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Cottage Computer Programming (1984)

24 points by lioeters - 4 comments
ylee [3 hidden]5 mins ago
What Lutus talks about exists even when it's not for anyone else.

I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. I wrote 20 years ago a backup script implementing Mike Rubel's insight <http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/> about using `rsync` and hard links to create snapshots backups. It's basically my own version of `rsnapshot`. I have deployed it across several of my machines. Every so often I fix a bug or add a feature. Do I need to do it given `rsnapshot`'s existence? No. Is it fun to work on it? Yes.

(I've over the years restored individual files/directories often enough from the resulting backups to have reasonable confidence in the script's effectiveness, but of course one never knows for certain until the day everything gets zapped.)

_doctor_love [3 hidden]5 mins ago
What do you do for work if it's not writing code? I'm always fascinated by the non-paid-professional-programmers who frequent HN.
cestith [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I’ve worked somewhere that used Snapback, and that’s also from Mike Rubel’s writings.

https://metacpan.org/dist/Snapback2/view/scripts/snapback2.P...

The 2 is I think because an earlier incarnation was by Art Mulder. There is also a Python implementation by apparently yet another person, which appears to be independently inspired by Mike Rubel’s writings.

https://github.com/diegocortassa/snapback

There are also rsyncbackup, rsyncmachine, https://rsnapshot.org/, https://github.com/jonaslu/rsyncrotatingbackup (inspired by http://www.dbourget.com/software/remote-backup.pl), and several more with seemingly the same original inspiration.

EvanAnderson [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Paul Lutus recently commented in this thread that linked this (and other) articles of the era: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830191