If you use a modern, open-source Unix shell — and by that, I basically mean either bash or zsh — then you really should know this shortcut. Control-R is probably the shell command (or keystroke, to be technical about it) that I use most often, since it lets me search ...
Several months ago, I was teaching an introductory Python course, and I happened to mention the fact that I use Git for all of my version-control needs. I think that I would have gotten a more positive response if I had told them that my hobby is kicking puppies. The ...
If there’s anything that software people know, it’s that changing one part of a program can result in a change in a seemingly unrelated part of the program. That’s why automated testing is so powerful; it can show you when you have made a mistake that you not only didn’t ...
One of the most celebrated phrases that has emerged from Ruby on Rails is “convention over configuration.” The basic idea is that software can traditionally be used in many different ways, and that we can customize it using configuration files. Over the years, configuration files for many types of software ...