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Last active April 25, 2020 06:56
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a-good-engineer.md

There are so many things I wish I started doing earlier. Just in case I run into a time-travel scenario, here's a list of things -

Developing hardware

  • Better cabling and wire management
  • Don't use single strand wires.
  • Keep a bunch of hardware scripts soldered and ready
    • Using a transistor as switch
    • Voltage divider circuits

Writing code

  • You can always have more macros in your editor.
  • Make an easily portable editor setup - you will change laptops, log into remote machines, use a coworkers ugly setup for just enough time to make it a pain in the a$$.
  • Keep a bunch of aliases handy
  • Have a consistent style. For example a ~/toolchains folder. Setting PATH (and other) variables across multiple machines becomes more manageable.

Document

Writing great code means nothing if you don't have good documentation

  • No, you definitely won't remember why you used that particular data type.
  • Screenshot videos - Hangouts on Air works great, Quicktime ain't bad either but you most likely won't have so much free disk space
  • Markdown is love, Markdown is life. Also know what flavor (yes there are multiple flavors and yes they have subtle differences) is being used by whatever editor, website you are on.
  • Take a lot of photos.

Design

  • Learn Gimp
  • And Inkscape
  • Read
    • Design of Everyday Things
    • and many more.

Getting better

Measure.Every.Damn.Thing.

  • Rescue time on all your devices
  • Analytics for all your sites
  • Swarm for where you've been
  • Geo tag your tweets and instagram posts
  • Finances using good ol Excel

Backups

  • Yeah, you are going to screw up that awesome dual boot thing that you want to do. At least the first couple of times.
  • If you don't have a separate /home partition you are just doing it wrong.
  • All scripts and projects on GitHub(or whatever).
  • All images to Flickr/Google Photos.

Backpack (and other misc physical things)

  • Either a MacBook or a ThinkPad (the older version).
  • iPod Classic lasts forever (and you want machines which don't connect to the interwebs, for impending Skynet times)
  • Leatherman or equivalent
  • Altoids mint
  • Don't cheap out on a good keyboard.
  • Notebook and pen (Skynet reasons). Moleskine's feel nice.
  • Duct tape
  • One of those cheap 'all-in-one' kits too
  • Cash
  • Email address and phone number on a piece of paper inside the bag

The three most dangerous things in the world are:

  • a programmer with a soldering iron,
  • a hardware engineer with a program patch,
  • a user with an idea.
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