gary_bernhardt

Yes, currently there's no way to jump to the middle of a course. That lets us keep the lessons shorter, without needing to recap earlier topics. We're planning to add a way to skip, but that's not in yet unfortunately.

Edit: Just to be clear, all of the lessons shown on the course page are available, but you have to start at the beginning for now.

This is a great excuse to repeat one of my favorite quips, from the late Jim Weirich (from memory, but this is at least very close): "half-assed is OK as long as it's the right half of the ass."

That sentence's grammar is intentional. (I wrote the sentence.)

English is not a programming language. I'm sure that we can both name revered authors who have used far "worse" grammar consistently throughout their careers, whereas the word choice that has so ruffled you here involves a single word.

As to "flexing knowledge": I had some fun in a couple sentences in that article. I aim to be at least slightly more than a machine that extrudes gray paste of unit density. Fabricating an ulterior motivate and attributing it to me is offensive.

I switched off of Dvorak because of vim, and because keyboard shortcuts in general were so awkward. Shortcuts are better in Norman, but vim is still awkward.

I second this.

I switched to Dvorak on regular staggered keyboards and got to 80-90 WPM or so, but pretty much lost my ability to QWERTY.

Then I switched back to QWERTY full time for 5+ years.

Then I switched to Norman on an ErgoDox, getting to 80-90 WPM or so again. This time around, I could still QWERTY on a staggered keyboard just fine. Night and day vs. the first attempt.

(Then I switched back to QWERTY again. Now I can't Dvorak or Norman or ErgoDox!)

Yeah, you can get lucky. But if you actually get denied entry and put on the next flight back, you'll wish you'd printed that flight receipt. All it takes is one officer having a bad day. (Or one who doesn't like [insert part of your identity here].)

I second this advice, having done it. I flew one-way from Seattle to Dublin in 2010 with no plan beyond the first week. 25ish cities and 4.5 months later, I flew back. You'll figure it out as you go.

But, a warning from experience: when you fly one-way to another country where you'll go through immigration, always pre-book travel OUT of that country as well, and have printed (on paper!) proof to show border control. Fortunately this doesn't apply between most European countries due to the Shengen area. Immigration is not the part of the trip where you want to wing it. Always make sure you understand the visa and border crossing rules in advance.

I use `git clean` maybe once per year on average, so very low risk for me. And if that ever happens... that's why I have hourly backup snapshots! If I didn't trust my backups, I'd definitely address that before worrying about dotfile management. If you don't have a good safety net then you end up reinventing the net 100 times in other ways and everything gets more complicated.

I've had my dotfiles under version control for over a decade (hg for a couple years, then git). I've never used or felt the need for any special tools, and I don't use any extra symlinking.

If you do that stuff, great, but here's what I do if you don't want to use any specialized tools:

My home directory is just a git repo. There's a regular old ~/.git directory. All of the management I do is regular git stuff, like any other repo. Everything I don't want to commit is listed in .gitignore, like any repo.

The only wrinkle is setting up a new machine. You can't clone into an existing directory (AFAIK), and your home directory already exists, so you need a workaround. An easy solution: clone the remote repo to ~/dotfiles, then `mv ~/dotfiles/.git ~`, then `rm -r ~/dotfiles`. Now your home directory is a git repo where the working copy is exactly as the home directory was before, and HEAD points to your repo's default branch. It will be dirty because all of your config files are missing. Use regular `git status` to take a look. It's always looked fine to me, so I `git checkout .`, which effectively installs the dotfiles. Then I'm done until I need to do that copy trick again when I buy my next computer. In the meantime I just commit and push as normal, and occasionally add a new file to .gitignore.