Hacker School Day 6 – Weekend Catchup/New Plan

Last Friday was the end of the first week of Hacker School already. I finished up the first pass at the Zulip to IRC trasnport, demo’ed it, went to some talks, and more! Last week’s posts are:

1. Hacker School First Day, Project Ideas
2. Hacker School: Day 1 – Zulip to IRC, strace post, Programming Pearls refresh, more
3. Hacker School Day 2: Zulip API, Perl, IRC, Buffering, and the Cloud
4. Hacker School Day 3 – Zulip IRC works!
5. Hacker School Day 4 – Daemons, init scripts, presentations
6. Hacker School Day 5 – Friday, Too Many Ideas

To tie up last week, I spent a lot of Friday thinking about what to work on. I ended up breaking the slump by joining the job prep timed task, which was to create a custom version control system within 2 hours. Inspired with the Git Parable, I worked through a very naive system that took snapshots by copying the directory and allowed for checking out previous snapshots, with a convenience call for reverting to the most recent. It kept track of head, allowed for commit messages with timestamps, shelled out to diff for diffing versions, and each commit tracked its parent. This way you could take 3 snapshots, check out v1, make a new commit, and see the history for only commits 4 and 1. Time ran out after that, but I was pretty pleased with the end result. It obviously wasn’t git 🙂 but I felt confident with the code. It was a good way to solve the analysis paralysis problem I was dealing with in the morning.

This weekend I tried not to think about code. I did decide that I’m going to start working in Go as much as I can. I’m going to start with the revamp of fuse-colors. My pre-requisites for starting the rewrite include:

• poking through percol to see if I can glean any knowledge, since it’s another project that’s pushing for a shell 2.0 idea without going too far.
• fiddle with the bash_autocompletion idea I hinted at in another post
• play with this StackOverflow answer about bash hooks. I prefer the FUSE idea because it’s cross-shell compatible, but it might make more sense to make a script that does the right bash/zsh incantation and call that good.

I’ll need a better name for fuse-colors though. That’s it for now.