It was thus said, that the great @poswait once stated:
At first I was like: “What? Quality time with … what?. I am pretty sure my wife want’s something different when she demands quality time!” However, that quote stuck in my head for a while. And thinking about it longer, I found it makes indeed some sense.
We live in a world where we are constantly distracted by our phones, slack channels, email, twitter, etc. For me quality time is the opposite of interruptions. “Let me just do that real quick” is not quality time.
It’s much more about being in the moment, and taking enough time for the task at hand. In my romantic fantasies about woodworking, a carpenter spends quality time with his materials. It takes a lot of dedication to make nice furniture. He does not rush to get some grooves in. He takes his time and carves them out one by one.
I sure think it’s possible! Here are some ideas on how to do it:
Go offline if you can. The internet is the most distracting invention ever made. Getting rid of it for a while is great. I think the Internet Distraction Comic by Asher Sarlin is pretty accurate. As a PhD student I used to have this as my desktop background image.
Avoid screens if you can. The typographer Bringhurst writes:
The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for the open storage of pulverized information - names, dates, library call numbers, for instance - but not so good a place for thoughtful text.
It’s near impossible for me to get into a calm state of mind when staring at a screen. If I can turn it off it’s a huge win. (Unfortunately the same holds true for for iPad screens as well. Even in Night-shift mode. epaper might be different. I have not tried it, yet.)
Print out manuals or at least get an offline version to read on the screen. Find a nice place in the sun, grab a cup of coffee, and work through the manual. Highlight stuff you find potentially useful in the future. It’s not about remembering every command line option. It’s about understanding the involved concepts, and getting an idea of the capabilities.
Here is what I use for printing out man pages, in this case for curl(1):
man -t curl > man.ps && ps2pdf man.ps && open man.pdf
t shortcut),
with a WebKit-browser (Chrome, Opera, not Firefox) and hit the print button.
(Before I was using a2ps(1) with a few tweaks, but GitHub just looks better.)Play with the tool. Unfortunately this will involve screens. Experiment with some options/switches that you found in the docs. Try something fun or interesting. Tweak your personal config file (if supports such a thing).
Inspect the internals.
Improve and verify your mental model by inspecting the internals.
Turn on verbose logging, to see what it does (e.g. ssh -vvv has some interesting output).
Run the tool under strace(1) to see how it interacts with the OS.
Attach gdb(1) and look at some typical back-traces and step thought some interesting places.
Capture and examine network traffice emmitted by the tool with tcpdump(1) and wireshark.
Write about it. Take notes for yourself. If you found a nice command line argument, share it with your peers in a tweet. If you discovered a new method to do stuff, write a blog post about it. Some discoveries also make great lightning talks at conferences (e.g. readline, gdb).
I am pretty sure that this was not exactly what @postwait did in his quality time with tcpdump(1). That’s OK. Everyone will have a different flavor of quality time, that works for him/her. I hope that this post will give you some ideas to make working with software more enjoyable for you.
Happy Hacking!