Usually what I do is writing these tricks down to a document that is easily accessible at a place where I know that I will look for when failing to remember them. I have a directory of docs where I write stuff like this down by language/tool/etc., so I can quickly look it up without having to search the internet. But I also have to actively remind myself that these things exist whenever I have a problem, stop me from just doing the inefficient thing.
It's not even that bad of a habit with zsh either where it will only scroll through history matching a substring in your history, for instance if I type "rg -i" and then start pressing up arrow, it will only cycle through history entries starting with "rg -i".
though one function that i recently added will narrow your history down based on a space separated set of filters which i found useful
function hgrep
set -l cmd history
for pattern in $argv
set cmd "$cmd | grep -- "(string escape "$pattern")
end
eval $cmd | cat
end
type eg "rg" then up or down arrow, and the history shown is filtered by that rg prefix.
People had this same problem last century. They would use templates that fit over their keyboards with all the common shortcuts and commands printed on them. Sometimes they were for a specific program, but you could buy blank ones to write your own notes.
Today, "keyboard templates" have an entirely different meaning, so the best thing for this is paper. Print your shortcuts out on a piece of paper and put it near your monitor. You could even categorize them by writing them on different-colored Post-Its.
Is this just plain old rage baiting? I literally can’t tell any more.
There are other terminal specific shortcuts for removing last word (ctrl+w) but they don't seem to be as portable.
I haven't put in enough effort to replicate the experience on GNOME but once I jump ship from Apple I'll have to.
The way macOS treats shortcuts thanks to the separation of Command and Control is great. It even makes Google Docs pretty painless to use because it's mostly like Emacs. Word still tries to hijack the shortcuts so that's suboptimal.
Those are also the current days if you have any sense. It's a bad idea to run an LLM with access to your machine at all, but if you absolutely must, you better review everything it does to make sure it doesn't run anything insane.
The rest of us picks a level between "approve some" and "YOLO" depending on how much they worry about having to clean up the workspace afterwards. Encouraging using the repo and some dedicated per-session storage, while discouraging changes to global state (like installing packages system-wide) reduces cleanup problem to "every now and then `rm -rf` some agent session dirs".
https://gist.github.com/GNOMES/6bf65926648e260d8023aebb9ede9...
I use this often instead of chaining together multiple '../..'.
Also nice for when I use Zoxide to CD into a deep nested directory. I quickly found out unless you manually CD each hop, the different parent directories aren't added to your Zoxide DB. (I have come across snippits to recursively CD into all directories in a path to "prepopulate" Zoxide).
I made this to jump directly from say `/foo/bar/batz/abc/123` to `/foo/bar/batz`.
The "Unix Power Tools" book is an excellent source for Unix and shell usage tricks
Is it true that you can pass a nodejs agent to fetch ? I don't think so
I would find that annoying, however to not be seen as a jerk I wouldn't say anything.
I frequently do the same, but not everyday; only when i think its something actually useful/helpful beyond the everyday crap. Most recently, we have had a huge push to use ai (just like everywhere else), ive been getting pretty creative with it, and at this point have a well polished setup that i can give a shitty sentence on a problem, not only does it understand the task, but theres a full ticket->branch->work->pr review->ready comment flow that it uses. My team also uses ai but they havent quite wrapped their head on ways to really work with it. I have built and shared a number of helpful things with the team to try and help them grow. One such thing was a doc i had my ai instance write, based on how ive been using my setup. This alone has started to get the rest of the team up to where i am.
My team doesnt share the same types of things i do, but they still share helpful things.
Call it what you will; I think if youre not helping your team grow by providing insights and helpful things, then youre not the kind of person i want to work with.
One is actually helping and the other is making yourself more visible to mgmt for promotions.
Share knowledge? I don't think anyone here is arguing against that in any way (or conversely arguing for hoarding knowledge).
The concern, one I share, is where the sharing has to happen publicly "every day" - so no matter how trivial, useless, niche, overly-specific the tip is (whatever, the list isn't exclusive), someone shares it.
That's the part that's not sharing knowledge for the benefit of others, but rather self-serving. I might even go so far as to say self-serving doesn't even need to be selfish; the person might genuinely believe they're doing good, but even there, self-serving.
TLDR: Share your knowledge, don't make sharing something every day, even when you don't have something valuable to share, your target.
PS - if this note irks anyone (are routine maxxers a thing?), make the goal to learn something every day, then share where appropriate.
Offering to teach someone something proactively? Sure, go ahead.
Sharing stuff freely when asked and arming someone with the tools to investigate further? Amazing!
Treating a public channel like ye olde facebok wall? Mildly annoying.
