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Tools: Take Your Pick Part 3



In Part 1 of this series I observed my behaviour in identifying problems, choosing tools, and finding profitable ways to use them when cleaning my bathroom at home. The introspection broadened out in Part 2 to consider tool selection more generally. I speculated that, although we may see someone apparently thoughtlessly viewing every problem as a nail and hence treatable with the same hammer, that simple action can hide deeper conscious and unconscious thought processes. In Part 3 I find myself with these things in mind, reflecting on the tools I use in my day-to-day work.

One class of problems that I apply tools to involves a route to the solution being understood and a desire to get there quickly. I think of these as essentially productivity or efficiency problems and one of the tools I deploy to resolve them is a programming or scripting language.

Programming languages are are tools, for sure, but they are also tool factories. When I have some kind of task which is repetitive or tiresome, or which is substantially the same in a bunch of different cases, I'll look for an opportunity to write a script - or fabricate a tool - which does those things for me. For instance, I frequently clone repositories from different branches of our source code using Mercurial. I could type this every time:

$ hg clone -r branch_that_I_want https://our.localrepo.com/repo_that_I_want

... and swear a lot when I forget that this is secure HTTP or mistype localrepo again. Or I could write a simple bash script, like this one, and call it hgclone:

#!/bin/bash

hg clone -r $1 https://our.localrepo.com/$2

and then call it like this whenever I need to clone:

$ hgclone branch_that_I_want repo_that_I_want

Now I'm left dealing with the logic of my need but not the implementation details. This keeps me in flow (if you're a believer in that kind of thing) or just makes me less likely to make a mistake (you're certainly a believer in mistakes, right?) and, in the aggregrate, saves me significant time, effort and pain.

Your infrastructure will often provide hooks for what I sometimes think of as micro tools too. An example of this might be aliases and environment variables. In Linux, because that's what I use most often, I have set things up so that:
  • commands I like to run a particular way are aliased to always run that way.
  • some commands I run a lot are aliased to single characters.
  • some directory paths that I need to use frequently are stored as environment variables.
  • I can search forwards and backwards in my bash history to reuse commands easily.

One of the reasons that I find writing (and blogging, although I don't blog anything like as much as I write) such a productive activity is that the act of doing it - for me - provokes further thoughts and connections and questions. In this case, writing about micro tools I realise that I have another kind of helper, one that I could call a skeleton tool.

Those scripts that you return to again and again as starting points for some other piece of work, they're probably useful because of some specific piece of functionality within them. You hack out the rest and replace them in each usage, but keep that generally useful bit. That bit is the skeleton. I have one in particular that is so useful I've made a copy of it with only the bits that I was reusing to make it easier to hack.

Another class of problem I bump into is more open-ended. Often I'll have some idea of the kind of thing I'd like to be able to do because I'm chasing an issue. I may already have a tool but its shortcomings, or my shortcomings as a user, are getting in the way. I proceed here in a variety of ways, including:
  • analogy: sometimes I can think of a domain where I know of an answer, as I did with folders in Thunderbird.
  • background knowledge: I keep myself open for tool ideas even when I don't need tools for a task. 
  • asking colleagues: because often someone has been there before me.
  • research: that frustrated lament "if only I could ..." is a great starting point for a search. Choosing sufficient context to make the search useful is a skill. 
  • reading the manual: I know, old-fashioned, but still sometimes pays off.

On one project, getting the data I needed was possible but frustratingly tiresome. I  had tried to research solutions myself, had failed to get anything I was happy with, and so asked for help:
This lead to a couple of useful, practical findings: that Fiddler will read pcap files, and that chaosreader can provide raw HTTP in a form that can be grepped. I logged these findings in another tool - our company wiki - categorised so that others stand a chance of finding them later.

Re-reading this now, I notice that in that Twitter thread I am casting the problem in terms of the solution that I am pursuing:
I would like a way to dump all HTTP out of .pcap. Wireshark cuts it up into TCP streams. 
Later, I recast the problem (for myself) in a different way:
I would like something like tcpdump for HTTP.
The former presupposes that I have used tcpdump to capture raw comms and now want to inspect the HTTP contained within it, because that was the kind of solution I was already using. The latter is agnostic about the method, but uses analogy to describe the shape of the solution I'm looking for. More recently still, I have refined this further:
I would like to be able to inspect raw HTTP in real time, and simultaneously dump it to a file, and possibly modify it on the fly, and not have to configure my application to use an external proxy (because that can change its behaviour).
Having this need in mind means that when I happen across a tool like mitmproxy (as I did recently) I can associate it with the background problem I have. Looking into mitmproxy, I bumped into HTTPolice, which can be deployed alongside it and used to lint my product's HTTP.  Without the background thinking I might not have picked up on mitmproxy when it floated past me; without picking up on mitmproxy I would not have found HTTPolice or, at least, not found it so interesting at that time.

