Recently I had a chance to meet and talk with several aspiring entrepreneurs. They all had different business ideas but our conversations eventually converged on one common problem they had: they didn’t have enough knowledge to make an informed decision on which technology to use to build software, and were feeling helpless. That lack of knowledge also led them to form some potentially harmful misunderstandings about software technology.

This post is a summary of the advice I gave them. It aims at dispelling some misunderstandings commonly held by entrepreneurs with no software background.

After switching from Sublime Text to vim, I started looking for a way to manage my dotfiles. It took me a lot of work to configure and understand them, so I wanted to back them up against emergency. And of course I wanted to have those personal settings wherever I work.

At first I considered Vagrant, but it seemed like an overkill for just a few dotfiles. My next idea was to symlink dotfiles to a single directory and manage that folder with git. But that also felt unnecessarily complex - surely there would be a simpler way to do this, right?

And then I found what I was looking for. This method uses a git bare repository, and aliasing git commands to send them to that repo. Simple setup process? Check. Version control in git? Check. Easy installation on different machine? Check. Awesome!

I’ve recently finished reading the Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz. I heard a lot of good things about the book and it was definitely worth reading - I highly recommend it too!

“Write” is the verb we use with programming. We write software. We write codes. Of course, we use other verbs too. We also build and design software. But write is the one we use most frequently. Is there some kind of philosophical meaning behind this usage? I doubt it. But as someone who has passion for both writing and coding, I see some interesting similarities between these two activities that are usually considered to be diametrically opposite. Dijkstra will probably want to strangle me for making such a metaphor, but I think this juxtaposition could be especially helpful to those who are coming into software development without traditional computer science background.

Are you currently majoring in computer science, or planning to do so? What do you hope to learn from the curriculum? If your answer is something in line with “writing a useful software” or “getting a job as a software developer,” this post is for you. I want you to not experience the same misunderstanding and frustration I had with university CS program.