[discussion] Tool Making

[ew.gemini]

Hello Andrew,

Andrew Singleton <singletona082@gmail.com> writes:

> In my last thread I had noticed a lot of you just a fair
> degree of tools both ready made and self assembled.
>
> Any reasons for this as opposed to doing it by hand? What
> advantage does your tools give to your workflow?

Well, for me:
- I work in IT, so I have "my tools" at my fingertips all day
  long, namely: emacs, shell.
- I am lazy in the sense, that I'm not going to type in the same
  tedious commands many times.
- self made tools are going to take the "tedious" bit out.

I can still edit my capsule by hand. That is an immediate
advantage of using shell, imho. I don't have to. But lets face
it: if I use gpg on the command line, I cannot really go beyond
this and do the calculation of a hash sum "by hand". There is
always a limit.

But I am never going to transform .gmi to .html by hand. Nope.
That is a waste of time. I am producing a .html version of my
blog in order to make it accessible with a web browser. And
sometimes I need this myself. I don't have an always online
machine with me all day long including a gemini browser.


---

Actually this "simple" question touches on a whole universe ...

* I do it my way -- you do it your way, please.

  My scripts are available online, and they might serve as
  inspiration to others. But please do this stuff your way!
  "Your way", not my way.

  Our ways change over time. We can choose to use different
  tools at any point, if we want to. For whatever reason.

* There is not /one/ solution for a given problem, but many

  Why are there so many solutions for the same problem?". That's
  because my brain works my way and not anyone elses.

* Diversity in Code is a mirror of diversity in peoples minds

  I strongly object to the "one size fits all"-hypothesis. If
  it's Rust for you, go for it. It's still going to be shell or
  perl for me, or C.

* Perceived "elite-ness" (or whatever the correct term would be)

  I have been told that "we opensource hackers" (I'm one of them
  :) are extremely elitist, because we are not helping all the
  normies out. (The person, who told me, is belonging to the
  latter group, even though he is not a stupid person at all!)

  That is a bold statement to make imho. The person was
  demanding my time for free to do his homework sort of. No. I'm
  not in for that. If they are willing to learn how to do it, I
  can help. If not, tough luck.

  My point is this: If I know a tool (shell, say) and I know how
  to solve a given problem (converting .gmi to .html) with this
  tool, then I can use it. The person in the above paragraph
  cannot be helped with shell, because it is not their tool.



Heck, I'm not sure, whether this is relevant for your quest to
understand "why am I not doing this by hand". This is just my
opinion after being involved with computers for >30 years. But
not everyone is a IT person. I am interested to hear other
opinions.

Cheers,
~ew

-- 
Keep it simple!