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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I taught myself some shell scripting and unix commands after being gifted an iMac running 10.3. I then decided I wanted to fully immerse myself, so I dual booted that thing with OpenBSD.

    The installer back then was pretty barebones; I used a scientific calculator to set up the partitions. After install I was dropped into a root shell and had to recompile the kernel to apply the latest system patches, then set up my user account, sudo, and bootstrap the package installer.

    Getting the latest Firefox meant compiling it from scratch, which took about a week. Setting up flash involved configuring a Linux emulation layer. It worked on most sites, but not others.

    I began pining for the binary updates, native flash support, and huge package libraries available in Linux, not to mention the cool wobbly window cube that compiz fusion offered, so I made the jump to Linux.

    I’ve switched distros and even switched to other unix-likes, but in the end Linux won for me.


  • kittenroar@beehaw.orgtoProgramming@beehaw.orgExercism
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    1 year ago

    It’s pretty great - it has nice tooling and well structured problems to sharpen your programming skill on. One issue I discovered is, if you are studying a less popular language, the difficulty ratings tend to be inaccurate - things that are labeled medium might be super easy, while things labeled easy might be super difficult.

    Also, just because something passes in your local doesn’t mean it will pass on exercism - the resources allocated to their cloud servers are skinnier than what you are likely running. This is part of what pushes problems another level up in difficulty.