I got caught by this one today. I use the search feature all the time, and I don’t know why I didn’t notice that until today. I found the thing I was looking for, then wanted to go back to issues backlog for that repo, I clicked “Issues”, that just took me to a filtered view of my search term within issues. Deleting my search term didn’t help. I was clicking around for at least a minute before I realised there’s actually no way back to the main repo from that page.

That’s like saying “what’s the best ingredients to learn cooking with?”, firstly it all depends on what your want to eat, secondly it doesn’t really matter what the ingredients are to learn cooking skills.

Trillium is a full featured configurable and programmable self-hosted note-taking app that can be easily configured to suit the use case you’re describing, it does categories, tags, links to other topics etc.

Someone suggested I try Supermaven yesterday, it’s got some good benefits over competitors. It has a 300,000 token context length so it can send a very large amount of context for your completions, and it has an extremely fast API response time (usually less than 200ms) so completions appear near-instantly as you’re typing.

It’s the first “copilot-like” tool I’ve used, and I’ve only been using it for a day, but so far I’m liking it. And I’ve already signed up for the $10/month pro plan.

Actually this is the biggest hurdle in leaning how to code. You can blame the huge numbers of “learn to code in 24 hours” articles and videos online and the the influx of “5 day bootcamp” courses. Its like teaching someone the basics of how to drive a car but never teaching them the road rules and never taking them on the road.

A better analogy might be learning a foreign language. It’s like teaching someone all the words in Spanish, but never putting them together in a conversation.

I’d argue that if you say “I know how to code, I know what variables are and how to print text to the console, how do I make an app?” Then actually you don’t know how to code. You might know the basics of a programming language, and that is the first step in learning coding, but there are many steps after that.

I identified this gap a few years ago after seeing a couple of my friends (one finished a boot camp, and one finished a software development major at Uni) both were in this same situation. I determined there is a big gap between “knowing a programming language” and “knowing how to make software”. It’s like going from “I know how to write words” to “I know how to write a novel”. It’s not something that comes easy. It’s something that can take time (often years) to get good at. This is the reason you see requirements like “3 years software development experience” on entry level programmer jobs. The number of people in your situation is incredibly high. The coding bootcamps churn them out by the hundreds every month.

A couple of years ago when I was between jobs, I created a Gumtree ad advertising “post-bootcamp” courses, that aimed at bridging this gap. It was a series of private 1on1 lessons aimed at teaching someone to go from “knowing how to code” to being “software developer” job ready. Lots of people have many different learning styles and different paths they took to this point. The key is focussing not on the giving them the missing information, but teaching the person how to identify what steps are missing and how to find resources to learn them (because that’s the real missing knowledge wink).

Unfortunately I found some people didn’t want to learn how to learn for themselves, and just wanted me to hand them the “secret missing parts” on a platter.

Oh I’m firmly in the second camp. They can use whatever version they like, as long as I don’t have to go near it.

The one thing I can say about java; the kinds of people who like Java tend to really like Java. Everyone else just leaves them to it.

Your loop had a race condition, so we let the smoke out for you.

Nope, were shiftin’ back, bby.

What VSCode uses is a super cut down and highly optimised version of electron, designed specifically to run a code editor. It’s still not as good as real native code, but a lot of people are willing to put up with it because the plugins available for VSCode are pretty good.

Hmm, I somehow missed that update. Thanks for making me aware.

The only good thing to come from this new editor so far is the frank statement by the original Atom Developers (who invented Electron, just to run Atom) admitted that Electron is not a good solution for a code editor, because who in the heck wants to edit their code in a web browser anyway.

Now we just need to convince the devs of Keybase and Obsidian the same.

I started using Trilium in early 2020, with version 0.40.2. Roam had released in 2019 and was growing in popularity quickly, I heard a lot about Roam, it looked cool, so I googled for an open-source self-hosted knowledge base note taking app with similar features to Roam, like notes arranged in a knowledge graph, and a backlinks explorer for each note. The only one that was available then was trilium. Looks like you’re right, the development of trilium was started in 2017, before Roam existed. This is a great interview with the creator, answers a lot of the questions I had. https://console.substack.com/p/console-169

Obsidian didn’t come out until a few months later (and remained under the radar until 2021), all my colleagues and friends use Obsidian now, but I prefer trilium. I had never heard of logseq before I read this thread. Just a quick glance, I see the first 0.1.0 version logseq was in April 2021, just before the first obsidian release.

