E.g. showing live data from a scientific instrument! TODO:
- superuser.com/questions/825588/what-is-the-easiest-way-of-visualizing-data-from-stdout-as-a-graph
- unix.stackexchange.com/questions/190337/how-can-i-make-a-graphical-plot-of-a-sequence-of-numbers-from-the-standard-input
- stackoverflow.com/questions/44470965/how-can-you-watch-gnuplot-realtime-data-plots-as-a-live-graph-with-automatic-up
- stackoverflow.com/questions/14074790/plotting-a-string-of-csv-data-in-realtime-using-linux
- stackoverflow.com/questions/11874767/how-do-i-plot-in-real-time-in-a-while-loop-using-matplotlib
CLI hello world:
gnuplot -p -e 'p sin(x)'People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.
Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.
Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.
This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.
Do as I say, not as I do: Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019, meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/381577/is-it-ok-to-have-links-on-how-to-create-sock-puppets-and-gain-rep-fraudulently-i/381635#381635.
LockPickingLawyer SAINTCON keynote (2021)
Source. SAINTCON is "Utah's Premiere Security Conference".- youtu.be/IH0GXWQDk0Q?t=900 mentions that Alfred Charles Hobbs commented in 1853:
Rogues are very keen in their profession, and know already much more than we can teach them
Edsger W. Dijkstra's request to programmers
. Source. A glitch is more precisely a software bug that is hard to reproduce. But it has also been used to mean a software bug that is not very serious.
Debugging sucks. But there's also nothing quite that "oh fuck, that's why it doesn't work" moment, which happens after you have examined and placed everything that is relevant to the problem into your brain. You just can't see it coming. It just happens. You just learn what you generally have to look at so it happens faster.
This is a simple hierarchical plaintext notation Ciro Santilli created to explain programs to himself.
It is usuall created by doing searches in an IDE, and then manually selecting the information of interest.
It attempts to capture intuitive information not only of the call graph itself, including callbacks, but of when things get called or not, by the addition of some context code.
For example, consider the following pseudocode:Supose that we are interested in determining what calls
f1() {
}
f2(i) {
if (i > 5) {
f1()
}
}
f3() {
f1()
f2_2()
}
f2_2() {
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
f2(i)
}
}
main() {
f2_2()
f3()
}f1.Then a reasonable call hierarchy for
f1 would be:f2(i)
if (i > 5) {
f1()
f2_2()
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
f2(i)
main
f3
f3()
main()Some general principles:
One of the Holiest age old debugging techniques!
Git has some helpers to help you achieve bisection Nirvana: stackoverflow.com/questions/4713088/how-to-use-git-bisect/22592593#22592593
Obviously not restricted to software engineering alone, and used in all areas of engineering, e.g. Video "Air-tight vs. Vacuum-tight by AlphaPhoenix (2020)" uses it in vacuum engineering.
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