Log 0002: First Day on the Scenic Route to a CCNA

Today, I streamed for the first time in a long time. It was a somewhat hard endeavor getting here. I streamed before on numerous occasions. This time felt a little different, a little more minimalist. I still don’t quite know what I am looking for when it comes to streaming, but it didn’t seem like I was willing to study without streaming as a forcing function. That sounds a little silly every time I think about it — why do I need to show anyone else that I’m studying? Isn’t studying enough on its own? I suppose if I tire of streaming at some point, that will give me the answer to my questions.

I wanted to log a few things from my learning that I might find useful again without having a hard time Googling it.

man page

I sometimes notice that when I call man command, I can see some things are underlined. During today’s search, I think I got confirmation that they are indeed just underlines and unlikely to be hyperlinks that one can follow somehow. In the stream, I checked the man page for date to learn how to format a date directory. It took a little longer, but I did get there eventually. It’s something that I’m very likely to offload to an LLM at work these days.

vim

One of the decisions I made was that I was going to try to stream/work in vim for learning the C programming language. I think I have a thesis for why I am learning C and I will start articulating that below. Consequently, I decided for learning C right now, I actually need a minimal development environment. I have access to CLion but it jumps to a complex build too quickly. For the initial programs I write, I really only need to learn how to run a basic compilation. Additionally, vim has really useful utilities for working effectively with the terminal. I don’t even have to become a vim power user and I won’t be too hard on myself if I use the arrow keys and not hjkl on occasion. I digress. I wanted to share a trick I learned that was bothering me for ages and I hope it becomes useful!

When compiling, I have decided that I want to run :term from vim to start bash. However, once I finish compiling and executing the binary, I would like to return back to the buffer to iteratively make updates. Until today, I did not know that I could run `Ctrl + Shift + W` on macOS to do so. I also didn’t know that they were called windows. This was covered in Lesson 7 of vimtutor. This was helpful and I will probably find other tips for being effective here. For example, I know that we can run commands on the shell directly using the exclamation mark in normal mode (? if that is what to call that). I will give that a try next time and see if the results are comparable.

I also knew that undoing a change is `u`. However, if you want to re-do changes it is Ctrl + r. That works. This is covered in Lesson 2 of vimtutor.

on the scenic route

I think computer networking has been the most fascinating thing to me in the past 6ish years. I asked myself what I could see myself working on long-term without possibly getting bored in software. I think this is it; at least, I’d like to try to see if this is it. Network Engineering seemed like the best way to describe it. I looked into it and I am definitely more interested in the software aspects, although, I admit that the hardware aspects are a big and core component. I have amassed all manner of books to try to soak in knowledge about this new field. As I’m reading TCP/IP Illustrated, I am realizing that if I knew more about how low-level things worked like binary numbers or memory layouts, it would open up new doors to engaging with this content. It’s very much slower, but I think I intentionally prefer to slow down and smell the roses here. I am on the scenic route and learning enough C to be dangerous.