Archive of posts with tag 'Git'

Learn Git Concepts, Not Commands →

June 4, 2019 • #

This guide is a great example of how a lot of introductory walkthroughs of technology should work. Every time I’ve worked with new users to help them understand using the command line, Unix commands, or git, people only mimic the individual commands they’re supposed to type without a fundamental understanding of what’s happening.

This’ll now be the first place I send anyone new to git. I know this would’ve helped me a ton in wrapping my mind around how it all worked, and I already had some familiarity with the SVN “trunk” versus “branch” structure. The sketches throughout help especially to visualize the abstractions.

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Weekend Reading: Mental Models, Git History, and Notion

March 16, 2019 • #

🧠 A Latticework of Mental Models

This is an excellent archive on Farnam Street with background on 109 different mental models — first principles, Occam’s Razor, probabalistic thinking, and many more. So much great reading material here to study different modes of thinking. Like writer Shane Parrish puts it, this latticework helps you “think better”:

The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models in our head and their usefulness in the situation at hand. The more models you have—the bigger your toolbox—the more likely you are to have the right models to see reality. It turns out that when it comes to improving your ability to make decisions. Variety matters.

Most of us, however, are specialists. Instead of a latticework of mental models, we have a few from our discipline. Each specialist sees something different. By default, a typical Engineer will think in systems. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. A biologist will think in terms of evolution. By putting these disciplines together in our head, we can walk around a problem in a three dimensional way. If we’re only looking at the problem one way, we’ve got a blind spot. And blind spots can kill you.

💾 Git History

A neat tool for visually browsing git commit history. Scrolling through commits does a nice animation to show you graphically what’s changing from step to step. Here’s an example with browserify.

✏️ Notion Pages

Over the last week I’ve been messing around with Notion, a productivity app that seemingly can do everything — a combination personal database, word processor, spreadsheet, notes app, and todo list. I’m trying it out for note taking and writing (mostly), but it’s got some potential to be a personal wiki, an idea which has always intrigued me but never felt worthwhile to try to set up and maintain. This site has a bunch of templates for Notion to help get started for different use cases. Just browsing it shows the diversity of things you can use it for.

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Weekend Reading: Ubiquitous Computing, Versioning SQL, and Video Game Maps

December 15, 2018 • #

🎙 Computing is Everywhere

A great interview with Bret Victor on the Track Changes podcast. His work has always been an inspiration for how to think about both creating things and teaching people.

📊 Git Your SQL Together

This post from Caitlin Hudon is a great reminder for anyone that works with data. Combining git versioning with your SQL is super helpful for archiving and searching previous analysis queries.

You will always need that query again

Queries are living artifacts that change over time

If it’s useful to you, it’s useful to others (and vice versa)

🎮 The Brilliance of Video Game Maps

I love the map and exploration of Skyrim. As an artistic achievement, the map there isn’t as eye-catching as Grand Theft Auto, the Ultima games, or even previous Elder Scrolls games. But I love the unlabeled overhead picture of the world that forces you to get out and walk to find your way.

The absolute piece de resistance of a game world map has to be the continent of Tamriel for The Elder Scrolls. People have tried to wrangle Skyrim’s map into submission with mods and interactive versions of it, but it fundamentally is a map that doesn’t explain itself to you or aspire to be particularly helpful. The world is what it is - now you have to go and find your way across it.

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