Day 8: Not again…
I’ve had a busy day. One group of Airbnb guests left and two new set checked into our home today. Aside from having to go pick them up, I’ve had to carve out time to clean their rooms and the common toilet. Not tiring, but a little tedious. Occasionally I let 30 minutes feel like an eternity in a day, especially if it’s 30 minutes of my morning. I need to learn to snap out of that.
In the in-between pockets of time I listened to parts of The Random Show and tried to think about what Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss were talking about seriously but failed. Too esoteric. But they’re always fun to listen to even if they talk about things I’m not usually at all interested in. In fact, I went to borrow the book How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia from the national library after tuning in to this episode. Recommended by Tim is good enough to make me give it a shot.
Flying, spinning metal bits
Another pocket I watched Casey Neistat’s YouTube channel and found a sobering message about the recent string of shootings in the US. From an outsider’s point of view, the situation in America is starting to sound unreal.
Senseless violence seems to have somehow become a part of life that people there have to deal with. This is something that bugs me about the US: it’s a great country with so many amazing things going on, but it is tainted by the consequences of its staunch belief that it is every citizen’s right to carry murder weapons.
The Philando Castile murder (to me, it was a murder without question) in my opinion happened partly because he happened to have a firearm with him, though he didn’t reach for it and as a pre-emptive declaration told the police officer that he had it in his car.
Imagine if the police officer had no reason to believe that any American citizen — not just an African-American — could possibly have a gun in his possession, like practically any other country in the world (less those at war). How different would that situation have been? The policeman would have no legitimate reason to reach for his gun at all…
Back in my reality
Anyway, that was just me airing my thoughts as a human being halfway across the world hearing news of the gruesome and unjust act. Back to my reality.
Mei was doing make-up for her client (who’s a friend) at home today, and while she was slathering on liquid foundation for her client, I was beside her staring at two screens like a legitimate geek. One had a bunch of coding exercise instructions and the other was for Sublime Text (a very popular text editor used by developers). Despite all the messiness in the world, I committed to learning today. I don’t know what else I could’ve done.
Quick summary of what I learned today:
- How to execute simple tasks using the command line (the stripped-down version of a Graphical User Interface that all of us non-technical people are used to), including creating, moving, renaming, duplicating, and deleting files and directories (aka ‘folders’).
- How to use Git version control software to ‘commit’ and track changes to files.
- Learned about ‘float’ CSS property and the somewhat ridiculous (and difficult to understand) ‘clearfix’ work-around solution to adjust the position of HTML elements horizontally on a webpage.
- Learned that it’s tough to be a solo indie developer (like Sublime Text’s creator Jon Skinner) because most people are cheap and don’t want to pay for things if possible.
Here’s what using the command line and version-control, Git, looks like:
cd ~ [change directory to home]
mkdir project-goodwill [make directory called ‘project-goodwill’]
git init [initialise .git hidden file that runs version-control in the background for everything in selected folder]
touch README.txt [create a file with that name — not sure why ‘touch’ creates. Oh, maybe I do now…]
open README.txt → proceed to write useful things in file, save
git add README.txt [adds said file to git’s ‘staging area’ to line up for committing as a new version]
git commit -m “created and wrote README file” [commit a new version!]
Nothing super interesting to report about today’s progress, except that it feels super cool to be using ‘git commits’ — that thing I’ve heard technical folks throwing around all the time but never really understood. Git version-control software, from what I know of it so far, looks like an elegant solution to having to save 10 files from Draft1 → Final3_finalFINAL. I really like the way programmers think.
This post is part of my 30-day commitment to write daily about my journey learning something technical everyday. You can see my other posts at Getting Technical.
