November 2021
I am aggregating here some more or less interesting stuff of various IT related materials which I came across this month. Some of them are strictly related to the things I did or am currently doing.
Some thoughts
Despite the fact that most of the month I was sick, an idea came to my overheated head to finally learn Vim (a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program for Unix).
Comments like "Vim is the second most significant skill I learned after reading" made me think.
I decided to move beyond moving up and down with arrow keys and at least try to understand how people are using it on a daily basis, why it is so popular/unpopular.
I must admit that the learning curve is not so friendly at the beginning.
It is essential to work through the “vimtutor” as it gives you some basics, but watching how people use it opens your eyes to the possibilities of using it efficiently.
So at the end of the month I started to enjoy editing files with it, especially on fresh Linux installations.
Writing small scripts without installing any additional software became much smoother.
I appreciate vim navigation so much that I started using vimium, which is a browser extension that provides vim-liked keyboard control and navigation.
Another fresh item under my belt is ranger, a minimalistic console file manager.
A nice thing in ranger is the :bulkrename command which gives you a list of filenames easily editable in vim, so actions like removing suffixes in a folder with numerous files can be done in the blink of an eye.
Another major point for this month is the Cloud. When I finally got better I signed up for the AWS Practitioner Certificate exam which I successfully passed. Yay!!! I already have some knowledge about the Google Cloud Platform (Google Cloud Associate Certificate), so expanding it with another provider gave me a better understanding of the Cloud in general. I have a better overview of possibilities which Cloud computing offers and feel much more confident in this field. It is interesting to observe how major players solve the same problems in different ways.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - credly.com
Articles
The Duct Tape Programmer
Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.
Python
PEP 636 -- Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial
This PEP is a tutorial for the pattern matching introduced by PEP 634.
Python libraries
speedtest-cli
Command line interface for testing internet bandwidth using speedtest.net
Tools
ranger
ranger is a console file manager with VI key bindings. It provides a minimalistic and nice curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy.
vimium
Vimium is a browser extension that provides keyboard-based navigation and control of the web in the spirit of the Vim editor.
Other stuff
wttr.in
wttr.in is a console-oriented weather forecast service that supports various information representation methods like terminal-oriented ANSI-sequences for console HTTP clients (curl, httpie, or wget), HTML for web browsers, or PNG for graphical viewers.
awesome-console-services
A curated list of awesome console services (reachable via HTTP, HTTPS and other network protocols).