Burying the Lede

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 23:28:22 +0000

Most of us don’t write very readable shell scripts. There are plenty of things we could do better, but today I want to talk about one in particular — burying the lede.

The term “burying the lede” comes from the field of journalism. Here’s the Wiktionary definition:

To begin a story with details of secondary importance to the reader while postponing more essential points or facts.

Like a good news article, code should tell a story. And the story should start with what’s most important. In the case of code, the most important information is the high-level functionality — a succinct summary of what the program does. In other words, write (and organize) the code top-down, as opposed to bottom-up.

Yak Shaving #1: Cursor Keys

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 22:02:59 +0000

I recently decided to start using Emacs again. I used it extensively from the early 1990s until the early 2000s. I pretty much stopped using it when I had a sysadmin job with no Emacs on the servers, and no ability to install it. With the rising popularity of tmux and tmate for remote pairing, and my dislike for vim’s modes, I decided to try going back to Emacs in the terminal.

Shell on BoochTek, LLC

Burying the Lede

Yak Shaving #1: Cursor Keys