How Things Work

Imagine everything you know is contained within a sphere. The more that you know, the greater its radius is. The surface of this sphere touches subjects you’re already aware of, but don’t know yet. When you learn the sphere becomes bigger, but its surface area increases at a faster rate. So the more things you know, the more things you have to study. That was the motivation behind myself taking a Computer Science course in one of the online universities.

I learned quite a few things and I liked the course, although not all of it. While the course gave me many insights, it was rather lightweight on why should I do something this way, and not the other way around.

This “cookbook-style” teaching is fine, but it loses out on flexibility. It’s a bit like learning spells. Sure, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, yet it’s still a technology. When you see Vim for the first time, you don’t know how to leave. When you spend time trying to grasp the logic behind its keyboard shortcuts, you start editing texts faster than ever before. Maybe you could achieve the same by just memorising the hotkeys, but I’ve tried that a few times and it never worked well for me.

That’s why I feel it’s important to know how things work. This month, we’ll spend some time looking at how Linux implements control groups. I’m not sure if you’ll ever need to touch the interfaces we cover, but hopefully it will help you to understand the limits of Docker and other tools. This in itself is something that’s good to know.