I’ve posted a first attempt at a screencast teaser for a lesson on vi macros and substitutions—both power features I find save me lots of time at work, but which can be daunting to new users.
Demotivator
I joined up with a research group as an undergraduate and applied myself to maintaining and developing scripts to produce videos from raw molecular dynamics trajectories. Most of the work was on SGI workstations, and I was really interested in learning Unix/Irix (Linux was coming into its own around the same time, so I could reuse some of my knowledge at home) My main stumbling block during this formative time took the form of a rather rude system administrator who didn’t have time for or interest in dealing with even a motivated self-learner like myself. I have since learned that this individual did not represent the entire archetype of systems administrators everywhere (and, indeed, as he moved around the university, customer after customer would complain about his attitude and refuse to deal with him…), but with my limited experience at the time, I found myself disheartened and developed the opinion that the systems I was working on were essentially black boxes from which I could never really learn the inner workings.
As I transitioned through my academic career and found myself drawn more to systems administration than computer science, I’ve tried to always work with my users from their point of view. If you work in an academic environment, you must always remember that intellectual development is one of the key strategic focuses of a university, and that it can happen in unexpected contexts, e.g. a novice undergraduate learning how to use a command line. I could have had fond memories of this fellow, if only he had been more understanding.