December 11, 2020

inkelinks S01E03

¡Hola, amigos! Friday means a new issue of inkelinks. Today I bring you some links on design and history of the program and utilities we, or at least I, use mostly.

Links

• URL Design
  Old but gold. Kyle Neath was one of the original designers at GitHub, and in this essay he talks about how to build good URLs and why that’s important. I keep coming back to this article from time to time, because it’s timeless.
• Design Better Forms
  Common mistakes designers make and how to fix them. Oh boy, many times I was guilty of doing most of these! Definitely not exclusively for designers; if you ever need to implement a form, you are to check this post, print it, frame it, and hang it in an always visible place near your computer. Your users will thank you.
• The Source History of Cat
  catis undeniably one of most used programs in any *nix based operating system, and this is a nice article trying to find out more about it by inspecting its source code. Recommended to accompany a cup of coffee.
• Brian Kernighan Remembers the Origins of ‘grep’
  My life wouldn’t be the same if it weren’t for grep. I simply love it. And like the article above this is also about the history of a command, but in a different way and told by someone directly linked to its inception.
• Even faster bash startup
  As a Bash user I’ve found this article very enlightening. I’ve got to go through all my computers to check my startup times, I’m sure I will greatly benefit from it.

Podcast episode of the week

The Birth of UNIX with Brian Kernighan
Yes, Brian Kernighan again. What can I say? I love the man, he is one of my programming heroes. And this interview is just fantastic. At 51 minutes it can be a bit long, but let me assure that you’ll do yourself a favour if you dedicate some time to just sit back and listen to it… but if you can’t do that, DON’T PANIC! There’s a transcript of it.