1) One of the best ways to learn how to use your tools is by looking through how other people use theirs. This is why Adrian Göransson’s Dotfiles digest: git is the first link in this post.

For the uninitiated, dotfiles is the term commonly used to refer to those configuration files we all have lying around our computer (.zshrc, .bashrc, .gitconfig, etc.).

2) Through Adrian’s post I also found an informative talk by Scott Chacon: So You Think You Know Git (46 min) and Julia Evans’ survey of popular git options .

3) Julia Evans’ blog is great, and went straight to my RSS reader after stumbling upon it. The older posts have plenty of gems. For example, Traceroute in 15 lines of code .

4) Postmortems (incident reports) are a really useful learning source. They’re chock-full of insights into how other companies operate, the idiosyncratic problems they face, the way they respond to them, and the failure modes. I found 4 Instructive Postmortems on Data Downtime and Loss to be a nice compilation of some of the biggest ones from the last few years.

5) I have my reservations about some of the arguments. The tech ecosystem is more complex than it used to be, and abstraction is a necessity to solve some issues that arise from said complexity. However, I think there is a lot of truth in We have used too many levels of abstractions and now the future looks bleak and, more importantly, some great advice for everyone —we’re all “people studying technology”, really—.