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Comment by bikingbismuth | Hacker News Reader

I enjoy reading things like this. It’s posts like this that have helped me build my command line text processing skills over the years.

If you are early in your career, I suggest you work on these types of skills. It is surprising how often I have found myself on a random box that I needed to parse application logs “by hand”. This happens to me even in fancy, K8-rich environments.

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I agree.

Just FYI, Kubernetes is abbreviated to k8s, not k8.

> K8s as an abbreviation results from counting the eight letters between the "K" and the "s".

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/

This is very similar to "a11y"[0] and "i18n"[1]. The abbreviation of words using this technique has become surprisingly common in the software industry.

[0]: https://www.wordnik.com/words/a11y [1]: https://www.wordnik.com/words/i18n

It’s called a numeronym https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym

Thank you! I truly do learn something new every day on here.

Sometimes an n7m?

Better watch out with Arabic speakers, 7 is used for a sound in Arabic we don't have in English.

i18n was a mystery for the longest time. a11y was just dumb for me until I learned what the numbers meant… last year, after what, two decades?

Btw txn is similar, but they didn’t bother with numbers, they just replaced the middle with an x.

It's been decades and I still don't know what is the original word for "l33t", but I reckon it must be quite large.

Only the elite know the answer to that

a16z andreesen horowitz

I strongly dislike this practice, because it impedes understanding.

"a11y" is especially bad, since it runs counter to the very thing it is supposed to represent.

I hope the fad passes quickly.

I'd say the vision impaired are going to understand what "ay-one-one-why" means about as fast as the rest of us. I'm not a fan of the cutesy letter-number jargon either, if you're typing about it in Slack, sure, okay, but it shouldn't escape confinement.

But it's equal-opportunity annoying I reckon: no one knows what the hell `a11y` is about when they first see/hear it, but not in a way that's more onerous for screen reader and braille users than for anyone else.

I was using the term in the general sense: capable of being understood. Not the narrow sense that refers specifically to vision.

Sure, that's reasonable. Kind of circles back to "a11y" being technical language, which refers to a term of art, "accessibility", which is not identical to the word "accessibility" itself. This is at least part of why it gets used, although the main reason is really that a11y is easy to write and fast to read, while accessibility is neither.

Some code challenge sites offer all their challenges in bash - I highly recommend working through these if you want to get better at this type of stuff. Some problems are surprisingly simple, others torturously difficult.

can you suggest few?

Been a couple of years since I did any competitive problems for shell and cannot recall - however this hackerrank page is how I do interview prep for anything shell related -

https://www.hackerrank.com/domains/shell

Is there something like leetcode for string manipulation exercises like this?

> If you are early in your career, I suggest you work on these types of skills. It is surprising how often I have found myself on a random box that I needed to parse application logs “by hand”. This happens to me even in fancy, K8-rich environments.

It’s surprising how many times you have to ad hoc parse due to the tools being so poor. It’s endemic.

Regex can help you with fairly complicated source code edits too, like changing the order of parameters in some multi language project where there's no automated tool that can just do it.

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