Pseudorandom

Not so long ago, in an office so very close, an imperial trooper used the same [email protected]$$w0rd on every single site. The onus of easy peasy pwnage led to separate and proper passwords for important sites, led to plasticky back pats, led to proud promotions. But an imperial trooper’s memory banks are only yea big and only hold yea many passwords.

Eight words. “Hey, can I see you in my office?” Whatever important tasks hung spinning in the air around you darken to match your widening pupils, then plummet to the floor in a slow-motion Broadway disaster. Eight words and the serene, ever-smiling avatar of your boss.

Prologue: Merek vs the Old Library The last tattered shred of hope clung limply to its flagpole and flew at half mast. “Where did we go wrong?”, Merek grimaced. Hopes in Köd Kingdom had flown so high, higher than the green and black banners billowing proudly atop the castle spires. The day they’d broken ground— the popping corks and howling cheers still echoed mirthfully down his ear canals. Only the wind howled now.

I won’t kid you; the road to course creation is riddled with potholes, roadblocks, and sketchy checkpoints. It was hard. But the solution to each obstacle taught me new skills and valuable life lessons. I think it’s time to document those lessons.

Night is falling as the old cowboy coder pauses his story to stoke the flickering campfire. You lean in slightly, eager to hear more. A deliberate man, he takes a draw from his tin mug and then exhales contentedly, gazing into the fire. Deliberate? — Maybe he just values a good dramatic pause, you decide. “Trouble was,” he continues, “click-clacking the day away was hard on the old wrists. Before long, I found myself square on the littered trail to neuropathy. A wise old country doc told me I had…” He pauses briefly, then pronounces each word like a hiker carefully negotiating rocky terrain, “carpal tunnel syndrome.” You can’t help but gasp.

You’re a programmer, software craftsman, full-stack developer, software engineer. But regardless of the titles dangling from your Twitter bio, if you want to greatly improve the quality of your code and indeed the quality of your life, there’s one more title you should consider tacking on there: “Runner”…

The software engineer bristles with annoyance, then cringes in fear. The cause? They came face to face with an opposable opinion. What are these opposable opinions and is it possible to refactor our brain to respond better the next time we’re confronted with one of them? Read on, fair coder! Let’s start with this illustration: Have you ever seen a basketball player “palm” a basketball? It’s a coveted feat which greatly enhances a player’s control of the ball.

** Hotel Vim ** or: Hotel Colon q. Bang on a dark linux bash prompt, new boss in my hair hot coffee and hardware, stale conditioned air ls listing the files, i cat configs that ain't right my head so heavy and my sight so dim i'd have to work through the night there she sat in the bin dir i heard the terminal bell and i was thinking to myself 'just a quick tweak and all will be well' then she lit up the keyboard and showed me the way three letters in the dark of night i thought i heard vim say welcome to the hotel :q!

Badges? Why don’t I have any stinking badges? With a flick or your wrist and a flourish of your cape, you unveil your latest open source beauty. It has more bells than a bell foundry, more whistles than a traffic cop convention. But there’s one problem: your OSS-contributing peers all have these cool badges decorating their projects. They’re so shiny and colorful! They imbue an air of legitimacy to their projects, like a detective flashing his badge at a crime scene.