Yulqen

I'm a below average intelligence programmer

I have just read I’m a programmer and I’m stupid and have been inspired to say the same thing.

I wrote some time ago about Being on the left of the bell curve and this blog post accounts for the programmer/coding aspect of that.

I follow Hacker News and my RSS feed reader updates constantly from dozens of blogs about programming, programming languages and similar technologies. I find most of it fascinating and I’ve always suffered from over-curiosity to the expense of productivity. I try so many things and leave fragments of learning and effort in the form of abandoned programs and mini software projects scattered all over my hard drive. I love tech.

But am I any good at it?

Compared to most of the commenters on Hacker News, I’m obviously not, based on the fact that I don’t understand much of what they’re talking about. When I read issues and comments on projects on Github, I struggle. I even struggle reading my own code. Just yesterday I read through the code for https://git.yulqen.org/go/datamaps-go/ and I thought, “how did I do that?”

I am currently navigating my way through the various technologies involved in creating a Kubernetes pipeline at work and I can’t believe how complex the cloud is. There are many and good reasons for this and when it works it is wonderful, but it’s bigger than my brain can handle. I have no idea how to debug a problem in a fifteen step CI/CD pipeline involving as many separate cloud services, each configured with scraps of JSON containing secret keys and arcane configuration key/value pairs.

My current ‘stack’

1. I have used many Linux operating systems in recent years, most recently Arch and Artix Linux on my desktop and various laptops. I flirted with Nix OS and on my stream I claim that NixOS was computing nirvana. But now I’m migrating back to Debian [stable] on all my machines (the servers were already mostly Debian) for the simplicity and stabilty.
2. I am favouring Go for new programming projects. For many reasons, but one of them is for its explicit syntax and rigidity compared to other languages.
3. Plain text for tasks and notes. Obsidian, Roam, Todoist, Trello, TiddlyWiki, Org Mode and a million others have been tried and put down over several year in favour of Vim. Fuck Obsidian
4. Markdown.
5. Bash.
6. Django, when doing web stuff in Python. It just does it all.
7. SQL, for data storage - with Sqlite for simple projects and PostgreSQL or MariaDB for bigger projects.
8. Docker running on a Debian VPS with Apache for reverse proxy.
9. rsync. I fucking love rsync.
10. Hugo for this site. Everything written in markdown.

Back to work.