A collection of lessons learned in tech and other meanderings

I'm a person that likes to dabble. I play around with something, learn some cool tricks, and typically, move on. My bread and butter, "pays the bills" programming language is C++. Unfortunately, C++ typically gets a bad rap for not being a "modern" programming language—which, truth be told, is fair since it does tend to lag the rest of the software world in features. Because of this, when I dabble in programming, I gravitate towards something modern and sleek, like Rust or F# (If you haven't tried F# yet, you're missing out; not on job opportunities, but certainly on a good time). In doing so, I pick up little habits that, while nice, are super painful when I go back to my beloved C++ and find the support for such features lacking.

Something we all have to do at one point or another is parse a file. Usually, it's simple enough. Import a parser for JSON, CSV, TOML, or whatever and run parser.parse(file). The same holds true for writing one of these tried and true formats, but sometimes that doesn't cut it.

You've learned to write some code. You've read some blog posts and mastered the basics of git. Why are your code reviews still a huge altercation? It's not enough to write good code and slap it into a git repo. You need to carefully consider your git commits (and likely your pull requests as a whole).

I, like many young programmers, had an immensely difficult time learning git, and after mastering git myself and years of teaching git to coworkers, (That's right! You can get your PhD without knowing anything about git...or computers, but please don't be that guy. Us lowly Bachelor's degree boys will thank you.) I've noticed a couple trends.

It doesn't matter how high up you go. You'll always find someone that doesn't understand git. Do not read this as "You can succeed without learning git!" While, that might actually be true, the fact of the matter is, git just isn't that hard, and it can add so much to your workflow. To make things easy on you, I've put together this short list of the 5 most important git commands.