Last Week In Code E002

WeeklySeries
Last Week In Code E002

Last week I decided I’d be going on an AI fast. Listed what services AI was providing me with then tried to get alt providers. For the mindless AI usage, I think the underlying cause was boredom, then outright addiction to the solution. I chose to use that time for a better addiction. An addiction to reading tech blogs. I’ve heard about Hacker News before but I’d never read much from the website. Well I discovered its way more than I thought. Which wasn’t much really. But that changed this week.

So its a collection point for quite a number of real good articles, most written by technical folk. Oh, and news too, obviously. What was interesting is I found that most updates made it to Hacker News before my Youtube sources made any videos on them. So its the source..

Also, there’s a whole lot of real technical readers in the comment sections for the posts so its a humbling experience the realization you have a long way to go. Plus, its a good place to get contributors or .. to just collect valuable eyeballls for Engineering projects.

I can’t promise to write one since my schedule ain’t stable yet but I surely should make an article on just Hacker News. The good, the bad. But mostly the good. Also, thinking of adding a section to collect my top articles of the week to this post. I read quite a lot of them and would like to share.

So I guess some of the whys for bookmarking hacker news for a dev would be

  • Central access to real good articles from a variety of sources on a variety of important areas of Engineering. SHOW HN

  • Collection point good contributors. Most of the readers are technical.

  • Show point for one’s projects. A good place to publicize a Startup Project.

  • Learning the value of documenting solutions and setups the hardway.

So upon rebooting my system to install the latest Ubuntu OS updates, I lost my internet connection. Debugging network problems is such a pain and I have wanted to return to Arch for quite some time so I was like .. I guess its time to go back home.

But that was its own kind of drama. I have installed Arch about twice. Last time was almost a year a go. So, you can tell why if I say I did not know my way around most of the significant parts of the process.

The installation process is quite a long one even with standard steps provided online. There’s some system specific bugs you run into that you will possibly never encounter till the next installation. So if doing it all manual , it could take about 6-7 hours to get a usable system.

But, and I have known this, yet have not acted on it as faithfully, with well maintained notes taken for every problem encountered, the mental tall and time spent are cut down drastically. I can’t count how many times I have run into problems for which I already had notes somewhere in my org roam archive, just a C-c F away in Emacs. thats my key binding for finding a roam node btw. How satisfying it was ripping dividends off well written old notes.

I should be adding to those notes, this blog for that matter, an article on how to install emacs. Someone could use them in the future. I will be happy to have written them when this problem recurs, which they all usually do in Software.

I guess the lessons from this were

  • Document the solutions to the problems you face.
  • Maintain your documentation (You will curse yourself when time comes to use it and you can’t.)
  • The problems you are facing now (time waste from re hunting for solutions) will keep happening till they have a solution ( maintained notes)

In other news

I mentioned my new addiction was Hacker News earlier. I got a whole lot of real good articles and news updates I sourced from there. I will only be sharing a few. I am still thinking about how to structure this section of the publication. Software is wide and even when you consider it is, you find it is wider. So for now it’ll be a list with not much commentary and not much categorization. But you can be sure that , at least for me, there was a lot to learn from these. (A lot to learn from the non-news articles that is)

Updates, Articles and Videos.

Recent developments, hot takes and randoms

LLM release updates
Data privacy
Figting Brain Rot and AI

Misc.

Okay, that’s that for e002 for LWIC. I sure hope you learnt something and until next time, happy hacking.