#15

Table-driven tests

Go has superb built-in support for good programming practices, such as test-driven development. In fact, I'm learning a lot about TDD while learning Go from this book: “Learn Go with Tests”.

If you want to test a bunch of similar inputs and outputs, it's handy to run table-driven tests. What you do is list input values and expected output in an array, then loop through all the test cases.

I found this blog post by Lorenzo Peppoloni quite helpful. It gives examples in both Golang and Python for table-driven tests.

Create your own keyboard layout optimized to reduce finger fatigue

We all push buttons for a living. Most of us spend enormous amount of time with the Qwerty keyboard layout.

I came across this fascinating video about making your own perfect keyboard layout.

By perfect, “adumb” refered to the shortest distance your fingers travel while typing on the keyboard. And the corpus he used to calculate the total distance is arXiv abstracts.

He first randomly generated keyboard layouts then crossed over the best ones. Until after 1000 generations of crossover, the total finger travel distance stopped decreasing.

If I were to make a keyboard layout, I would use a larger corpus that includes English, Swedish, Chinese as typed using Pinyin, and a bunch of programming languages.

On top of the larger number of symbols to rearrange, when you type CJK (and other complex, non-alphabetic) languages, you need to deal with the complicated relationship between the input method and the keyboard layout, especially on Linux.

zsh

For quite a while, I found I couldn't use commands I clearly had installed properly (macOS 12.2).

After some digging, I used an export command in .zshrc file and forgot to include $PATH: when setting the PATH value.

This answer on StackOverflow was helpful.