• she/her, it/its

gay ass artist and programmer, i guess. 23. works on botania, the minecraft mod. also into weird functional programming stuff. talk to me about monads (or applicatives if you're even cooler)


artemis
@artemis

this is a problem we run into a lot. we have a problem, it's very easy to describe to a person, but we don't know anypony who would know what the answer is. a lot of times this is just looking for specifics commands like "surely there's a command to do this thing, what is it called??". or trying to figure out what libraries we should use for something, or what function calls or whatever.

and like, searching is often useless at this point because you don't know what to search for. so what we ask is "who else has to solve this problem?". so just now a friend of ours was asking for a specific make target to do something with their linux kernel and we had no idea how to do it. but we knew that gentoo definitely has had to solve this problem. so we looked at how gentoo's kernel build script works and found something that looked like it might be what we wanted. Then we searched the exact command that script was running online and found the documentation that confirmed that yup, it was exactly right.

in general this seems to be really effective at getting us close enough to the answers that we can go do some finegrained sifting just reading/searching around a project and expect to get what we wanted to learn.


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