- kimchi
- reverse debugging
- E Ink
- web archiving
- Buildroot
- integrated development environments
- degreaser
- UML: while it might seem like a over-thought thing and likely is, the basic idea that understanding "one to one vs one to many vs many to many" relationships between objects and which object can see which object, is a fantastic approach towards understanding complex object oriented code
- open source software, including open source scientific computing consultancies
- computer
- FOSDEM. Ciro Santilli attended in 2016, and felt extremely good together with all those amazingly smart open source hackers: www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-open-source-conferences/answer/Ciro-Santilli
- Sass
- vimium
- bisection
- vector graphics, notably scalable Vector Graphics
- ASCII art
- OAuth
- command-line interface
- virtualization
- Anusol
- autodidacticism and self-directed learning
- end-to-end encryption
- The Criterion Collection
- version control
- SQLite
- Guerrilla Mail
- POSIX
- static website
- Freeman Dyson
- open access academic publishers
- unconditional basic income
- transhumanism
- 2FA, and notably 2FA apps
- human-readable formats
- wealth tax
- Reproducible builds
- F-Droid
- Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021)
- drug liberalization
- Wiki-binge
- molecular Sciences Course of the University of São Paulo
- meal deal
- clade, as opposed to taxonomic ranks
- lingua franca, see also: having more than one natural language is bad for the world
- rsync
- zip hoodies
Because when this gets converted to a OurBigBook.com page, it will be easier for people to copy paragraphs/fork and write a canonical page about Ciro.
What do you do when creating a pull request? Do you say "I", which is not true because Ciro did not say that, or do you say "John Doe thinks" bla bla?
And because his name is awesome! :-) Just kidding.
This became a micro-meme in 4chan:Correction: cirosantilli.com is not Ciro Santili's resume. It is your life.
- 2020-09-21 archive.vn/wip/Zz7fx (original) "ITT: weird sites you found by accident" a comment reads:
cirosantilli.com/ this is some guys resume who repeats his own name well over 1,000 times.
- 2020-04-30 archive.is/LgDbK (original) "Interesting Website thread" a comment reads:cirosantilli.com/ What is even this?
Ciro Santilli learned this expression from Angry Video Game Nerd.
Ciro was trying to make his face fit on the banner. But it is hard because faces are square and text is long.
At this moment, Ciro knew what to do.
Finally, by adding another eye to the footer of the page, this also added a symbolic dimension to things: the pages contain what is in between Ciro's eyes: his brain: Section "Braindumping".
The concept, like any other, is not in itself new and has been used by others, Ciro just independently rediscovered it again:
Ciro Santilli has the power to document stuff in a way that makes using them awesome, as evidenced by his his Stack Overflow contributions (notably those in the best articles by Ciro Articles), and other online contributions.
If your project does something awesome, hiring Ciro means that more people will be able to notice that it is actually awesome, and use it.
He likes to do this in parallel to contributing new features, quickly switching between his "developer" and "technical documentor" hats.
This means of course that he will develop new features a bit slower than others, but he feel it is more valuable if end users can actually use your project in the first place.
His technique is to provide upfront extremely interactive and reproducible getting started setups that immediately show the key value of the project to users.
He backs those setups with:A prime example of kind of setup is Ciro's Linux Kernel Module Cheat.
- scripts that automate the setup much as possible to make things enjoyable and reproducible
- a detailed description of the environment in which he tested: which OS, version of key software, etc.
- a detailed description of what is expected to happen when you take an action, including known bugs with links to bug reports
- theory and rationale on the sections after the initial getting started, but always finely interspersed with concrete examples
- all docs contained in a Git-tracked repo, with the ability to render to a single HTML with one TOC
- short sentences and paragraphs, interspersed with many headers, lists and code blocks
While he create this setup, he inevitably start to notice and fix:
- bugs
- annoyances on the public interface of the project
- the devs were using 50 different local scripts to do similar things, all of them semi-broken and limited. Every new hire was copying one of those local scripts, and hacking it up further.
- your crappy build / test / version control setup
Exploiting this skill, however, requires you to trust him.
When he tells to managers that he's good at documenting, they always say: great, we need better documentation! But then, one of the following may happen:
- managers forget that they wanted good documentation and just tell him to code new features as fast as possible
- they don't let him own the getting started page, but rather and expect him to try and fix the existing crappy unfixable existing getting started, without stepping on anyone's pride in the process >:-)Good documentation requires a large number of small iterative reviews, and detailed review of every line is not always feasible.Too many cooks.
Ciro's passion for documentation and tooling has the effect that if you have crappy documentation and tooling and don't want them to be fixed, Ciro will end up trying to fix those tools instead of doing what you tell him to do anyways, which might lead to him quitting because he can't stand the tools, or you firing him because he's not doing the job you think I should be doing. So please, don't bother hiring Ciro if you have crappy documentation and tooling.
Psychological analysis of why Ciro has this gift: How Ciro Santilli manages to write so much.
Ciro often has the following metaphor in his mind:
New discoveries are like very rough trails where you have to cut through heavy bushes (an original research paper).After a brave explorer goes through this rough path for the first time and charts it, it does become much easier for others to follow it later on, but it still requires a lot of effort to go through them, because there are still a lot of rough bushes and some parts of the map are not very clear (reading and reproducing the research paper to further advance the state of the art).As enough people start going through, the probability that someone with a bad memory ends up walking it increases, and that person ends up pounding the earth into a beaten track and increasing the trail clearance of the beginning of the trail at least (review paper).There finally comes a point when even the local government starts to notice this trail is important, and pays someone to add some stone pavement and rails on the most exposed parts of the trail (post and undergrad education).And at last, Ciro Santilli comes with a bulldozer and creates an autoroute that thousands of people can cruise at high speed without any effort (Q&A, open knowledge HTML websites).
Ciro's documenation obsession is partly part of his braindumping effort of dumping his brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact