

From Novice to Master, and Back Again - walrus
http://blog.djmnet.org/2013/01/14/from-novice-to-master-and-back-again/

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petercooper
This is the hardcore version of the more common "Google for help on something
and get your own blog post/Stack Overflow answer coming up"! :-)

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ezequiel-garzon
Yes, and it's comforting to know that even these people need to look up UNIX
flags from time to time! Not really surprising, but a bit reassuring
nonetheless.

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beat
"Geez, what idiot wrote this code? Oh yeah, me."

I hate that feeling.

~~~
JOnAgain
I think I hate that feeling because it usually comes up in the context of a
bug. Something that's lived in the system for years. It's existed through a
half dozen code reviews when related code is refactored.

Then some college grad comes in and starts asking all these stupid questions
like, "why does this function loop n^2 times and not just return the number 42
every time?" You answer, "Well you see this part here, Billy, this is the
important part it ... it calculates ... give me 2 seconds ... ... ... ...
fuck."

~~~
adamtj
I love when that happens! That's because I hate being wrong. I really really
really hate it. I hate being wrong so much that I'm extremely grateful when
people point out my mistakes. Then I get to stop being wrong and start being
right! The satisfaction I get from that more than makes up for any amount of
embarrassment stemming from the revealing of my mistake. It's not that I hate
_appearing_ to be wrong. A little embarrassment never killed anybody. Rather,
_being_ wrong is awful, even if nobody knows it, even if I don't know it.

I hate being wrong.

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onedognight
Given that he is listed as an author for ls, cp, mv, ln, rmdir and yes, yes as
well, I can see how he might forget that he wrote su.

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akbar501
This article is a good reminder of why writing documentation (and commenting
code) is important. Often the reader of your docs is you.

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bobowzki
I did not expect that ending.

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guessbest
I was amazed by this paragraph, "Shortly thereafter, someone came running into
the room and ... was worried about an attempted breakin."

Just think of a Network Administrator doing this every time there was a root
login attempt that failed. They'd get a lot of exercise these days, that's for
sure.

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emilis_info
The reason probably was that this was highly unusual. There was no flood of
break-in attempts from the Internet and the absolute majority of students
usually have no curiosity and are only using such servers for lab assignments.

This reminds me how my first unix account at college was locked by sysadmins
during the first day. I only knew "cd" and "ls" at the time... :)

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nsajko
What harm did you cause with cd and ls??

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emilis_info
As far as I know, I didn't cause any harm. From what I heard, the sysadmins
didn't like the floppy drives making noises on their Solaris x86 server.

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segmondy
Use it or lose it, it happens to the best of us. There is only so much I can
remember at one time, I don't even worry about it, so long as I can find a way
to look it up. I wish I had a photographic memory. Knowing that I don't, I
don't obsess about remembering the details only the high level over view of
things.

~~~
noisy_boy
Typically for short command line options, I've noticed that if I stick with
the first character of the word that immediately comes to my mind while
contemplating, I'm able to recall it much easier and even after a longer time.
Maybe something to do with how my brain is wired so sticking to the natural
instinct results in repeatable results. If the option takes the last <n> lines
from the file, "tail" immediately resonates so "-t" makes more sense and
sticks to memory longer. Of course, with increasing no. of options, this
strategy becomes less reliable.

