Debopam Gupta

@w3dg.bsky.social

80 Followers 420 Following

Software Engineer. Exploring systems, the web, and sustainable tech. Website and Writings at dgdev.fyi

A screenshot of a draft Article from Debopam Gupta which is titled "The command line isn't scary, its damn powerful". The body reads - "Motivation for this article A lot of beginners / new grads (hi there, I am one too!) that I interact with seem to have little to no confidence in interacting with the computer through the shell. They might have some experiece like that one or two labs at university where they had to compile C programs in the first semester or one associated with a later operating systems course. But apart from the commands like cd and gcc, which they most likely used at these courses and got away with it, they are helpless at the terminal. Often I will get asked the same questions around the lines of - “How are you so good at the terminal?” or “Holy crap! I dont understand a thing what you did there!”. These are typically asked when I typed out some shell command that uses pipes and three to four commands with different syntaxes, and frankly as much as I would love to explain each piece individually in a normal setting, I am kind of tired of starting from scratch everytime. That doesn’t mean I will not happily explain from scratch, but I expected some basics to be already known and comfortable with. This often will waste time for the problem at hand and is a sign that to become better you should also be comfortable at the command line. With that preamble, I am writing this in the hope to help others to get started with the shell. I do not aim to go into a comprehensive detail but I will link all the resources that helped me or that I deem very useful to beginners and experienced alike."
A screenshot from Greasyfork website (a place for submitting user scripts) showing a script titled "Better Hacker News" with a description, "Fixes the hideous looking interface". To which, I agree, the interface is quite hideous.
A screenshot of an excerpt from a blog post from Terrible Software having the following as the content. "You’ve just pushed a PR after hours of careful work. You’re feeling pretty good about it too. Then the review comes in. “ChatGPT thinks that {wall of AI-generated text}” No context or specifics. Just a copy-paste job from someone who couldn’t be bothered to form their own thoughts. I’m seeing this everywhere now: PR reviews, design docs, Slack threads. But here’s the thing: I don’t care what AI said. I care what you think. ChatGPT isn’t on the team. It won’t be in the post-mortem when things break. It won’t get paged at 2 AM. It doesn’t understand the specific constraints, tech debt, or your business context. It doesn’t have skin in the game. You do."
Schematic of the Map Reduce framework showing input data splits, map workers, intermediate files, reduce workers, and final output files.
A visual representation of a Trie data structure drawn in Excalidraw with circles depicting nodes and lines between them as edges making up the tree like structure. Letters are valid transitions between nodes and terminal nodes are marked as orange while others are marked blue.
Pile of books on a table. Represents the incarnation of the information in a printed form. With my blog linked about converting Obsidian vault notes to PDFs, I think it's a similar idea.
Solution in Python to the interview question posted in the newsletter.
A return statement in python written with ternary which returns maxsum if its greater than threshold else it returns 0. The code reads pretty much like english. Which is the point i'm trying to make.
Laptop showing adventofcode and terminal on a train seat
Shell script which I use for changing terminator theme on Linux.
a bash function, cdfl which takes you to a directory of the file whose filename you just typed in
🧵3/4 : We can kill processes interactively by hitting **<TAB>, some autocomplete which is set up in your shell config when you install fzf. Also available for ssh entries etc.
cd to a directory with the name of the file you remembering having somewhere. Here we move into a folder with the file single threaded matrix multiplication code.
Screencapture showing fuzzy searching and cd to a chosen directory with fzf and built in cd.