From 1f689fd039533801842ae241671f2437ddbe0044 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Steph Enders <steph@senders.io>
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2024 15:17:29 -0500
Subject: Copy old files and update build.sh to generate it all!

This is a huge messy commit but :) sue me. I'm not at work I can do
git badly for once!
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+
+--post-date: 2020-02-16
+--type: blog
+    <article>
+      <h1>remember/recall - what could've been a command line tool</h1>
+      <p>During a meeting at work when I realized I often forget useful
+      commands. So I had the bright idea to create a command line tool that
+      would basically append a file with the command you wanted to remember
+      that you could search over later if you wanted to recall a certain
+      command. I figured I could it could just be a simple bash script that
+      recalls your bash-history and appends it to a file, all things that are
+      incredibly easy to do... or so I thought.</p>
+      <h2>Look before you leap</h2>
+      <p>This article is a reminder to myself to test the core functionality
+      first, before decorating your program/script with all those bells and
+      whistles. While I did learn a lot in the process it is always a good to
+      check the basics first.</p>
+      <h2>What went right</h2>
+      <p>I actually ended up learning a lot during the development of the
+      (never finished) tool. I had never used <code>getopts</code> inside a
+      script before, which turned out to be extremely intuitive. That was all
+      that went right...</p>
+      <h2>What went wrong</h2>
+      <p>Literally, everything else that could&#39;ve went wrong did. The
+      &quot;project&quot; was a single bash script roughly 160 lines long
+      before I found out it wouldn&#39;t work. It was a series of flags that
+      enabled actions that called functions, some of which ended the script
+      either successfully or not. It wasn&#39;t necessarily a mess to read (I
+      tried to make it that every function ended up in an exit so I knew if I
+      entered I would need to assume it terminated) but it was hard to follow
+      when writing. I tried to allow it so you could default an action to make
+      the CLI intuitive which lead to a messy set of if/elses and switch
+      cases.</p>
+      <h3>You can&#39;t access un-committed bash history</h3>
+      <p>History command in a bash shell commits the history at the end of the
+      session. This makes sense once you know this, there are a lot of reasons
+      saving the commands to file after every execution is probably not the
+      best idea. However, it can be enabled with a flag when you enable a shell
+      session. But I didn&#39;t want to build a tool that required me to
+      remember I had to add something to my bash_profile before it would work.
+      I wanted something I could just copy onto a new machine and have access
+      to its functionality.</p>
+      <h2>Lesson learned</h2>
+      <p>While developing a tool to help me remember things, I learned
+      something I cannot forget: Test the core, simplest functionality first.
+      Before you do anything validate what you&#39;re trying to do will work.
+      Because after building all of these fancy bells and whistles, if it
+      can&#39;t do the basics, there is no point.</p>
+    </article>
+
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