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January 2023 - Awesome Articles and Cool Commands

Written by Brie Carranza

A curated list of links accompanied by notes about the things I found interesting this month.

Hello, world!

I’m trying something new this year! In this post, I have a ✨ curated ✨ list of interesting articles, tools and neat links that I found particularly impactful or helpful this month. If you are a frequent reader of HN, you may recognize some of these items. This is not a “best of HN - January 2023” review. It’s closer to “things that were on my mind - January 2023”.

OK, but who are you?

Great question! 👋 I’m Brie Carranza and I welcome you to learn a little bit more about me. Taking a quick look at my blog might give you some insight into what I’m interested in and whether or not this series may be of interest to you. Let’s chat!

Enjoy and be well!

— Brie

🔖 Good Reads

Take a few moments, grab a notebook and read through these articles!

  • Conversation Skills Essentials
    • I reflect often on this article. There are so many gems but I’m particularly struck by the notes on positive disagreement. Once you’ve read the article: consider what it feels like when someone disagrees positively with you.
  • Ghost Ships: What happens when ships become data?
  • A high level guide to USB-C
    • In addition to being a well-written moderately deep dive into USB-C, they get so many points for an awesome domain name like ubsc.wtf. It’s a site dedicated towards reducing the confusion that is USB-C.
  • The Window Trick of Las Vegas Hotels
    • A fascinating read on our conflicting needs for both order and variety and a really interesting observation about the impact of how windows are grouped in Las Vegas hotels. I can’t not notice it now!

Learning a new codebase - for non-developers

I saw Grokking Big Unfamiliar Codebases on HN and got really curious about what else has been written on this topic. I spend far more time reading other codebases and using that knowledge to solve problems than I do writing my own code. In other words: I am not a developer. However, it’s still extremely helpful for folks in roles like mine to be able to get a handle on a new codebase. When troubleshooting, there are a few options:

  • Test how the thing works, observe the results and construct a new test
  • Read how the thing should work: testing may no longer be necessary; if it is necessary, you can build much more well-informed tests

The latter is the more elegant option, in my opinion. Without a reasonable understanding of the codebase, it might be very difficult to pull off the latter option. The first option is more of a blunt instrument but it will get the job done — in time.

If the description above resonates with you, I can highly recommend these articles for non-developers who would like to start to get their arms and brain wrapped around a codebase:

A few notes:

  • This won’t make you an expert on the codebase overnight — or maybe ever.
    • The goal here is not to become an expert on the codebase.
    • The goal here is to get enough of a handle on the big picture that you know where to look. The point is a general situational awareness that provides helpful context for later investigations.
  • This exercise might raise a lot of questions. Good! Record them and track your progress on answering them over time.

Fun with YAML

The Norway thing comes up on noyaml.com. IYKYK but if you haven’t read about the trouble with abbreviating Norway and YAML, it’s a wild ride well worth a read. A good entry point is:

---

One of my favorite YAML tricks is for troubleshooting GitLab CI and uses the power of ---. Let’s say you want to quickly comment out a bunch of jobs and other stuff in your .gitlab-ci.yml file. Yes, it’s git so you can just delete, commit and revert. Considering the beginner mindset: that kind of git wizardry might take longer than it’s worth. Here’s what I like to do instead:

  1. Put the content that I want to run at the top of the file
  2. Add a line that only contains ---
  3. Plop everything that I don’t want to run below that line

Only the jobs that I define above the --- line will get added to the pipeline!

From there, I can iterate on the job(s) above the line until I get it right. I can simply remove the --- line and I get my whole pipeline back!

This is for troubleshooting or experimenting in test branches where the somewhat messy git history that this creates does not matter.

  • No need to add . before each and every job name to hide them.
  • No need to type # and the Enter key a billion times (👀👀👀).
    • If this sounds like you, it might be worth spending a little bit of time with sed. I promise it’s worth it.

What’s going on here? Why does this work?

