Terminals are crucial to mastering computers and are super fun to play with. But you don’t need to be a gray beard to master the terminal! You can learn it bit by bit and have fun too. And this isn’t some kind tongue-in-cheek expression. Try to remember the last thing your learned that made some drudgery less drudgeful (like finding out that adding site:blah.com in Google will limit results to just those from that site.) Wasn’t that fun? This is the same kind of idea.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

(spoilers!)

This quote represents a major theme in the movie Interstellar. Beyond the color pallette that reminds me of color footage from the Apollo missions, or Hans Zimmer’s enveloping soundtrack that echoes 2001: A Space Odyssey, the above quote (attributed to Dylan Thomas) is what really resonated with me.

For those not yet familiar with the awesomeness of Strangeloop, it is a yearly conference about “emerging languages, concurrent and distributed systems, new database technologies, front-end web, and security." This year, Strangeloop was at the Peabody Opera House in St. Louis, and I found it informative, inspiring,and incredibly fun.

I decided to take some time and compress my experience into a reasonable blog post, focusing on only the things that jumped out as interesting or worthy of exploration.

Have you ever wanted git branches to display all branches sorted by the last commit date?

Let’s say you’re working on a project with a lot of branches, you’re hopping around topic branches like crazy, and you have the name of that last one you were working on right on the tip of your tongue…

Well, easy enough!

Use this plugin.

It’s just a slightly ugly one liner:

$ git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(refname)' | sed 's/refs\/heads\///g'

But if you save this as git-recent-branches, make it executable, and put it somewhere accessible on your $PATH, you can do this:

I love the versatility of emacs, even without any additional packages. You get a powerful and fast editing environment that is ridiculously extendable if you so desire.

I used to maintain quite an extensive .emacs configuration, with all sorts of third party packages and custom functions. But early this year, after about a year of heavy Emacs use, I felt the pain of maintaining a working, organized, and fast Emacs setup was just too much. After a certain threshold, twiddling around editor configuration for hours seems to look awfully like useless bike-shedding. And I did find myself sinking a couple hours at a time on my .emacs and .emacs.d. “Time for a fucking change,” I thought.

I just finished reading Worm, a smartly written and relentlessly intense web serial by Wildbow. It’s about an introverted high school girl named Taylor who’s one of many individuals with superpowers. But her power is rather unique for the genre: she can control and perceive essentially any number of bugs within around 1500 feet. We see Taylor fight insanely high powered capes, deal with steadily more impossible situations, and face the dilemma of “doing the wrong things for the right reasons.”

originally published in North by Northwestern

Whether you want to build a game, a website, a mobile application, or simply want to explore creative concepts, programming is an indispensable skill. It offers the means to create instantly useable and distributable products, so it’s very relevant to Northwestern’s mix of entrepreneurial, creative, and technical students. Moreover, it is only slightly removed from pure thought, allowing you to effectively express your imagination.

Do you read more about politics or economics? What are the top websites you recently visited to read articles? How do you plan your casual reading?

My team ( Katie Zhu, Basil Huang, and Amelia Kaufman) and I wondered about these questions and more at the start of Knight Lab’s “Collaborative Innovation and Journalism in Technology” course in spring of 2013. The initial idea we riffed on was about managing personal news consumption. We got to pick our approach and tools and were told to go wild… and we built an app! (graciously maintained by Knight Lab)

What I mean by a “neural prosthetic” is a supplemental tool that aids your brain. Over the past year, I’ve found that Evernote fits that description fairly well, and that it aids useful thought in many ways.

The collection of items that passes your attention daily includes: Wikipedia articles, posts on HackerNews or other aggregators, research papers, interesting projects, videos, slide decks, contacts, places, receipts, etc. It’s a staggering amount and variety of information.

I’ve made some headway into my reading list over the past few weeks. Actually, calling it a “reading list” evokes the wrong concept; it’s more like a constantly re-ordering queue of effectively infinite reading material that is pitiably reduced over time. But anyway, here’s some of the things I came across:

Consider Phlebas, by Ian M. Banks #

One of the better novels in the Culture series, Consider Phlebas at first reminded me of the Star Trek universe but quickly distinguished itself as a brutally efficient story that hammers your brain with its sheer scale. The crucial point of interest for me was the Culture itself, which is a … hmm… galactic, highly individualistic, post-scarcity conglomeration of various species, mediated/managed by ridiculously intelligent AI “Minds.” Their politics could be described as “death is bad, life is good; pain is bad, pleasure is good,” with a liberal helping of anarchism. They’re at war with the Idirans, who instead essentially believe that everything has its place, and want to impose a certain order on the universe. The novel revolves around this central conflict and follows an Idiran mercenary, neatly threading a focused story with a small cast through a large canvas spanning many unique situations. Definitely a satisfying read.