Every team/department/org/whatever should have channels everyone should subscribe to, and channels individuals set up that are optional for everyone. The appropriate way to handle this is for the OP to write a few tips once in a while in the public channel, and if people seem to like it, announce that all future tips will be in that channel.
Most senior engineers I've worked with have forgotten all these tricks, and they actively tell you that while you should try to get better at these things, career gains lie elsewhere. Focus on things with higher impact.
"Oh, yeah, I know a cool trick, but y'all have to wait until tomorrow to find out what it is."
"Look! It's a way to evaluate SQL expressions with a select with a from! Oh, you already knew about it?"
I have nothing against sharing knowledge, especially when seeing someone else do something that can be done better. But just leaving daily breadcrumbs to remind people you're the guy that teaches random trivia feels like attention seeking.
I see it more as: every day they will go on the slack channel and pause, wondering "Is there a neat trick I've learned or used recently?" then they share it. It's like a ritual to remember that you can share things because it's easy to forget other people don't work the same way you do. Writing it all at once is difficult (you have to remember a lot of stuff at once) and it tends to go unread.
I also think every single day is a stretch, but it's nice to pause once in a while to think about how you could help other people with something you've learned.
Both a centralized repository AND a daily message, especially for new employees, would be ideal, imo!
Normalize chatting and sharing stuff in slack!
Annoyance is a clue; not about them, but about you.
What I'm saying is I am not a jerk and actually do care about my coworkers, however I also don't want a bunch of noise in a chat app I have to use to do my job.
Sorry for the "personal attack" but my point stands, you may not think of yourself as a jerk, but I saw your comment and thought "this guy imagining himself being annoyed at a coworker for a daily message with a helpful tip might be more of a jerk than he realizes". As a jerk myself I judged myself qualified to make that assessment and commented accordingly.
>I shared a trick on slack every day with the engineering team
And as another commenter said, you often forget the target, and use Ctrl-r to find it. Although just does support fzf...
Still, Zsh history with fzf fuzzy searching is fantastic. I have years of history I can recall commands with a few keystrokes.
Truly a second-brain.
If anything, I wish I had paid a lot more attention to this in the early days and made a nicer shell environment full of my own utilities, as I felt my skills just kind of slowly erode over the years with each migration. Make a nice little nest for yourself and curate those tools as your own (text) UI.
Here's one that I think more people should know: avoid branches. If I can do the same thing without an if statement and even a logical expression, the code typically both becomes easier to understand for people and easier to run for the CPU.
I have always felt like my bar for publishing something (even just to internal wikis/channels) is too high due to being overly self-conscious. I think we should try not to validate that feeling by implying that there is a non-negligible number of readers who will think you have a personality flaw because you wrote down your personal collection of tips in a public place, or that those people deserve consideration in the first place.
There is no such thing as "the things everybody knows". There are just too many things. Even a list of basic tips is probably going to contain one thing I didn't know or perhaps forgot. Write-ups like this are where most of my practical knowledge comes from, not RTFM (which I do).
It's not applicable to every situation, but one way to do this is some very basic fuzzy logic. You do a little math and then either choose a single branch at the end, or sometimes avoid a branch altogether. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/artificial-intelligence/fuzzy-...
Another way to avoid some branches is to have specialized routines, maybe with multiple dispatch, rather than more general methods with a bunch of checks within them for slightly different situations.
A classic performance hack for critical sections is loop unrolling.
=====
Should you go branchless?
Most of the time, no. Branchless code is harder to read and easier to get wrong. Besides, compilers know a lot of tricks and already do a lot of this work for us.
Only when a profiler points at a hot loop, and the loop contains a branch on unpredictable data this technique can pay off big.
if (x == 0) {
return y;
}
y += 25*x;
return y;
if (count == 0) {
return;
}
for (int i = 0; i != count; i++) {
puts("hello");
}if (thingThatIsTrue):
// a bunch of logic here...
// different logic here...
if (thingThatIsTrue):
return doThisWhenTrue()
Just a simple example. I'm not sure if this is what you consider "obfuscating" the branches. Logically the same, but a bit more linear to understand?
Edit: I am bad at formatting comments here.
Example:
No space before start of line.
One space before start of line.
Two spaces before start of line.
int main() { return 0; }
int main() {
return 0;
}
Like imagine you have a few different classes of things A,B,C so instead of checking if the thing you're handling is an A,B,C you have like a shared interface across all and can call Thing.do_it or whatever.
Still branching conditionally but it's passing it off to language features instead of code you have to write.
A common pattern in an old C++ job I had: People writing for loops, coupled with if conditionals, for things that could just be done by chaining functions in the algorithm library.
