About this Episode

Small, Sharp Developer Tools With Brian Hogan

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Guest

Brian P. Hogan: Editorial Manager for DigitalOcean, Author of Small, Sharp, Software Tools: Harness the Combinatoric Power of Command-Line Tools and Utilities, teacher, student, and musician. More info at bphogan.com.

Summary

Developers use a variety of tools other than their programming language to get their jobs done. This week, we talk about those tools with Brian Hogan, an Editorial Manager for DigitalOcean. Brian's a prolific technical educator, writer, and editor and he's currently the author of the book Small, Sharp, Software Tools from the Pragmatic Press. We talk about why command line tools in particular are important, what command line tools do well, and why some people including myself often find them opaque and confusing. We talk about our favorite tools and about customizing your workflow to fit your needs.

Notes

02:33 - Benefits to being comfortable on the Command Line Interface (CLI)

• Small, Sharp, Software Tools
• Brad Urani, The Ruby Developer's Command Line Toolkit
• Noel Rappin, The Developers Toolkit
• Developer's Toolkit Cheat Sheet
• Create React App
• A command that shows commonly used commands

09:43 - Concepts that people struggle with and don’t internalize

11:13 - ‘awk’ and ‘sed’ defined

• awk
• sed
• Elixir
• F#

14:48 - The Ethos of Cargo Culting Information

• Z Shell
• Oh My Zsh
• Makefile
• Deckset
• Noel's Deckset Editor

20:02 - Reminding Yourself to Use Tools and Shortcuts

• Z Shell History Substring Search
• TextMate

27:31 - Benefit to Setup/Cost Ratio

• Bash prompt generator
• RB command line

30:28 - Differences in Tools on Different Machines and Operating Systems

32:52 - Tools You Should Know Better

• Rubular
• regex101
• regex-railroad-diagram
• entr

37:29 - Practice as Continuous Improvement

• Exercises for Programmers

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