(Let me start clarifying that this is not at all a criticism of the author)

I am usually amused by the way really competent people judge other's context.

This post assumes understanding of:

- emacs (what it is, and terminology like buffers)

- strace

- linux directories and "everything is a file"

- environment variables

- grep and similar

- what git is

- the fact that 'git whatever' works to run a custom script if git-whatever exists in the path (this one was a TIL for me!)

- irc

- CVEs

- dynamic loaders

- file priviledges

but then feels important to explain to the audience that:

>A socket is a facility that enables interprocess communication

That feels like part of why some juniors are so confident while more senior engineers are plagued with self-doubt.

Juniors know how much they have learned whereas a 10+ year senior (like the author) forget most people don't know all this stuff intuitively.

I still will say stuff like "yeah it's just a string" forgetting everyone else thinks a "string" is a bit of thread/cord.

All of the things you listed are ops topics. But sockets are a programming concept.

I would expect a person with 10+ years of Unix sysadmin experience — but who has never programmed directly against any OS APIs, “merely” scripting together invocations of userland CLI tools — to have exactly this kind of lopsided knowledge.

(And that pattern is more common than you might think; if you remember installing early SuSE or Slackware on a random beige box, it probably applies to you!)

As a blogger who makes similar assumptions, I think we depend on how a lot of us from that time "grew up" similarly. Sockets came to relevance later in my career compared to everything else listed here.

I haven't even realized that while I was reading the article, but it is amusing!

Though one explanation is that I think for the other stuff that the writer doesn't explain, one can just guess and be half right, and even if the reader guesses wrong, isn't critical to the bug ­— but sockets and capabilities are the concepts that are required to understand the post.

It still is amusing and I wouldn't have even realized that until you pointed that out.

I found it interesting that they know how to use strace, but not how to list open files held by a process which to me seems simpler. Again, not criticism just an observation and I enjoyed the article

Most people these days are using http and don’t need to touch sockets. (Except for the people implementing http of course).

To be fair, it does link the CVE, so if you don't know what a CVE is, you can click the link.

I agree that it's amusing.

I mean, the title is a quote from Buckaroo Banzai. Lack of context is part of the fun!