This was my first year to commit to do an Advent of Code event in full. In the past, I’ve started feeling a bit fatigued vaguely by day 10, so the fact that this year the event was 12 days definitely helped to pull through until the end.

People often see advent of code as a good chance to experiment with a new language, and I partially agree. This time I’ve decided to go with…Typescript. Definitely not the most esoteric option, but I’ve avoided learning anything about it for long enough.

This is a continuation of a series of posts, but now on bash. See what is this about and why I’m writing this in the first post

Craftsmen should know how to use their tools. I usually follow this sort of motto. But sometimes, you stop somewhere half-way, or 80% of the way. Bad habits stick instead of the “canonical” way to use the tool. The meme example of it would be using search bar to look up “google.com”, then opening the first link, and using that for your actual search. It is, however, hard to get rid of some of those bad habits, even when you know that there is a better way™️.

This post is something in the middle between a cheat sheet and a confession about things I know are useful, but for some reason keep forgetting about, and usually resort to doing the equivalent in a bad way. My hope that by writing this I can finally push myself to stick to the better solutions instead.

This post is sort of a therapy session where I dump all of the weird things that I have seen when working with several huge projects in COBOL 85.