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Linux tip of the day

If you want to see when you ran a particular command on a linux, you just need to run HISTTIMEFORMAT=”%d/%m/%y %T ” at the command prompt, then the next time you run history you’ll have handy timestamps! Thanks as usual to stackoverflow for that answer. So that’s cool and all, but why should you care? Because being systematic is extremely important when you’re trying to solve a problem. If you.. Read More

Dev tool of the day

Exercism is a tool that lets you download and solve practice problems in over 30 different languages. I mentioned it in passing before, but let’s talk more about why it’s great. First of all, each problem in Exercism has a set of unit tests, so you don’t have to wonder if you’re doing it right, you can just run the tests and know for sure. The tests are also great for.. Read More

Be a better programmer while still having a life: part 8

Testing! Getting better at testing will make you seem like a better programmer even if your coding style doesn’t change at all. No matter how beautiful and clear your code is, if it’s full of bugs it’s not good code. It’s kind of ironic that I’m writing a post about testing because honestly I’m not very good at it. Better than I used to be, especially since I started working at.. Read More

Be a better programmer while still having a life: part 7

Back in part 1 I talked about how important it is to make sure you understand the problem you’re trying to solve. Today I want to expand on that because there’s much more to problem solving. Having a great understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve is great, but it’s not always enough. Sometimes you’re wrong about what the problem actually is. No matter how well you understand the problem you think.. Read More

Link of the day

Julia Evans has a great guide to asking good questions, you should read it :) Asking good questions is such a useful skill, I wish programming education spent more time on it. Getting really good at asking questions is also a great hack for looking like a better developer (it’ll also help you actually become better, but in the short term it’s a good hack). When you ask a bad question,.. Read More