bartib is a command line tool for time tracking. It had a good set of commands that were easy to learn and had a fair bit of depth. However, command args were awkward to present, and the forced project + description combo is not desired for my tracking.
A lot of content written for "The top command, part 1" was validated with some experimentation. This article highlights some of the experimentation I've done to highlight differences in top output when observing different computational loads and task scheduler priorities.
After preparing a cpu-bound program, I experiment with different runs of the program (single vs multi process, different priorities) to see how top visualizes its usage.
After running company software on some virtual machines and observing erratic resource usage behaviour, I thought it would be wise to understand what sort of data structures underpin a server and its computations. The top command is readily available in many environments to visualize process usage statistics, and has provided insights to countless people already.
A few years ago, as a group of inexperienced developers at my company, we transitioned from the absence of code reviews to requiring them. Before the transition, we were still operating above a minimal baseline of quality, and we were absorbing the cost of many small (and a few large) failures. As the engineering team grew, we knew the quality of our work would continue to suffer if we didn't hold each other accountable.
When I try to help people overcome negative emotions, I often tell them to "maintain positivity" or "look at situations objectively". This simple answer can work for people already thinking in that direction, but is not very helpful for guiding people seeking a truly different way to approach negative emotions.
Jonathan Blow (game developer - Braid - The Witness) approaches the topic in a more strategic, self-reflecting way.
How does a University of Waterloo Software Engineering student like me (at the time) pick up on what is a fairly unknown sport around these parts of the world (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)?
Sheer. Dumb. Luck.