(Here for the blog-series kick-off post).

We’re playing catch-up a little, and these are things I did in the tail end of 2017.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything with Unix. About 10 years, actually, and my unix experience was limited to running Ubuntu at the time and being forced to troubleshoot a lot of things mainly by googling answers. That was frustrating and satisfying at the same time. A memorable highlight was the time that my system switched to Ancient Greek at some fundamental level so that I couldn’t log in because it would only input Greek characters and it was not as simple as ‘change keyboard’.

Anyway, Jedi master Tauber decided I should learn to manipulate text files in Unix and set me the following tasks. You can see them over here:

This is what I call “hunt”-learning. The teacher isn’t pushing, and the learner isn’t actively trying to pull things from the teacher, rather the teacher is setting up tasks which the learner must then go and problem-solve. I think there’s a lot to be said for such a method, and it works particularly well for something like this.

Also, by the end of 7 tasks, I had not only an appreciation for how to do these things, but a sense of both (a) the kinds of things that could be done just by manipulating appropriate data sets, (b) that so much is possible if you just have the data.

Of course, having the data, or having a text in an actionable form, is itself half the struggle.

If you’re a totally beginner like me, and want to follow through those 7 tasks, go ahead, and feel free to drop me a line if you get stuck. There’s lots I don’t know, but I know enough to hint you along the path.