Trillium was originally created to be an open source replacement for Roam Research. Trilium came out in 2017, and had Roam-like features before Roam even existed. It’s similarities to Obsidian are purely coincidental, probably because Obsidian is designed to be a cross between Roam and Evernote.

It’s not really a standalone file format, it’s executable Lua code.

It returns a new item with the given table contents.

That syntax with the keys in square brackets is the “long-form” method of creating a new table, that’s allows the use of spaces and dashes in the key name.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34687498/what-is-the-function-of-square-brackets-around-table-keys-in-lua

Maybe this is the lua-equivelent of a python Pickle file?

Lol, that reminds me of when I was in Uni, I had a systems development class, they taught in C, all the lectures, tutorials and assessments were done in C. Our final assignment was handed out the week the first Rust v1.0.0 build dropped in 2015. I had been following the hype around the development of Mozilla’s new language, and I was so keen, I asked my professor if I could complete my final assignment using Rust. He said it’s a great idea. Then cut to me furiously trying to learn Rust in just two weeks, so I could even start the assignment, including C interop, implementing functions with c-style interfaces for callbacks, and lots of unsafe blocks for memory manipulation and pointer manipulation. In the end I was just forcing Rust to be C.

It did work in the end, and I did get an A, mostly because the professor couldn’t understand any of the Rust code.

I was using Inconsolata for about 5 years, then switched to Inconsolata-g when that came out, for another 5 years. But it’s a pretty old font and is TrueType and it’s hinting is bad, so doesn’t render well on Linux and it misses out on a lot of new font features.

In 2019 I went hunting for a new favourite font, and tried out a whole bunch, giving each one a week in my IDE to really get to know it. During that time I realised I had a bunch of basic requirements for a font that some do better than others:

• Similar characters should be distinct: eg, uppercase O and number 0. Uppercase I, lowercase l, and number 1. It’s weird how many popular coding fonts fail to make these clear.

• Not too wide, and not too narrow. You’d think monospace fonts are all around the same size horizontally, but a standard 80-column slab of code can vary greatly in screen space width depending on the font, some are much too wide. Consolas is an example that is too wide. I like to have the option to tile three code panes side-by-side on a 1080P screen.

• Easy to read. For some reason a lot of coding-specific fonts affect my ability to quickly and easily read the code, and some give me a headache.

I realised that my use of Inconsolata for such a long time in the early stages of my career definitely shaped my preferences. I was looking for something similar to Inconsolata. That was when I discovered Fantasque Sans Mono. It’s a kind of weird looking font, maybe a bit too playful for a serious coding font, but I found I could read and parse code much faster (maybe it helps with mild dyslexia?), each letter is very distinct from every other. It has elements of handwriting, it has elements of a dyslexic font, it has similarities to Inconsolata.

I’ve been using Fantasque (with Nerdfonts mixins) for 4 years now. Since then there has been a renaissance of code fonts, like Jet Brains Mono, and Fira Code. I like those, they are good fonts, but I keep going back to Fantasque, it feels so comfortable to use.

I used be a computer technician at a small town computer shop around 2008-2011. More than half of our customers were over 60.

Sometimes I needed to take some tech support calls, and sometimes I needed to make house calls to troubleshoot the folks issues.

Literally every support call started with “Why doesn’t the email work?” while the actual problem ranged from ISP issues, and modem faults, PC faults, Windows configuration errors, to dead monitors or a broken mouse. Literally any computer fault could be described as a failure to access their email.

Well, now we know it’s a pair of slow motion side cutters in your bag that causes it. Hooray for science, and the human pursuit of knowledge.

+1 for micro. I install it on every server I administer, and alias it to nano. If you’re a nano user and haven’t tried micro, I highly recommend it. It’s like nano, but built this century, it feels fast and modern.