DEV Community

CodingBlocks

Team Leadership, TUIs, and AI Lawsuits

In this episode, we’re talking about the history of “man” pages, console apps, team leadership, and Artificial Intelligence liability. Also, Allen’s downloading the internet, Outlaw has fallen in love with the sound of a morrvair, and Joe says TUI like two hundred times as if it were a real word.

See all the show notes at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode214

News

  • Thanks for the reviews!
    • itunes: michael_mancuso
  • DevFest Florida is a community-run one-day conference aimed to bring technologists, developers, students, tech companies, and speakers together in one location to learn, discuss and experiment with technology. (devfestfl.org)

What are (were?) man pages?

  • “man” is a command-line “pager” similar to “more” or “less” that was designed specifically to display documentation – ahem, “manuals”
  • “man” pages would show you documentation for many apps in a (mostly) consistent manner that was available offline
  • Do people still use them?
  • People would print these out in the 70’s and beyond!
  • How do you create a man page? (allthings.how)
  • Uses an old markup language named “roff”
  • Install to the proper location, typically /usr/man/man: (tldp.org)
Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time (amazon)

How to Lead a Team (Anti-Patterns edition)

Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time (amazon)

  • Hire Pushovers
  • Ignore Low Performers
  • Ignore Human Issues
  • Be Everyone’s Friend
  • Compromise the Hiring Bar
  • Treat Your Team Like Children

Terminal UIs

  • A new frontier in programming?
  • The Good:
    • Keep your hands on the keyboard!
    • Easily install on remote servers
    • Often built by devs for devs
    • Low overhead
    • Purpose-built for their purposes (as opposed to IDE extensions)
    • Looks ancient
  • The Bad:
    • Looks ancient
    • Scriptability
    • Each has it’s own learning curve

Examples:

Meta AI

  • Meta has been making serious strides in AI with LLAMA and…it’s open source! Does that make them any more or less liable for the information? Does “publically available information” change things

Resources we like

Tip of the Week

  • Want to learn something new while also making your life easier? Why not try writing a TUI!? Here’s an article that will kindly introduce you to terminal user interfaces, libraries like “Clap”, “TUI”, and “Crossterm” that people are using to write them, and…you can get some XP with Rust while you’re at it! (blog.logrocket.com)
  • Are you looking to upgrade your Kubernetes cluster? Check for API problems first!
  • Are you a browser tab fiend? Did you know you can reload all your tabs simultaneously with a simple shortcut? (groups.google.com)
  • No more nasty wiring jobs, get yourself to the hardware store website and pick up some wire and splicing connectors. Keep things nice, tidy, and organized. (wago.com)
  • Matt’s Off-road recovery channel is amazing if you’re into cars or… beautiful-sounding things.
  • Are you tired of manually correlating logs and events? No more! Check out the Open Telemetry project for your distributed tracing and analytics needs! (opentelemetry.io)

Episode source