Well, YAML understands you saying --- to mean that you want to create a new YAML document. The stuff below the line “isn’t in .gitlab-ci.yml“.

⚒️ Cool Tools

  • espanso - A Privacy-first, Cross-platform Text Expander
    • This is a tool I wish I had picked up sooner. I do not use it all of the time but it’s invaluable when I do wield it. I haven’t documented my Espanso config anywhere as of this writing.
  • libSQL - libSQL is a fork of SQLite that is both Open Source, and Open Contributions.
  • lnav - The Logfile Navigator

Whoa! I love lnav because it is a fantastic general purpose log analysis tool! I’ve used it to parse logs from a whole bunch of different services and it does a really good job with content from the likes of . I have only started to explore the feature set but it’s wonderful so far. You’ll probably here more from me on lnav.

Let’s face it: when you are troubleshooting a problem, the involvement of a self-signed certificate pumps things up a level. It’s not impossible, it’s just a little bit harder. For testing and troubleshooting purposes, it can be very helpful to be able to:

  • quickly generate a self-signed certificate
  • act as your own CA (certificate authority)

It’s possible to do all of these things without being a TLS wizard! Enter XCA - X - Certificate and Key management! XCA stores all of it’s cryptographic data in a database and SQLite is supported!

While you’re at it, How to destroy a certificate authority in one month is a great companion read!

Fun Commands

My favorite new-ish git feature!

Seriously: I’m so pumped for this one! Let’s set the stage:

  • You cloned your repo.
  • You used git checkout -b dev/cute-cats or similar and then committed your awesome work.
  • You run git push and git yells at you:
fatal: The current branch dev/2023-01-january has no upstream branch.
To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream, use

    git push --set-upstream origin dev/2023-01-january

OK, so you know what I want: just do it!

No more! That message now lets us know a bit more about my new favorite git feature:

To have this happen automatically for branches without a tracking
upstream, see 'push.autoSetupRemote' in 'git help config'.

YES PLEASE! For my personal workflow: I can’t think of a situation when I would not want this to happen automatically! For a reasonable description and links to the relevant commits, check this SO answer.

“new-ish”? Do I have this feature?

It’s not super new but this is my first opportunity to write about it and I’m still excited that it exists!

This joy comes to us in Git 2.37.0 so ask git --version if you have it.

Datasette Favorites

I really started to appreciate datasette towards the end of last year. I used it to build this heat map of Pittsburgh’s “city steps”. I have enough datasette instances open often enough that this has saved me lots of grumbling:

datasette serve -p 0

The -p 0 tells datasette to choose an available port instead of constantly trying to use :8001. Banish this error message from your life with datasette serve -p 0:

ERROR:    [Errno 48] error while attempting to bind on address ('127.0.0.1', 8001): address already in use

As a bonus: adding -p 0 isn’t all that much extra typing!

QUICK: put a password in my clipboard!

As I do more personal computing on 🍏 than 🐧 , I found myself needing to port my apg workflow for generating random passwords on the fly. I am presently using pwgen for this purpose. I usually use this when I want a reasonable password but don’t really care about remembering it (for whatever reason). Something like this is reasonable:

pwgen -1 -N1 -y -s 20 | pbcopy

I highly recommend taking a look at pass which can work nicely with git-crypt. insert chef’s kiss emoji

  • pass - the standard unix password manager
  • git-crypt - Transparent file encryption in git

💡That’s Neat!

These days @depthsofwiki is one of my favorite novelty accounts on the bird app. The tweet about a picture of a flower getting 90 million hits a day was fascinating and I had to know more: you can read the public investigation.

We can make some good guesses about what the developers of the app were attempting to do by loading that image. The consequences of such a change are clear and I can even totally understand using an image hosted by The Wikimedia Foundation. (We probably all take the reliability of Wikipedia and other projects over the decades for granted. It’s always there: thank you, team!)

Here’s your homework or food for thought:

  • How would you solve this problem differently?

From the Heart

If you find yourself experiencing a moment of happiness, savor it.

FIN.
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