Intro

I’ve gotten to become quite the fan of CLI apps as of late. Maybe it’s the allure of the terminal of my childhood (starting with DOS on a 486/33 and my dad’s old Apple IIe). I was born a little too late for the Gen X Commodore64 era, but just in time to know more then just Windows 95. It was interesting era, back when dial up and 56k modems were king. I know most blog posts these days have intro fluff, to pad out word count for SEO, but this really is even why I still love the CLI when so many the younger folks these days only know GUI apps. Nothing makes me happier then to see Gen Z kids fire up the terminal, even for simple tasks. Man, wait till Gen Alpha finds out what a BBS is. “Grandpa computers” they’ll probably say 🤣. “GET OFF MY LAWN” ✊✊

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been needing to do something very simple, in theory, type out a timestamp.

Yeah, I could just use one of the 1000’s of bash scripts, or write it out in Python in my sleep, but I wanted to use this as a excuse to get back into writing GoLang. I first fell in love with it over a Thanksgiving break. Took me a little over a week (40 hours) to get the hang of it well enough to write a nice little custom SNMP parser for the monitoring app PRTG.

(Image credit to bphope.com)

Intro

So it’s no secret among my friends and family that I’m a bit of a scatterbrain. I also love to offload anything difficult into different applications, either on my phone or on my desktop/laptop. While I’ve covered some great tooling before, this time, I’d like to review a few neat things I’ve found that more normal users can benefit from.

I make no effort to hide the fact that I have a really bad case of ADHD. No, not the “I cannot concentrate when I have a TV on in the background bad”, more like, I’ve sat staring at my monitor for 45 minutes and cannot make my brain engage in something I know I NEED to get done. This can be very frustrating and downright upsetting. Anyone with ADHD knows that stress and anxiety love to tag along RIGHT when you need to get things done. This can create a depressing cycle that can be hard to break out of, depending on the day.

Cover photo - contextualelectronics.com

tl;dr What DOES work

The 3 F’s

When I think of tooling, I think of my dad’s electronics shop, a big sprawling room, filled with random parts, power supplies and oscilloscopes. I used to spend my Saturdays with him as a kid. He would “put me to work” and I would help with small tasks, unsolder some old burnt-out capacitors, or log data on faulty power supplies. Nothing critical, but it was neat getting to learn and play at the same time. Anytime there was a big project around the house, my dad would rope me in. Fix a car, build a shed, my dad always had the right tool for the right job, form, fit and function.

Intro 👋

As you might have guessed, I’ve decided to write this entry on Poetry (as in the package manager). I’ll start right off by saying that I’m no expert by far. While I’ve been programming for several years in Python, much of my original experience was just with good old Pip alone. This was partly to do with the fact that back in the early 2010’s there weren’t as many options as there are now. If PyPi is accurate Pipenv was only started back in 2017 and didn’t hit maturity until 2020. Poetry only hit version 1 at the end of 2020 as well.