Tag: Julia Evans

Choosing the “best software”

Julia Evans has a nice blog post about choosing the “best software”.  Here is my favorite part:

So, let’s talk about another way to think about making decisions than “what is the Best Thing in this situation”.

I run an event series called “lightning talks and pie”. At the most recent one, Ines Sombra gave a talk about capacity planning. In it, she said that there are 3 reasons you might want to change something about your system:

  1. It’s too expensive
  2. It’s too difficult to operate (humans spend a ton of time worrying about it)
  3. It’s not doing the job it’s supposed to

I find these 3 criteria a lot easier to reason about than the “Choose The Best Thing” framework.

She provides some examples on how to apply this thinking, as well as how to deal with tradeoffs and limitations.

Things to learn about Linux

Julia Evans has this amazing list of things to learn about Linux.  I think, it doesn’t matter how new or experienced you are with the operating system, you’ll find a few points in this list that you either know nothing about or know very little.

Personally, I’ve been using and administrating Linux systems for almost two decades now, and my own knowledge of the things on that list is either very limited or not existing.  Sure, I know about pipes and signals, but even with basic things like permissions there are some tricky questions that I’m not sure I can get right on the first go.

Some of the topics mentioned are simple and straight-forward and will only need a few minutes or a couple of hours to get up to speed with.  Others – are huge areas which might take years, if not decades (like networking, for example).

I look forward to Julia’s drawings covering some of these.

 

Julia’s Drawings on Programming

Julia Evans, who blogs about her programming endeavors, now also draws simple, note-like sketches on a variety of the computer and programming related subjects.  Those are great as kick memory refreshers or reminders for “I wanted to learn more about that” kind of things.  Here’s her take on pipes, for example:

pipes

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