Last Week in Code E004

Last Week in Code E004

It’s four weeks already! I spent most of last week writing. I mean, I did give time to other projects beyond writing too but it was mostly writing. I thought I had quite a lot to write about and that I was going to produce as much. But that’s not really what happened. I only wrote 3 articles. There was some lessons to learn from that still. And I’ll share those.

Teaching, the best way to learn

The Protege Effect.

I have installed and reinstalled Arch quite a number of times but,all of that was me following guides just for the sake of getting a working system. The installation process is very involved and I’d decided I’d have my own notes on it. So one of the days last week I set out to write a guide on how to install Arch. But then I learn’t all along I wasn’t understanding any of what the steps meant that I followed from old guides. I felt a responsibility to know what I was teaching. I found myself reading articles on how differeant parts of the OS worked that I don’t think I’d ever have gotten the motivation to read, if it wasn’t for the teaching task I had. And, I found that this responsibility to understand was triggered every time I needed to explain something to someone else.

I have way more drafts than published articles for that reason. The only articles I was able to publish were : one on TCP (Which wasn’t my intended article as what I intended to write about turned out to have needed way more reading before I’d be able to explain it in my own words) and one on Probability.

I collected and pieced together scraps from my networks research to write about why downloads are slower with small files. That’s what I intended to write about before I switched to the easier alternative, how TCP downloads work. Then for the article on Probability, thinking about it from the lens which I did made me understand it more intuitively. And, I found that I arrived at already established conclusions from independent exploration (reverse engineering formulas that is). (like, all probability could be expressed in term’s of Baye’s theorem)

So I then tried to follow the Probability article up with one on Baye’s theorem. But, after 3 days of reading , and trust me I know Baye’s and can pass a test on it, I realized transferring the intuitve explanation to someone else was levels harder. I still learnt alot about what I did not know anyways. And, I developed better mental models for explainign to others, and to myself.

Also, this whole task, the difficulty of it, developed in me a respect for people that know how to explain technical concepts. That is with as much ease as they seem to have. The Organic Chem tutor, and Ben Eater or any other educator on YouTube for instance. It also got me interested in if this was a formally recognized means to learn for how non trivially effective it was deepening my understanding for the topics I tried to teach. That’s how I learn’t about its formal name, The Protege effect.

Notes as a living document.

There was some sadness during all this. Some folk , after they are done with school, never get to use any of the work they studied in class. And, for that reason, they never get to feel the consequenes of never having written and, or kept good notes.

I am not one of those. I have read about the importance of writing and maintaining notes from different sources but did not appreaciate that advice until it was 5 years late. Which is now. The fields I hope to have a career in need for me to have explanatory depth for concepts spanning 4 years of school.

Now that ain’t the annoying part. The annoying part is I studied virtually all of the ‘hard’ concepts I find myself going to YouTube for now! I got grade A’s in some of the classes. But what do I have to show for it? Nothing. That feeling I am doing double work and will have to for years of notes unwritten ain’t a good one. I have learnt the hard way and that’s one of the why’s for this blog, and for last week’s writing activity.

I find that even when the first writing drafts ain’t complete, I always have somethign to return to that grows as my knowledge grows. That I don’t have to spend hours again going through some long youtube video when I already wrote notes and explained it to myself in them. Its like , you have 5 pages explaining 3 hours of content which when you read those five pages, all the locked memories fromw when you consumed the 3 hours of content are retrieved to working memory.

Random rant on other projects I spent my time on

In other projects

Scripting

Scripting. How much efficiency can be gained from the smallest of solutions and the importance of small but efficient scripts is , I think, something that’s not given as much attention as it deserves. A script to make sure you don’t commit your passwords to github. A script to clean your downloads folder. A script to deal with port assignment. A script to make sure your directory structure is uniform across all your computers and ensure it stays as defined. All these are small “unimportant” but frustrating problems devs face which, at least for me, compound into major discomfort for the developer. Or just a normal computer user, a hobbyist maybe.

However, getting oneself to write these small scripts is interestingly hard. I mean, they are easy to write but the fact that their ROI is not understood well enough makes it hard to get one to write one for themselves. Maybe there’s another reason and I’d like to hear.

I have a number I have written for myself, other’s vibe-coded.

One dirty but very efficient script to clean my downloads folder, and another one I vibe coded to manage port assignment. Just an aside, there’s always this sense of satisfaction when I get into my messy downloads folder and with one command, wish all the mess away. That feeling my writing energy was not wasted. I like the port assignment script too but you know how it is with AI written code and the sense of ownership. I am hoping to add another to handle my git operations after I read about git hooks. There’s one I vibe-coded with deepseek for port management last week. But anwyways, point is, automation and scripting has way more value than its given. Interesting as I was searching for folk online to corroborate my sentiments I found this video speaking along the same lines.

A radio server

Imagine having a streaming service where you control the EPG. Or one that could grow to have some AI agents act as DJ’s but on your own music doing what you configure them to do. Well, I’d day that’s imagining having your own broadcasting station and I made one step towards that when I set up streaming with AzuraCast last week. I think I mentioned this somewhere among the docker projects in last week’s episode but I probably did not link it. Here’s an exposed endpoint that’s always live when I am.

Misc.

I talked about having too many drafted articles. More on that problem. I think I am going to have to put up a section on what drafts I got in my drafts folder and what article I am working on. It’ll probably help keep me from drifting and also, send notice what article is coming next. You have probably seen that section “In-the-pipeline”.

Also, I messed around with my ‘baseURL’ settings and messed up the font-awesome configuration for the social icons. But , the usual problem, I did not record how I set them up. The icons still work though. I should be working on that soon. That and the search feature.

In other news

News Updates

Cool articles

Random finds

As always, I hope you learnt something from this log and hope to see you around in the next one.

Still here?

Here’s an extra rant. Usually I mention certain things are a problem or try to make the point certain things should be done a certain way and get this reaction that makes it feel its just me. Its always really reassuring whenever I search online and find exactly the issues I stated were issues expressed as so by thousands of other people I have never met. Sometimes finding projects built around exactly the same issues. Thats what the case was with PortButler. I wrote the port mgt script only to find many have been written before all having the same driving frustration as I did. Then the more interesting one is my sentiment on the lack of appreciation for scripting. The video I linked on scripting I found after I was through with writing this article. But one could say I took some points straight out of that video since it was published earlier than I posted this. Or, the protege effect. I thought it was just me, this feeling I had there was something special about teaching it should be a studied phenomenon, only to learn it was. I guess what I am trying to say is, you can trust that I am a valuable independent thinker of sorts if you wonder who the hell I am. Trying to get me some credibility points is all :)