Cheatsheet

Making Code Cheatsheets

I used to be a Google / Stack Overflow junkie for syntax issues or finding configuration/compatability issues in the vast amount of dimensions software gives us.

An approach I used to solve this problem was to document snippets once I have solved the problem (don’t forget to upvote the answer on SO). This is especially useful when you start learning a language. When you start learning a language, there are

  1. Syntax
  2. Style Guide
  3. Bad Practices to avoid
  4. Good Practices to start with
  5. Test cases to cover
  6. Libraries to use
  7. Libraries which are not upto date
  8. Highly opiniated frameworks
  9. The philosophy of the community
  10. Tooling
  11. Vendoring
  12. Advanced Syntax
  13. Backward compatible changes
  14. Where to find help instantly (when stuck)
  15. How to maintain, build and deploy
  16. The Database interaction
  17. The Spec (may be)

As a curious person wanting to learn everything you can with tens of open tabs, believe that once you start doing a project, you will eventually get to all these.

I started learning Elixir and it took me a while to get over syntax itself. I thought I would make a different approach while starting Go. This is about in August 2016 that I started to write down (copy often) the code snippets and what they mean from the books I was reading.

Maintaining a cheatsheet in a 3 column layout for code snippets has been a huge time savor when I was searching on how was this done here. (well, may look better with Borders)


Example:

What Code Snippet Reference Link
H1 heading # heading 1 Ref H1 Link
Links [link](text) Ref Link

I use a table structure in Evernote for now which I will have to soon move to a Git Repo in markdown. Inspired by other cheatsheets I find, I have decided to make my own so that

  1. Help others work like me so that they dont have to search SO
  2. I can reference them from any where outside my private laptop
  3. Try to make the development world a better place

This approach has worked well for me when I was learning the Go language and resuming my work on Ruby has made this better.


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