Since I always feel like I'm learning, re-learning, trying to learn, or more importantly, somehow failing to learn / figure something out; and since people are always asking me how I do what I do... I thought I'd toss this out there; with the hope that it helps someone else.
I started playing with code in the late 70s / early 80s, on a Commodore 64 that my dad bought. He used to get tons of different science magazines, and in particular, Popular Science (I think that was the one) used to send out snippets of binary code in their magazines. Being somewhat unruly, I managed to get grounded for a couple of weeks. So, my friend and I discovered these snips; one such snip was Dig-Dug. I spent so many quarters on that dang game, so when I saw it, I was like "Whoa! Check this out! If we type these pages of 1s and 0s into the computer, we can play Dig-Dug for FREE!!
So, we went down to my room, and started typing... line after line... column after column... page after... Wait! Where's the rest of it!? In another issue of the magazine. Ugh!... We dug out another issue, and another, and this went on for a month or so, until we finally received the last magazine with the last snipped of binary. We saved the
.binfile on our lovely 5 1/4" floppy (double-density, thanks to my Mom's hole-punch), and typed in the magicalruncommand. The command prompt disappeared, and the colorful arcade-ish Dig-Dug screen appeared. We celebrated for a second, and then started playing.
Unfortunately, we'd missed a 1 or a 0 (or several) somewhere, because the hose would blotch out from time to time, and the exploding creatures were more like a pixelated blocks than the expected KA-BOOM that we expected. But, the game worked! We played that thing for hours...
Ever since that day, I've always been interested in code, and how it can translate those words or dwords into actions.
From there, I moved on to batch files, video-games on my Dad's Amiga (shout out to The Bard's Tale), and hours of figuring out Windows 1.1, etc... etc...
Needless to say, I grew up on Windows, and never really had much exposure to Linus' invention... Linux.
Fast forward to today.
I'm learning Linux, I'm learning Ansible, learning Terraform, learning Docker, Kubernetes, Javascript, Markdown, Python, SQL, Splunk, AppDynamics (ADQL), Prometheus...; and the list goes on and on...
I believe that you always need to be learning, growing, and improving, or you're edge will begin to dull.
So, try not to judge the (more than likely) simple or already known answers that I post to issues, and the amount of simplicity, or perhaps complexity, of my setup.
If you know of a better way, then Please drop me a line and let me know!
I use:
- Visual Studio Code to write
- With too many damn plugins to count
- WSL when I'm on Windows, because I'd rather be in Linux...
- VirtualBox
- Linux VMs to play / test / validate / cuss at what I made
- I try to write them as Vagrant files, so they're idempotent, since I'll likely jack something up
- Raspberry-pi cluster (coming soon to an amazon project near you)
- GitHub & GitLab for source control
- Docker Hub to browse all of the very poorly documented images, download them, and the beautiful frustration that accompanies trying to get them to work
- Postman to initially test APIs
- Notepad++ (because it's notepad + +)
Well, that's about it.
Again, please send me suggestions, links to places that I can find good snippets, and any feedback on how I can improve my abilitles. I welcome them all, and will always be willing to help anyone learn from the plethora of mistakes that I've made.