Changing to a new tool can give you possibilities that you didn't know were there before. Or expose a part of the space of possible solutions that you hadn't considered, or change your perspective so that you see the problem differently and a different class of solutions becomes available.

Sometimes the problem is that you know of multiple tools that you could start a task in, but you're unsure of the extent of the task, or the time that you'll need to spend on it, whether you'll need to work and rework or this is a one-shot effort and other meta problems of the problem itself. I wondered about this a while ago on Twitter:





A common scenario for me at a small scale is, when gathering data, whether I should start in text file, or Excel, or an Excel table. Within Excel, these days, I usually expect to switch to tables as soon as it becomes apparent I'm doing something more than inspecting data.

Most of my writing starts as plain text. Blog posts usually start in Notepad++ because I like the ease of editing in a real editor, because I save drafts to disk, because I work offline. (I'm writing this in Notepad++ now, offline because the internet connection where I am is flaky.) Evil Tester wrote about his workflow for blogging and his reasons for using offline editors too.

When writing in text files I also have heuristics about switching to a richer format. For instance, if I find that I'm using a set of multiply-indented bullets that are essentially representing two-dimensional data it's a sign that the data I am describing is richer than the format I'm using. I might switch to tabulated formatting in the document (if the data is small and likely to remain that way), I might switch to wiki table markup (if the document is destined for the wiki), or I might switch to a different tool altogether (either just for the data or for everything.)

At the command line I'll often start in shell, then move to bash script, then move to a more sophisticated scripting language.  If I think I might later add what I'm writing to a test suite I might make a different set of decisions to writing a one-off script. If I know I'm searching for repro steps I'll generally work in a shell script, recording various attempts as I go and commenting them out each time so that I can easily see what I did that lead to what. But if I think I'm going to be doing a lot of exploration in an area I have little idea about I might be more interactive but use script to log my attempts.

At a larger scale, I will try to think through workflows for data in the project: what will we collect, how will we want to analyse it, who will want to receive it, how will they want to use it? Data includes reports: who are we reporting to, how would they like to receive reports, who else might be interested? I have a set of defaults here: use existing tooling, use existing conventions, be open about everything.

Migration between tools is also interesting to me, not least because it's not always a conscious decision. I find I've begun to use Notepad++ more on Windows whereas for years I was an Emacs user on that platform. In part this is because my colleagues began to move that way and I wanted to be conversant in the same kinds of tools as them in order to share knowledge and experience. On the Linux command line I'll still use Emacs as my starting point, although I've begun to teach myself vi over the last two or three years. I don't want to become dependent on a tool to the point where I can't work in common, if spartan, environments. Using different tools for the same task has the added benefit of opening my mind to different possibilities and seeing how different concepts repeat across tools, and what doesn't, or what differs.

But some migrations take much longer, or never complete at all: I used to use find and grep together to identify files with certain characteristics and search them. Now I often use ack. But I'll continue to use find when I want to run a command on the results of the search, because I find its -exec option a more convenient tool than the standalone xargs.

Similarly I used to use grep and sed to search and filter JSON files. Now I often use jq when I need to filter cleanly, but I'll continue with grep as a kind of gross "landscaping" tool, because I find that the syntax is easier to remember even if the output is frequently dirtier.

On the other hand, there are sometimes tools that change the game instantly, In the past I used Emacs as a way to provide multiple command lines inside a single connection to a Linux server. (Aside: putty is the tool I use to connect to Linux servers from Windows.) When I discovered screen I immediately ditched the Emacs approach. Screen gives me something that Emacs could not: persistence across sessions. That single attribute is enough for me to swap tools. I didn't even know that kind of persistence was possible until I happened to be moaning about it to one of our Ops team. Why didn't I look for a solution to a problem that was causing me pain?

I don't know the answer to that.

I do know about Remote Desktop so I could have made an analogy and begun to look for the possibility of command line session persistence. I suspect that I just never considered it to be a possibility. I should know better. I am not omniscient. (No, really.) I don't have to imagine a solution in order to find one. I just have to know that I perceive a problem.

That's a lesson that, even now, I learn over and over. And here's another: even if there's not a full solution to my problem there may be partial solutions that are improvements on the situation I have.

In Part 4 I'll try to tie together the themes from this and the preceding two posts.
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