New just for new

David Satime Wallin — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 10:07:14 +0000

We all know that both software and hardware is innovated daily (if not hourly) these days. If you used node 10.1 yesterday it's time for 10.8 today. Those who don't use Docker and Kubernetes and so on are viewed as ancient relics. As a frontend developer you need to keep track of react, redux, respond, gulp, grunt, bower, yarn, etc, etc, etc.

New frameworks are released daily. For javascript there's even a website called "Days since last javascript framework" ( https://dayssincelastjavascriptframework.com/ ) that is always single digit - and most often at 0.

New languages are released daily. Only the past few weeks we've all seen Hacker news -posts about Joy-lang, Markdeep-lang, Pole-lang, Kitten-lang and so on.

You probably think this ranting cranky old (32 yrs) man is tired of keeping up - but thats not really the point. I love IT partly because of the innovations happening constantly. I love IT because everyone can make their thing and get a wide spread when releasing it.

There are two things about it all that annoys me though;

1) People seem to put some kind of prestige in the freshness of knowledge. If you're blogging about the framework that was released 15 minutes ago you're apparently awesome.

What about really learning something? No matter how quickly you learn things you cannot be really good at it after a few weeks. Use the new framework in a few customer projects, refactor it a few times over a longer period of time, then you can start to claim real knowledge in it and then I'd love to read your blog post.

What happened to "the right tool for the right problem"? The latest language or deployment tool cannot possibly be the right tool for every single problem. Docker for example cannot be the best choice for every deployment or hosting situation - even if Docker is a great tool.

2) People tend to learn a framework and claim to know the language. This, yet again, is shown clearly when it comes to Javascript. I've seen plenty of frontend developers who claim to know Javascript when what they really know is React and JQuery. They know frameworks and tools written in a language, they don't know the language.

Another great example is backend developers that constantly argue the greatness of using an ORM. Why not learn SQL?! SQL is simple yet powerful. Unlike an ORM you can actually optimize an SQL query using your knowledge. When using an ORM you can simply call the functions that someone else wrote based on their knowledge of SQL - and you have close to no idea of what's actually happening.

I expect being shot down plenty of times for my above ranting but that's all part of the game and I'm looking forward to it.

EOF!

Go -mess with flatpak+vscode

David Satime Wallin — Sun, 05 Aug 2018 19:29:18 +0000

Made a fresh fedora 28 install on my macbook pro today (yes I'm an osx hater) and decided to install vscode (me too went from emacs to vscode) through flatpak - which I had yet to try out.

Now the basic install of vscode is a one-liner. Simply do flatpak install flathub com.visualstudio.code and you're done. The trouble arose when I installed the go extension.

Normally this is a one-step-thing as well but this time I couldn't get the darn thing to find the go binary. I use fish as my shell and started to suspect it did not find the environment variables correctly (since vscode initiates an sh-shell of its own). So, perhaps noob-ishly, I started setting my PATH, GOPATH and GOROOT in .bash_profile as well. This actually made a difference. I could now see the correct path in the vscode terminal. The strange thing was that, ever if the path was correct, the binary could not be found when I tried to run it from inside vscode.

My investigation continued. I quite soon realized that it was my lacking knowledge of flatpak that made me stumble. Since my GOROOT was pointing at /usr/lib/golang (yes i normally use GVM but couldn't be bothered today) and flatpak is sandboxed it could not find the content of GOROOT.

Thus, the simple solution was (if perhaps not the best) to

1) download the Go linux binaries

2) unpacking them into $HOME/go

3) adding this to $HOME/.bash_profile

PATH=$HOME/src/go/bin:$HOME/go/bin:$PATH
export PATH
GOROOT=$HOME/go
export GOROOT
GOPATH=$HOME/src/go
export GOPATH

4) and then adding this to my vscode settings.json

    "terminal.integrated.shellArgs.linux": ["-l"],
    "terminal.integrated.shell.linux": "/bin/bash",
    "go.gopath": "/home/dsw/src/go",
    "go.goroot": "/home/dsw/go",
    "go.inferGopath": true,

So, call me a newb but it's solved. Would gladly hear of any alternative ways of solving it or perhaps similar flatpak-stories.

EOF!

Forem: David Satime Wallin

New just for new

Go -mess with flatpak+vscode