment than many of my colleagues.
There’s always room for improvement, though. And when I’m not at work, I’m working on a new-to-me Linux laptop. Even with Pop OS installed, let’s be real: There are some things that any Linux GUI just doesn’t do that well, so the command line is still essential.
In that spirit, I bought Efficient Linux at the Command Line.
I’m only on Chapter 3 but am already learning a lot of commands that I hope to burn into muscle memory. Here are a few that I am working on now: