Programming By Stealth

I don't always make the time to pre-read the shownotes for Programming By Stealth but I never regret when I do make the time. That was especially true this week. In this installment, Bart Busschots takes us through his solution to the challenge from PBS 151, which was to print a "pretty" multiplication table using the `printf` command. Being Bart, he didn't just make the columns line up nicely, he took it up a notch and added ASCII characters that build a nice border and corners around his table. The reason I said it was good I pre-read the shownotes is that while nearly everything he explains in this lesson was a reuse of things he's taught us before, the commands are so dense in Bash that it was particularly hard to read and comprehend. We had also taken 4 weeks between lessons which made it even harder to remember. Because I told Bart ahead of time that I was going to be stopping him to ask lots of questions, we decided to skip the one main topic he had planned to explain - `xargs`. This means that

This week's Programming By Stealth wasn't a heavy lift but I managed to get confused a couple of times anyway so expect lots of questions from me in this one. Bart started the show by telling us about a clever tip from listener Jill of Kent about how to detect when the Terminal talking to and from STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR. Then we learn about how to use the `printf` command to make nicely formatted output. I especially liked that part because I love me some organized output. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

When Bart and I recorded PBS 150 on Bash Script Terminal Plumbing, neither of us was happy with it. I got very confused in the middle, and Bart decided that his original strategy might have been flawed in which he assumed everyone had heard Taming the Terminal and remembered everything taught more than 4 years ago. He completely rewrote the shownotes and we re-recorded the entire episode. It was ever so much more fun and I really understood what he was teaching this time through. He also realized after we recorded that there was a bit of information he hadn't taught us which was crucial to being able to complete the challenge he had set for us. If you understood PBS 150 the first time through and want to jump right to the new part, I put a chapter mark in the audio file that will take you to where he explains `/dev/tty`. We're proud to have done this because we are both of the same mind that we need to stay committed to the quality of what we're creating here, both for the current listeners and the future le

In this rather mind-bendy episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes into the weird world of POSIX special variables and options. He refers to some of them as being like handling nuclear power, at one point he suggests mind-altering drugs must have been involved in the design, and he even compares one of our newly learned tools to a chainsaw. He powered us through amidst my many interruptions with questions to where we can now write shell scripts that take flags and optional arguments using `getopts`. The final form of the syntax is very readable but knowing the reasons behind each bit is crucially important. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_04_15

This week's Programming By Stealth is a great lesson on how no matter how long you've been coding, you'll still get caught out from time to time and think that the universe makes no sense. When Bart was working on the challenge from PBS 147, he ran into a bizarre situation for many hours. He eventually figured out what was going on, but it changed this installment into a walk down what went wrong, what he learned, and gave him the opportunity to teach us even more about shell scripting. The entire installment is all about the solutions to the challenge from PBS 147 so you might want to take a shot at it yourself before listening to or reading this week's installment. Before we get started, I also explained how we now have a terrific way to share our work on the challenges, through a GitHub Organization called pbs-students. I wrote it up in the article entitled [Introducing the Programming By Stealth Student Organization in GitHub](https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2023/03/pbs-students-github) You can find Ba

In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart walks us through how to create, add to, and extract from arrays using Bash. It's a very light episode, which I manage to drag out longer by making him slow down and dig into the syntax used for arrays. It's not just me being dense (this time), there are squirrely brackets, square brackets, single quotes, double quotes, and the good old octothorp thrown in for some extra fun. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle Podfeet 15-Year Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Setapp - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for bo

As Bart continues our education in shell scripting, he explains the simplicity of looping. He explains the four types of loops: while, until, for, and select, along with the simple syntax of do/done within a loop. He walks us through a lot of examples that illustrate how each one of these loops work. He ends by giving us a challenge, because teacher's pet Allison asked for homework last time. Enjoy this episode along with Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_03_04

Bart continues his miniseries on shell scripting by teaching us conditionals in the shell. In order to explain why conditionals are a bit odd in shell scripting, Bart first walks us through how it was originally done and then shows us the evolution to a much better method. It's still weird, and many things are opposite of what you'd expect (like 4 is actually > 10), but he gets us there in the end. I was most excited to finally learn what `fi` means, which shows up in shell scripting and I'd seen before in AppleScript. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_02_18

This week our guest is Bart Busschots with Programming By Stealth 144. When last we recorded, Bart started teaching us the basics of shell scripting using Bash. We learned how to collect terminal commands into a reusable shell script, but we didn't learn how to accept any kind of input. In this installment, we learn how to take inputs either from the execution of the command or from user input and how variable names are created for the different ways of receiving input. We also learn about Exit Codes, which are really error codes, and how they can be used in boolean logic. This knowledge will come into play when we learn next time about how to do conditionals and loops. It's a short episode, and as Bart says, "not a heavy lift." You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_02_04

In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots starts building out one more tool in our toolbox: shell scripts. Bart starts with the basics explaining how to tell our little scripts which shell to run using the shebang line, the structure of shell scripts, commenting, assigning, and using variables, and how to write strings without having to escape every space and unusual character. Throughout the installment, Bart refers back to things we learned in Taming the Terminal podcast and tutorial. If you haven't listened to or read this series, you can download the book Helma helped us to produce using the Apple Books Store, or access it in a beautiful HTML version at [ttt.bartificer.net/...](https://ttt.bartificer.net/book.html), both of which have the audio of the podcast embedded within. You can find even more formats at [podfeet.com/tttbook](https://www.podfeet.com/blog/download-ttt-book/). Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_01_07

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart officially kicks off the XKPasswdJS project. This is what we've all been waiting for! As I said to Bart at the end of our recording, we're no longer fixing to make a plan, we _have_ a plan. The shownotes for this episode point to the README file for the GitHub project. Bart explains n the podcast that we'll have a project skeleton phase where Bart will define the code that has to be ported from Perl to JavaScript, and he'll build the guidelines that will help us work as a team of contributors. This means things like a style guide, automated scripts to build the project, and configuration files for the tooling. He has a vision that we'll work on the direct port next, with no enhancements and I tried to get him to take a dollar bet on whether that goal will be achieved, but he didn't fall for it. After that, we'll go into maintenance mode. It's a fun episode because we're finally moving forward after learning all of the tools we'll need to make the

In the last installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart taught us all about UML class diagrams for documenting the structure of our code. In this installment, Bart teaches us how to use the ASCII diagramming tool Mermaid to make our class diagrams. The advantage of Mermaid over a graphical tool to make our diagrams is that we'll be able to use Git to do version control for them. I think the most important part of this installment was when we learned that we shouldn't ever cuddle the mermaid. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Bart and I are back from summer vacation to kick back into gear on Programming By Stealth. As you may remember, we've been learning all of the tools we'll need to rewrite, test, and document Bart's password generation library xkpasswd from perl to JavaScript. In order to start the rewrite, we need to understand the structure of the code we're going to write, and instead of writing up a long text requirements document, we're going to use a standard software diagramming language called UML Diagrams. In particular, we're going to be using UML Class Diagrams. Bart will probably do most of the diagramming himself as he dusts off decades-old code but we need to learn how to read UML Class Diagrams ourselves, so it will be another tool in our toolbelt. Most podcasts would stick to everyday examples, but not here at the Podfeet Podcasts. Instead, Bart will teach us some Particle Physics along the way and you get that for free with this installment of Programming By Stealth. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial s

In the past few episodes of Programming By Stealth, Bart has been walking us through worked examples to demonstrate how to roll up a web app using Webpack. These worked examples have been contrived to show how to perform the task. This week in a Tidbit episode, Bart walks us through how he tried using the skills he's been teaching us to roll up his [this-ti.me](https://this-ti.me) web app. It's a real-world test of the technologies and it allowed him to describe some of the pitfalls he fell into (though they were few and far between). It also gave him a chance to exercise the Webpack documentation, which happily turned out to be very good. There's no heavy lifting in this episode and no work to do to follow along. Instead, sit back and relax while you listen to Bart give advice on how to approach this task in your own code. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. [audio mp3="https://media.blubrry.com/nosillacast/traffic.libsyn.com/nosillacast/CCATP_2022_09_17.mp3"] mp3 do

In our last installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart started teaching us how to bundle an app/website using our bundler of choice, Webpack. The app/website he's creating for us is very simplified but is intended to allow us to exercise every one of the kinds of things we'd want to bundle. This week we finish all of the tools he wanted to teach us to bundle. In PBS 138, after explaining to us why we would want to do this, and initializing things, he taught us to import a pure JavaScript library with jQuery as an example, and a pure CSS library with basic Bootstrap as the example. In this week's show, we learn how to install and use Mustache for templating in a Webpack world. The process is quite a bit different from how we originally learned to implement Mustache in Programming By Stealth. Then we learn how Bootstrap 5 now lets us import just what we need (instead of all of Bootstrap). We need some fancy icons so Bart teaches us about Bootstrap icons which he now favors for free icons over Font Awesome.

We're back in the saddle after a summer of "PBS Adjacent" installments. Our last real PBS was learning how to use Webpack to bundle a JavaScript library for sharing with the world. That was cool, but a lot of us want to use Webpack to bundle a web app we've written ourselves to include all of the libraries we're using. We also want to have an easier way to reduce dependency on having an Internet connection. We also want an easier way to keep our bundle of libraries up to date. In this installment, Bart teaches us how to do all that with NPM and Webpack. I really enjoyed this episode because he used a worked example to show us how it all works, rather than talking only about the theory. The repetitive steps for each library really helped me to understand the process. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

I'm about to go on vacation where I suspect I'll have little to no Internet to play with. It would be really cool if I could use any downtime (like on the 11-hour plane flight) to do some programming. Unfortunately, our code is often filled with references to content delivery networks to get needed libraries like jQuery and Bootstrap. While on my walk on Friday I was mentally preparing a post for our PBS Slack community to ask them how I can modify my code so that it doesn't require the Internet to function. Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw Bart's topic for this week's Programming By Stealth - it's all about how to do exactly what I wanted. He covers how to prepare your computer for departure, how it's important to clone any repos you might want to reference, and most importantly how to localize your dependencies and then what to undo when you return home. It was exactly everything I needed to know and I hope it helps you too whenever you disconnect from the Net but still want to play with your co

We have one more thing to learn as we gear up to actually start writing modern code for Bart's HSXKPasswd tool. The last piece of our tool kit is a bundler. In this installment Bart teaches what problems bundlers solve, and he explains why he chose the bundler Webpack for our project. After learning about Webpack, Bart takes us through a worked example, bundling the Joiner module we've been working on through this part of the series. When we're done, we'll have an ES6 bundle and a Universal Module Defnition (UMD) bundle to cover both modern and more legacy needs. In the episode you'll hear me say that the exercise hit errors, and after the show we diagnosed the problem and fixed the shownotes so have no worries about that! You can, as always, find Bart's fabulous show note tutorial for this installment at pbs.bartificer.net/...It's Showtime

Over the past few months, podfeet.com went through a period of really poor performance. My site hadn't been snappy in the last few years with page loads of up to 6 seconds, but it hit a tipping point where it was taking in excess of 40 seconds for pages to load. William Reveal and Bart migrated the services behind podfeet.com that improved performance to where most pages load in less than a quarter of a second. In this Programming By Stealth adjacent episode, Bart wanted to walk through the structure of what makes up a web server, what a web server does, what all of the components are, and then walk us through how these things have changed in the nearly 17 years podfeet.com has been around. As we continue our journey in Programming By Stealth we are moving from the client-side to the server-side, so this lesson is quite relevant to helping our fellow learners understand what's behind the next steps we'll be taking. There's no homework in this episode but it's also challenging to keep the pieces straight in

In this Programming By Stealth adjacent installment labeled Tidbits 3 of Y, Bart Busschots talks to us about the dangers of using other people's code in your code, and the danger of not using other people's code. He explains this seeming dichotomy and gives us ways to approach the problem taking a middle ground. He helps us think about how to choose whether to use other's code and whose code to use, and even how to ensure it's kept up to date with security patches. It's definitely a philosophical installment and it was triggered by a recent event where a developer maliciously broke his own code, impacting a lot of developers. It's actually sort of a success story of open source which I didn't expect. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.