The other day I asked what folks on Mastodon find confusing about working in the terminal, and one thing that stood out to me was “editing a command you already typed in”. This really resonated with me: even though entering some text and editing it is a very “basic” task, it took me maybe 15 years of using the terminal every single day to get...

Hello! Today someone on Mastodon asked about job control (fg, bg, Ctrl+z, wait, etc). It made me think about how I don’t use my shell’s job control interactively very often: usually I prefer to just open a new terminal tab if I want to run multiple terminal programs, or use tmux if it’s over ssh. But I was curious about whether other people used...

Hello! I’ve been writing about git on here nonstop for months, and the git zine is FINALLY done! It came out on Friday! You can get it for $12 here: https://wizardzines.com/zines/git, or get an 14-pack of all my zines here. Here’s the cover: the table of contents Here’s the table of contents: who is this zine...

While writing about Git, I’ve noticed that a lot of folks struggle with Git’s error messages. I’ve had many years to get used to these error messages so it took me a really long time to understand why folks were confused, but having thought about it much more, I’ve realized that: sometimes I actually am confused by the error messages, I’m just...

I noticed some tech bloggers I follow have been making April Cools Day posts about topics they don’t normally write about (like decaf or microscopes). The goal isn’t to trick anyone, just to write about something different for a day. I thought those posts were fun so here is a post with some notes on learning to crochet tiny cacti. first, the...

A new thing I’ve been trying while writing this Git zine is doing a bunch of polls on Mastodon to learn about: which git commands/workflows people use (like “do you use merge or rebase more?” or “do you put your current git branch in your shell prompt?”) what kinds of problems people run into with git (like “have you lost work because of a git...