Don't do a for loop, check for a condition, and break. Use find_if.
if Val === "A" then Do funcA() else if Val === "B" then
and so forth for lots of values, or using a switch statement or similar branching instead of
Object functions = { "A": funcA() {does what funcA does}, "B": funcB() {does what funcB does} etc. etc.
}
runnableFunction = functions[val]; runnableFunction();
Actually writing it I remember now someone who did this, a junior who had to update a validation function for XML invoices based on their root namespaces, which there could be a large number of these, and so she wrote out
switch namespace == "somenamespace" { validatingscheme = "someschema"; doPreliminaryFunctionToDetermineifshouldvalidate(); }
I can't remember all the details as this was almost 20 years ago, however while it was true that one branched on the schema, it made much more sense to look up what one was supposed to do based on the rule for branching and then just execute that one action rather than writing a bunch of branching logic.
So to make it more concrete: Once branching rules becomes sufficiently complex prefer query for what you should do rather than branching
on edit: note again, not real code, but should be understandable and translatable into real code to understand what is being said easily enough.
on 2nd edit: this is also just basically one of the things I prefer instead of getting a lot of branching logic. I have never seen any stats on any benefit to this model than just having a bunch of branching statements, but I feel that the benefit is there nonetheless.
A trivial example is actually written with a branch in C/C++, but relies on compiler optimizations to kick in. If you compile a ternary operator in C/C++ (and probably rust, C# and other languages) such as in:
int min_branchless(int a, int b) {
return a < b ? a : b; // Often emits cmov with -O2
}
cmp edi, esi
cmovle eax, edi ; select a if a <= b
ret
edit: Also, it doesn't mean to never branch, but to minimize branching, especially in tight loops. Branch outside loops, not inside, for instance.
e.g. don't do:
for (...) {
if (condition independent of loop variable) {
...
} else {
...
}
}
if (condition independent of loop variable) {
for (...) {
...
}
} else {
for (...) {
...
}
} v = setup()
if v == 1:
side_effect_1()
elif v > 1:
side_effect_1()
side_effect_2(v)
else:
raise Exception()
v = setup()
if v < 1:
raise Exception()
side_effect_1()
if v > 1:
side_effect_2(v)
total = calculateOrderTotal(user.order);
if (user.isPremiumMember) {
total = total * 0.9; // 10% discount
total = calculateOrderTotal(user.order);
discount = calculateDiscount(user); // Returns 0.9 or 1.0
total = total * discount;Or stupid, like all those vloggers posting "ZOMG! Go all in with these secret hidden weird trick iPhone life hacks to level up!" that are just regurgitating what's in the manual.
As we used to say, RTFM: https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/iphone
IMHO the value of these nuggets is that you understand what you're doing and why; opening yourself to large amounts of non-default behavior likely will end up in a less than pleasant setup.
Not taking into account that different users might disagree on what is convenient and what is not, which is basically the point of making things configurable.
welllll that depends entirely on the DB Software you're using. A certain IBM product certainly has opinions on this.
Another option is to do a ‘git log -p’ followed by a string search ‘/‘. It can give more context and let you browse more easily, especially if the project has small commits. It won’t work well for every project or search though.
Of course shell scripting is programming according to some HN commenters
Perhaps others would call SQL a programming language
Record a debugging terminal session including output to a file. Its pretty great.
similar to ripgrep, though, fd is a modern replacement that’s a bit friendlier to use.
For me, I personally use nothing fancy other than normal KDE Kate for backend development.
Function and variable names are chosen after putting a lot of thought into it which also includes being amenable to grep and sed.
In the macOS terminal you can...
Ctrl + Option + -
Dunno about other OS keys!
I remember learning a lot of these programming tricks over the years. They would give me happiness: learning something new about nvim, or some new shortcut in the Fish shell, or a new Vim macro, or the difference between 1 bracket or 2 brackets in Bash scripts, etc. But now it seems like all of them are irrelevant, and I wanted to see how others think about the situation.
I'm fortunate I guess in that most of my work tasks have very loosely defined deadlines, if any at all.
I write everything myself. After 41 years of coding, I think in code — code flows from my brain through my fingers effortlessly: translating my thoughts to English for an LLM to then translate back to code is much, much slower than me. And once my hyperfocus kicks in, the last thing I need is to be jolted out of it by an LLM prompting loop.
JetBrains Rider has an AI auto-complete which I do use for the 5-10% of the time that it can predict what I’m going to write next. But even the next-word/next-block-of-code prediction seems so hopelessly out of its depth (which is supposed to be LLM’s party piece), it’s genuinely shocking how wrong it is most of the time.
Disclaimer: I’m not writing vanilla line-of-business code or bog standard web apps, so I suspect I’m just not in the training data.
