Crafts In The Command Center How To Build A Better Mouse

What do aircraft carriers do in a storm?

Here’s a couple of sea stories for you.During a mini-deployment to the Gulf of Alaska, I was relaxing one evening in my stateroom, which was midships, second deck. (Which made it fairly close to the center of gravity/balance. Sweet. It was also located far enough aft, that the cat shots were merely annoying, rather than deafening).Suddenly, I felt the ship shudder. My first thought was that we had run aground, but that made no sense - we were operating in open ocean waters. I made my way up to the combat center, to learn what had happened. Turns out that a huge “rogue” wave had crashed over the bow, and had showered numerous aircraft with salt water baths. The fo’csle had suffered damage, and was secured for the remainder of the time at sea. When we returned to port, I walked up to the bow of the ship, and saw where the giant wave had crushed the huge steel plates just below the flight deck. Since the flight deck sits 60 feet above the waterline, it is estimated that the wave height was probably close to 90 feet.During my time on the carrier, I often enjoyed watching UNREPs, particularly from the hangar deck. UNREPs are amazing feats of seamanship, especially during heavy weather. I distinctly recall standing on the hangar deck, with our ship gently rolling, as the (large) supply ships beside us were plunging up and down, crashing through the waves. Made me glad to be on the carrier.Due to the counter-clockwise rotation of a cyclone (in the Northern hemisphere), it is generally better to plan your course to “follow” the winds, rather than head into them, and this was what our battle group had planned as we skirted around a typhoon on our departure from Japan. As a result of our planning, we were successfully avoiding the highest winds, but were encountering huge swells.“Man overboard!”.The best laid schemes of mice and men aft gang agley. Our Battle Group Commander dispatched most of our escorts to return to home port, and to avoid the typhoon. Our carrier, and one cruiser, remained to conduct the search. We spent the next two days and nights searching for our lost sailor, as the typhoon bore down upon us. The seas were brutal. Unfortunately, we never recovered the sailor. (In those water temperatures, expected survival time was approximately 12 hours. We stayed for 48 hours).Generally, it is best to avoid the big storms, but sometimes it is unavoidable. I’ve been there - our carriers are capable of surviving brutal weather and sea conditions.

How do programmers code quickly?

They know how to use their keyboards to do work.  Keyboards are way faster than mice once you know how to use them.  They're also more amenable to muscle memory.  Are you clicking around to open new files?  When I'm coding I barely touch my mouse.They are good typists. I probably type around 80 WPM on average and 100-120 WPM if I'm focusing on my typing, for example.  Go practice!  I like http://play.typeracer.com/ and https://typing.io/.They know how to use their tools, especially on the command-line.  Ctrl+R for reverse search, Ctrl+A/E for beginning/end of lines, for autocompleting filenames, etc.  These become muscle memory after a point.They are very good at debugging and are likely to isolate, identify, and resolve a bug 100x quicker than a beginner.  This isn't just because they "know more."  Oftentimes they know just as much as you, but have a more disciplined approach to finding the source of unexpected problems.They have a better sense of where to look for information and aren't afraid to navigate through manpages or even source code to understand how some other system is behaving.  If I'm having trouble with a poorly-documented Ruby gem, for example, I'll often look at the gem's source code to see if I can make sense of what's going wrong.  I'd say 90% of the time this is quicker than Google.Regarding debugging, I wrote a blog post (Teaching Novice Programmers How to Debug Their Code) that outlines how to teach people to be better debuggers.