Debopam Gupta

dgdev.me/guides/shell

I’m approaching 40 so i use claude opus 4.6 to explain to me what a gif means that someone sent me on discord.

any suggestions or feedback are welcome!

what resources did help you to become good at the CLI?

A screenshot of a draft Article from Debopam Gupta which is titled "The command line isn't scary, its damn powerful". The body reads - "Motivation for this article A lot of beginners / new grads (hi there, I am one too!) that I interact with seem to have little to no confidence in interacting with the computer through the shell. They might have some experiece like that one or two labs at university where they had to compile C programs in the first semester or one associated with a later operating systems course. But apart from the commands like cd and gcc, which they most likely used at these courses and got away with it, they are helpless at the terminal. Often I will get asked the same questions around the lines of - “How are you so good at the terminal?” or “Holy crap! I dont understand a thing what you did there!”. These are typically asked when I typed out some shell command that uses pipes and three to four commands with different syntaxes, and frankly as much as I would love to explain each piece individually in a normal setting, I am kind of tired of starting from scratch everytime. That doesn’t mean I will not happily explain from scratch, but I expected some basics to be already known and comfortable with. This often will waste time for the problem at hand and is a sign that to become better you should also be comfortable at the command line. With that preamble, I am writing this in the hope to help others to get started with the shell. I do not aim to go into a comprehensive detail but I will link all the resources that helped me or that I deem very useful to beginners and experienced alike."

Trying to collect and write something useful for beginners at the command line.

The calendar for the first three months of 2026, with today, Saturday, January 31, highlighted. February begins on Sunday and lasts for exactly four weeks, ending on Saturday.

We have a perfect Rectangular February coming up, first time we’ve had one since 2015

Maybe this is what finally closes the loop and fixes the world

I just completed "Secret Entrance" - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/1

Brave has already rolled it out for a while, especially useful when you need to scroll or post to x and bsky simultaneously 😆

A screenshot from Greasyfork website (a place for submitting user scripts) showing a script titled "Better Hacker News" with a description, "Fixes the hideous looking interface". To which, I agree, the interface is quite hideous.

usually i install a userstyle for hn but this one got me (haven't tried it)

Don't know if related, but bsky itself logged me out randomly yesterday

A screenshot of an excerpt from a blog post from Terrible Software having the following as the content. "You’ve just pushed a PR after hours of careful work. You’re feeling pretty good about it too. Then the review comes in. “ChatGPT thinks that {wall of AI-generated text}” No context or specifics. Just a copy-paste job from someone who couldn’t be bothered to form their own thoughts. I’m seeing this everywhere now: PR reviews, design docs, Slack threads. But here’s the thing: I don’t care what AI said. I care what you think. ChatGPT isn’t on the team. It won’t be in the post-mortem when things break. It won’t get paged at 2 AM. It doesn’t understand the specific constraints, tech debt, or your business context. It doesn’t have skin in the game. You do."

Love this take that dropped in my inbox today. terriblesoftware.org/2025/10/24/c...

How did I get randomly logged out from the app but not the website? I used the app yesterday.

Sounds similar to a hybrid workflow in Acme where you could run commands, view files, edit them right in your editor.

"A hybrid of window system, shell, and editor, Acme ..."

plan9.io/sys/doc/acme...

Converting my Obsidian Vault to PDFs | DG Dev How I export my Obsidian vault to PDFs using Pandoc and (more recently) Go.

Here's a peek (also a test that it is actually working 😬
dgdev.me/blog/convert...

GitHub - w3dg/kage: Opengraph image generation on workers powered by workers-og Opengraph image generation on workers powered by workers-og - w3dg/kage

Inspired by @danabra.mov's and @natalie.sh's Opengraph images on blogs, I generate them using workers-og on cf workers.
Kage (影) – means shadow; subtle reference to "OG image as the shadow of a page."
github.com/w3dg/kage

With the AWS outage, now‘s as good a time as any to post this old strip.

A picture of a foggy street

Edinburgh castle failing to render, likely thanks to the AWS outage

Schematic of the Map Reduce framework showing input data splits, map workers, intermediate files, reduce workers, and final output files.

Wrote a post implementing a simple map reduce model and running word count on it. dgdev.me/blog/map-red...

A visual representation of a Trie data structure drawn in Excalidraw with circles depicting nodes and lines between them as edges making up the tree like structure. Letters are valid transitions between nodes and terminal nodes are marked as orange while others are marked blue.

A short (or maybe not so short) writeup I had made about a month ago on Tries. I explain what they are, how to implement them and a few Leetcode style questions where they apply practically.

wiki.w3dg.workers.dev/notes/dsa/tr...

an example of fetching my top 10 rocksky artists with pdsfs. the command used is jq -r '.artist' app.rocksky.scrobble/* | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -10

a something i've been hacking on:

✨ pdsfs: mount #atproto PDS repositories as a FUSE filesystem!

more info in the repo's readme: tangled.sh/@oppi.li/pdsfs

i've fetched my top 10 @rocksky.app artists with just jq and coreutils:

Defragged zebra where the stripes have been concatenated to the front half of its body.

Turns out there are a number of repetitive helper utils you would want to mainly parse the inputs in a typical #adventofcode fashion. This involved parsing lines, blocks of lines, parsing them as numbers etc.

So I ended up writing a small helper library. pkg.go.dev/github.com/w...

I think, to learn a new language or to get better at something, the best way is to actually get hands on with it. So when I was getting started with Go #golang a few weeks back, I thought to resolve problems from #adventofcode 2024.

I just completed "Plutonian Pebbles" - Day 11 - Advent of Code 2024 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2024/day/11

cartoon of the angry wojak meme with two characters talking. Character 1: CSS is not a programming language Character 2: Of course it is! What are the main concepts of OOP? Encapsulation, like how all the CSS properties are contained in a rule. Inheritance, like how the CSS properties flow down to the children (+ the cascade). Abstraction, how we can use a class to style without knowing what is inside. Polymorphism, like using the same class on different HTML elements. Character 1: [looks confused] Character 2: CSS is not only a programming language, it is an object-oriented programming language. Character 1: [Looks confused] [Looks angry]

comiCSS #48: CSS OOP
comicss.art/comics/48/oo...

August 8, 2022 – This was the intention of creating the previous cartoon. This cartoon went viral on Reddit 🥳 when someone shared it (without attribution 😢). It was interesting seeing a serious heated debate based on a joke.

#css #webdev #joke #meme

Little Bobby Tables had a brother

Pile of books on a table. Represents the incarnation of the information in a printed form. With my blog linked about converting Obsidian vault notes to PDFs, I think it's a similar idea.

Switched to using @golang.org for the job of converting my notes to PDFs. That too now concurrently without much setup or headache. Took less than 10 minutes to have a concurrent version already. dgdev.vercel.app/blog/convert...

when the AI bubble pops and corporations stop forcing AI down our throats i'll miss stuff like this

As stressful as it already is to deal with dates, AI seems to make it even harder by subtracting the wrong things and writing the comment correctly

Solution in Python to the interview question posted in the newsletter.

Even though I've been subbed to the newsletter for long, this is the first time I actually did solve a question. Pretty short and straightforward!

A return statement in python written with ternary which returns maxsum if its greater than threshold else it returns 0. The code reads pretty much like english. Which is the point i'm trying to make.

Now i see why people like python so much! Its like reading English! I am still not happy, sometimes with nesting and this inside list comprehensions, it can get pretty confusing...