I’ve found the perfect tech video. Seriously, it changed my entire outlook on things.
I’ve spent over 10 years spending most of my free time watching technical videos on various computing topics. That is an unfathomable amount of hours of content. In that time, there have been a number of videos that helped to shape my perspective on computers and how they can be used. One of them stands above the rest though, and it can be located here:
The Unreasonable Effectiveness Of Plain Text
“Wait, a video on plain text? What a letdown”, I assume you must be thinking. That’s ok, that was my reaction too when I saw it in my watchlist. But then I watched the video and immediately subbed to “No Boilerplate”. This video changed my outlook on a lot of things.
I want you to watch it so unlike a lot of my articles, so I’m going to keep my summary light. The video covers these topics:
- How to overcome the tool fatigue problem.
- How to do more with less.
- Understanding the Ulysses Pact (A technique I used to lose 90 lbs of bodyweight in 7 months).
- Why I chose Hugo for making a website (markdown).
- How to punch jira in the face with a better project management tool.
- The PROPER way to conduct meetings so you don’t waste your life with them.
- How to keep auditors happy by exploiting programmers’ need to argue.
- How to easily automate your work for free.
- The world’s best low stress, disaster recovery program. (Also free)
- How to fix documentation at scale. (Cloud apps hate this one trick)
He somehow manages to fit all of these topics in a 14 minute video. All hail “No Boilerplate”.
But if you still aren’t convinced, there is a video I encourage you to watch to take Triss’s ideas further.
This video is a breakdown of the Unix philosophy and explains how and why that neckbeard in your office can literally solve ANY problem that you have with a command line.
As an example: “Oh my god, we need to count how many machines have this vulnerability, but our scanner gave us an excel sheet that’s 7 gb big and Excel won’t open it!” I sit and laugh in awk. My manager scoffs in python. My mentor chortles in R.
That example, by the way, isn’t a hypothetical. I’ve worked with a client before that relied on excel sheets for all their reports, but their tools made sheets that would crash excel. Those who understood how to work with and parse text were fine, but the ones who relied on excel were in serious trouble.
If you understand how to use the basic tools that come with your standard linux system, you can solve most problems with bash. Anything beyond that, and only a programmer can save you.
One last note
I have a reputation on my old team for being the guy who tries all of the newfangled note taking applications. I did cherrytree, zim, joplin, obsidian, logseq, and so many more. At this point, all I do is vim and the fzf voodoo from the last article.
But why?
Every note taking app I used had a different storage format and it caused so many headaches. (I hate you Joplin. Your betrayal was worst of all). The only thing that never caused any lost data? plain text. And it was easy to parse, carve, manipulate, change, replace, etc with a bash one-liner.
Love plaintext and it will love you back. Go with proprietary garbage and it will cost you hours of your life.