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My Missing Semester

Notes from MIT's tooling bootcamp that finally patched the gaps in my developer toolkit.

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productivity learning tooling
Terminal window illustration inspired by retro monitors
The command line stopped feeling like punishment once I treated it like an instrument.

Notes from MIT's tooling bootcamp that finally patched the gaps in my developer toolkit.

Every degree syllabus I have seen worships algorithms and projects, not the gritty tools that keep engineers sane. Cue MIT’s Missing Semester playlist—it felt like the adviser I wish I met in my freshman fall. Instead of more theory, it walks through the connective tissue of real-world software work: shells, editors, automation, reproducibility. I’m writing this while my terminal is still glowing because the course filled exactly the gap I have been tripping over.

The blind spots I kept shipping with

I can wire up services and ship features, but my workflow still had duct tape:

  • Terminal sessions littered with copy-pasted commands because I never invested in shell scripting.
  • Dotfiles that were basically a pile of aliases copied from strangers.
  • Git used like a glorified USB drive.
  • Debugging sessions that relied on “remember where the print statement was” rather than systematic tooling.

Missing Semester doesn’t shame you for that—it treats the tooling layer as a craft and shows how to iterate on it deliberately.

Lesson 1: Shell as an amplifier

The first lecture hammers home that the shell is a programmable environment, not a command graveyard. Three upgrades I adopted instantly:

  1. Shortcuts with intent – Aliases are now namespaced (gs for status, gco for checkout) and backed by shell functions when logic grows.
  2. Composition mindset – Piping ripgrep, fd, and custom scripts together feels like building Lego. I finally internalised xargs as glue.
  3. History that works for me – fzf + reverse search means I re-run complex commands without hunting.

Treat your shell like a musical instrument. Scales (basic commands) are boring, but that’s how you improvise confidently during outages.

Watch the opening session

Lesson 2: Dotfiles as a living document

The course pairs the shell lecture with a dotfiles tour. Two practices stuck:

  • Keep dotfiles in version control and treat the repo like a lab notebook. Commits document why a tweak exists.
  • Use bootstrap scripts to onboard future machines. I wrote a setup.sh that symlinks configs and installs baseline tooling.

To enforce discipline, I added a weekly calendar block just to prune or annotate dotfiles. Future me will thank present me for the breadcrumbs.

Lesson 3: Editors, tmux, and flow

I always flirted with Vim, then fled to GUI editors when deadlines hit. The Missing Semester pairing of Vim + tmux finally clicked because they framed them as window management and focus tools, not rites of passage.

  • Mapped leader-f to telescope files, leader-b to buffer switch, and a tmux session template launches servers + tests side-by-side.
  • Learned to record macros, making repetitive log formatting a ten-second move.
  • Adopted tmux-resurrect so a reboot does not nuke my setup.

Lesson 4: Version control and debugging as safety nets

The git session was the therapy I needed. I stopped fearing reflog, embraced interactive rebases, and started tagging releases in personal projects. The debugging lecture paired strace, lsof, and Python’s pdb with real use cases—my next production mystery now has a checklist instead of panic.

Lesson 5: Data wrangling & automation reps

awk, sed, jq, and csvkit used to feel like esoteric trivia. The instructors chain them to clean logs, summarise data, and feed it back into scripts. Combined with cron + make, it turns small chores (log pruning, dependency audits) into background processes.

Automation rule of thumb: If I run a command more than twice a week, it earns a shell function or a script checked into my dotfiles repo.

My action plan

  1. Weekly tooling retro – 30 minutes every Friday to snapshot dotfiles and log friction points.
  2. Pair script with documentation – Every script now ships with a README snippet in the repo explaining inputs/outputs.
  3. Practice drills – Once a month I recreate an environment from scratch using only my bootstrap script to prove it works.
  4. Teach someone else – Sharing a new trick on my team Slack keeps me accountable and spreads the joy.