git-from-the-bottom-up VS learnxinyminutes-docs

Here's a great walk through for how Git works from the bottom up: https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/

It's short, easy to understand and you'll understand HEAD.

Very tangential:

Gerrit also stores some of its configs in a git repo. I was setting up a new instance, but couldn't get Admin permissions because the way my auth front-end didn't play well with the docker image's assumptions.

Gerrit already does a lot of its work via non-standard references. For example, you don't push to a branch, `refs/branches/foo`, you push to a separate `refs/for/foo` namespace that creates the review.

Similarly, Group config is stored in the All-Users git repo [1], but in references created after a UUID, in `refs/groups/UU/UUID`.

I ended up having a to exercise the plumbiest of plumbing commands [2] to create a new commit from scratch (from a tree, from the index, from blobs), to update the group ref to add myself to the Administrators group (this, of course, requires a local shell and permissions on the Gerrit host). It was a great way to exercise what I had learned in Git from the Bottom Up [3]

[1] https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/config-...

[2] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects

[3] https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/

I found Git from the Bottom Up helpful. It is very short as well. Then refer to the official book when you want more detail.

I recently came across "Git from the Bottom Up by John Wiegley" (thanks to Coding Blocks podcast), he has a chapter about rebasing: https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/1-Repository/7-branching-and-the-power-of-rebase.html

You won't have to put your entire life on break in order to understand the fundamentals of git and why it works the way it works. Going through https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/ and really understanding the material will take you a couple of hours at max, but will save you a lot of time in the future.

Wanting to understand things before using them is hardly elitism, not sure why you would think that.

Just like you probably don't want to fix bugs without understand the cause, it's hard to use a tool correctly unless you know how the tool works.

> Sure, maybe for some esoteric edge cases, but 5 mins on https://learnxinyminutes.com/ should get you 80% of the way there, and an afternoon looking at big projects or guidelines/examples should you another 18% of the way.

Not for C++, and even for other languages, it's not the language that's hard, it's the idioms.

Python written by experts can be well-nigh incomprehensible (you can save typing out exactly one line if you use list-comprehensions everywhere!).

Someone who knows Javascript well still needs to know all the nooks and crannies of the popular frameworks.

Java with the most popular frameworks (Spring/Boot/etc) can be impossible for a non-Java programmer to reason about (where's all this fucking magic coming from? Where is it documented? What are the other magic words I can put into comments?)

C# is turning into a C++ wannabe as far as comprehension complexity goes.

Right now, the quickest onboarding I've seen by far are Go codebases.

The knowledge tree required to contribute to a codebase can exists on a Deep axis and a Wide axis. C++ goes Deep and Wide. Go and C are the only projects I've seen that goes neither deep nor wide.

Learn x in y minutes: Concise tutorials to learn various programming languages and tools quickly.

StackOverflow's making their own competing LLM for all this stuff.

IMO, one of the biggest problems with the way people use LLMs right now, is that they're being treated as a single oracle: to know Java, it must be trained on examples of Java.

It would be much better if their language comprehension abilities were kept separated from their knowledge (and there are development efforts in this direction), so in this example it would be trained to be able to be able to read a Java tutorial rather than by actually reading a Java tutorial, so when the overall system is asked to write something in Java, the language model within the system decides to do this by opening https://learnxinyminutes.com and combining the user query with the webpage.

I think this will help make the models more compact, which is a benefit all by itself, but it would also mean that knowledge can be updated much more easily.

Someone would have to actually do this in order to see if those benefits are worth the extra cost of having to load a potentially huge a tutorial into the context window, and likewise the extent to which a more compact training set makes the language comprehension worse.

The project was created and is maintained by Adam Bard, but is open sourced with over 1.7k contributors since 2013

https://github.com/adambard/learnxinyminutes-docs

So you have studied programming for at least 5 years, what kinds of programs have you written? Apparently you have already applied your skills, since you have "created a good reputation among developers"? Why a time-frame of 20 years, why not 20 months or 20 weeks? Heck, you can learn a lot in even 20 days!

Once you have learned a few languages, libraries and frameworks then learning new stuff becomes much easier. At that point I'd recommend to check the website https://learnxinyminutes.com. Meanwhile, continue asking questions here and elsewhere :)

An other tip, if you are into computer science and algorithms stuff I recommend you try to solve problems which are posted at https://codegolf.stackexchange.com. You don't need to try solving them in less than X characters, but just to get them solved by any means necessary. And don't take too much bad influence from the posted solutions.

If you want a brief overview, go to https://learnxinyminutes.com/ and look for Javascript. I guess it should be roughly the time it took to learn C++ or possibly less, but JS has its own quirks. Often learning a second language is difficult as the first.

Very light compared to the other resources people have linked for you, but I love https://learnxinyminutes.com/