A terrible schema from a clueless programmer

A very experienced engineer tells a story about a horrible database design. The kicker is that the terrible design was hers, when she was younger and didn’t know any better.

We’ve all been there. This is how we learn. Especially when a lot of software engineers don’t have the opportunity to be mentored and guided by more experienced engineers.

RegexLearn

This is a step-by-step tutorial for learning regular expressions. Well explained, plenty of examples and feels like a smooth on-ramp to regex.

The History of Command Palettes: How Typing Commands Became The Norm Again

So much this: Typing commands is better than clicking your mouse. Command palettes help with discoverability.

In fact, one of my “must-have” Alfred extensions is Menu Bar Search. It adds the command-p behavior to any program, by searching the text of all the menus (using accessibility access). I use it a lot, in all sorts of programs that don’t include such functionality natively (e.g. Quickbooks, Firefox).

One thing not mentioned is that a shell typically also stores history, which helps you discover commands you’ve already typed before. I use my history all the time and use a fuzzy finder to search through it.