Then, there's language-ext [1], which is my large open-source functional-programming framework for C#. And although this isn't beyond the realms of an LLM: they know FP and they know C# and even my library has been around for more than a decade, so it'll be in the training data, when it comes to bending C# to my whims or to trying to eek out exceptional performance, they're all at sea.
A good example would be what I am working on at the moment, which I have in a standalone prototyping repo [2]. Basically I have introduced functional traits to C#, like `Functor<F>`, `Applicative<F>`, `Monad<M>`, etc. This brings more rigour to things like LINQ comprehensions and allows for the building of truly generic trait-based behaviours. Something that just doesn't really exist in C#.
In language-ext today I have `Foldable<F>`, which is a little bit like `IEnumerable`, but pure. I want to be able to provide a super efficient set of default implementations for any `Foldable` (or enumerable/iterable). For this I need an efficient lazy-stream or co-routine system. The one built-in to C# (`IEnumerable` and `IEnumerator`) is impure (it mutates as it enumerates), so I am trying to build an efficient iterator/enumerator that:
* Takes around 0.25 nanoseconds per-iteration-step for its housekeeping (this speed is then on a par with the mutable IEnumerators that are a core part of C#).
* Doesn't allocate any memory
* Is immutable
* Is lazy
* Can be stopped at any point and the iterator reference be passed around (because it's immutable)
* Can be composed with standard functional operators (functor map, applicative apply, monad bind, etc.) without performance degradation and without a large memory-allocation cost.
I've been building several prototypes to try different ways of bending C# to my whims. I've managed all but the last item on that list.
Not allocating memory means using value-types (stack allocated types), but that also means the entire state of the co-routine needs to be stored in the value-type as each value is yielded (because control needs to be given back to whatever code is processing the values). To solve it, I'm pretty much building my own CLR (Common Language Runtime) on top of the .NET CLR so that I don't have to submit to its rules. I'm trying to apply as many of my old-skool low-level engineering chops as I can (without making it brittle), but to do the last item on that list needs more space in a value-type than would be reasonable (to avoid copying costs), so I'm looking at other pooling strategies.
After all of that, it may be a fools errand, and not doable. The LLM wouldn't understand, and that's for just one feature! Also, it must be stated, I just love doing this shit, it's brain fuel. The idea of having this conversion endlessly with an LLM as it continuously gets it wrong is nightmare fuel.
I'm not anti-AI, I love the fact that people who can't, now can. But, at this point in my journey with code, I think quicker and can produce quicker than an LLM. It can maybe churn out more code than me, but I can build more value and I can invent. I will certainly keep checking in though, I'm sure there'll be a point where I feel like it augments me rather than hinders. It's just not there for me yet.
[1] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext
[2] https://github.com/louthy/iterator-prototype (this is messy prototype code, don't hate me).
Analysis and any artifacts are all handcrafted by me. I mean, that is the work. I have never seen papers or code as an outcome. What I want is to learn and enable other to learn. That I can only get from doing the work myself.
I don’t mean this to brag, mostly to point out that in my line of work, actually writing the code is not the biggest bottleneck.
For context I work on greenfield network security appliances
That's basically I all do. I might ask a few questions to LLMs here and there like Google/StackOverflow in the days of yore.
Still, every line in all my codebases are still hand-typed. I get everything I need out of the chatbots, and I cannot use any kind of agentic coding tools at work, oddly enough. Trust me, I'd love to have access to something like Codex at work. That way I could save my mental bandwidth for personal projects that I find interesting and enjoying.
So i still get daily use out of these tricks.
Are there people that are literally ONLY interacting with a computer via an LLM? thats crazy if its true
LLM's have not affected us in the slightest when it comes to coding. Maybe we write a snippet, post it for llm to scrutinize, and usually LLMs spout bullshit and wrong suggestions and after enough verbal abuse it points to some issues with the code.
But I don't get this delegation to LLM's for your entire coding. I hope everyone delegates to LLM :) (sarcasm)
;with [[[]][[[](_)as(select 1 union select 0),[[]][]][](_)as(select 1 from [[[]][[[] []]]][]]],[[[]][[[] _),[]][]][[](_)as(select 1 from [[]][]][] []]]][]]],[[]][]][] _),[[[[[]][](_)as(select 1 from []][]][[] []]]][]]],[]][]][[] _),[[[]][]]](_)as(select 1 from [[[[[]][] []]]][]]],[[[[[]][] _)select _ from(select row_number()over (order by _)from [[[]][]]])[[[]][[[](_);
/s
I think for most cases `git ls-files` does this job quite well. If you provide pathspecs, this can be very powerful!