Canadian software engineer living in Europe.
I had a job interview a few weeks ago where the lead developer straight-up said that he doesn’t have any tests in the codebase because “it’s just writing your code twice”. I thought he was joking. Unfortunately he was not.
I didn’t end up getting the job, perhaps because I made it clear that I thought he was very wrong. I think I dodged a bullet.
I don’t think there’s an official “way”, but here’s mine (which I love):
On start-up I open all the apps I usually use, one per designated workspace:
Workspaces 6-9 are left empty, ready for whatever app I need in the moment, but only ever one app per workspace.
With this setup, I’ve mapped Ctrl+Fx to each workspace, so Ctrl+F4 takes me to PyCharm where I write the code, and Ctrl+F5 followed by another F5 takes me to Firefox and reloads the page. Ctrl+F3 is always the terminal, etc., so you quickly start building these shortcuts to mean Fwhatever is $APP_NAME.
I almost never use the mouse, unless what I’m doing is necessarily mouse-driven: browsing or drawing charts etc. Everything else is keyboard-driven.
I have a few interesting ones.
Download a video:
alias yt="yt-dlp -o '%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s' "
Execute the previous command as root:
alias please='sudo $(fc -n -l -1)'
Delete all the Docker things. I do this surprisingly often:
alias docker-nuke="docker system prune --all --volumes --force"
This is a handy one for detecting a hard link
function is-hardlink {
count=$(stat -c %h -- "${1}")
if [ "${count}" -gt 1 ]; then
echo "Yes. There are ${count} links to this file."
else
echo "Nope. This file is unique."
fi
}
I run this one pretty much every day. Regardless of the distro I’m using, it Updates All The Things:
function up {
if [[ $(command -v yay) ]]; then
yay -Syu --noconfirm
yay -Yc --noconfirm
elif [[ $(command -v apt) ]]; then
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt autoremove -y
fi
flatpak update --assumeyes
flatpak remove --unused --assumeyes
}
I maintain an aliases file in GitLab with all the stuff I have in my environment if anyone is curious.
Points for the exceptional choice of name.
I have much the same:
The only difference is that I’m using a Synology 'cause I have 15TB and don’t know how to do RAID myself, let alone how to do it with an old laptop. I can’t really recommend a Synology though. It’s got too many useless add-ons and simple tools like rsync never work properly with it.
Yeah this was a deal-breaker for me too.
Unfortunately, a rather substantial portion of warfare is the economics behind it. Often, spending eye-watering amounts of money on proprietary, overpriced hardware is the point. It’s corporate welfare.
TIL about using lsblk instead of just reading through the output of journalctl to find the disk and partitions. Thanks!
That’s not been my experience. It may be using a web view under the hood, but the functionality is quite different. Additional features, breaking the video call out of the primary pane, etc. To suggest that they’re essentially the same is not accurate.
Really? All I’ve seen is a Flatpak that’s really just a wrapped web view. Is there now a native version of Teams for Linux?
Well presumably there are at least some performance and safety benefits to using these new alternatives. Otherwise it’s just a blatant license dodge.
Yes. Tailscale is surprisingly simple.
# systemctl start tailscale
# tailscale up
Debian should fork it and re-license it under the GPL.
In addition to the excellent examples posted here that refute this, I want to add “Last Exile”, “Wonderful Days”, and “Chrono Crusade”.
I have been in precisely this position. The pain is real.
Exactly. It’s stuff like this that’s convinced me to join a tech union myself. If you’re in the UK, you might consider the one I joined.
Cory Doctorow just posted something very much related to this. It’s an excellent read.
As someone else said here, programmers are not a monolith. However, I’ve seen it multiple times on the job and in social media where programmers are using these tools to write code voluntarily. The code produced is often garbage, and I have to reject it at review time, but there are a lot of programmers using these things willingly.