💾 Archived View for gemini.susa.net › seeds captured on 2023-09-28 at 15:55:13. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Seeds of ideas for further development

Please feel free to discuss these with me by email or IRC, or just write your own take on the subject.

Docker disempowers

Of course, this is not aimed just at Docker. The 'wrapping' of technology into handy bundles serves as a mental lock to keep people invested in a vendor's technology.

It's complicated by the fact that, for example, Docker really does offer something - it's just that such vendors try to hide the underlying tech.

Questions that are best answered in terms of OS container tech are answered in terms of Docker commands, and nobody ever really deepens their understanding.

It occurs to me that this is perhaps *why* Docker seems so comprehensive; something that I marvelled at is really just driven by the need to fully hide the underlying tech.

To understand this further, I'm going to run a Gemini server in a hand-made container to see what I'm missing.

Vim is Our Saviour

IDEs are all different. Auto-complete, refactoring tools, and debugging are probably the most valuable things to me in an IDE, yet none work well with untyped languages - the bar to me is Eclipse (and other good Java IDEs), and it's a high one.

So, rather than struggle with a different IDE for every language, mastering none, I can use Vim for any language on any platform and the onus is on me to get very good with one editor, rather than be mediocre with ten.

Microsoft could see the obvious trend in developer thinking, hence VS Code. Even so, I found myself chasing moving targets when using Atom & VS Code, the plugins and configurations would be continuously break, or wouldn't play together, in the auto-update hell that they favour. Noble in intention, sadistic in action! Yet there are Vim plugis that still work years after they were written.

For example, the following repository has plugins to help with many established Unix scripting languages. Some have been recently updated, some not for years. All are useful.

Vim plugins by Fritz Mehner & Wolfgang Mehner (current maintainer)

I find the freedom from environmental clutter leaves a lot more time to think about the actual problem at hand. It's a steep climb, and I have to accept that I'll always feel like a novice, but I'm happy to be humbled, belittled even, by Our Saviour.