TIL: Today I learned...

Today I learned that chatGPT is pretty good at explaining cryptic bash scripts and commands. I was trying to understand exactly how a git prepare-commit-msg hook was working so I asked chatGPT to “explain the following git hook to me” and it did a pretty good job. For example, it returned tidbits like: [[ $BRANCH_NAME =~ $BRANCH_REGEX ]]: This conditional statement checks if the branch name matches the BRANCH_REGEX pattern. If the branch name starts with one or more digits, this condition will be true. and: sed -i.bak -e "1s/^#${BASH_REMATCH[1]}: //I" $1: This line uses the sed command to replace the branch number (captured by the BRANCH_REGEX pattern) and a colon at the beginning of the commit message with an empty string. The I flag makes the replacement case-insensitive. The -i.bak option creates a backup of the original commit message file with a .bak extension. ...

You can store a “list” of values in sql with a table variable. DECLARE @listOfIDs TABLE(id INT); INSERT INTO @listOfIDs SELECT id FROM Transactions WHERE USER='bob';

In CSS, the stacking context can impact which elements display on top of each in addition to the z-index. So if you end up in a situation where cranking up the z-index doesn’t seem to work, the stacking context is likely the issue. I technically learned this a while ago but completely forgot about it until I was just reminded about it by a coworker dealing with this issue. Josh Comeau explains it well in his post on stacking contexts.

In c# Nullable.GetUnderlyingType(type)will return null if the type is not Nullable<T>. For some reason this is not what I expected.

Sometime around 2019, git added the core.hooksPath config setting to change the directory where git will look for hooks. This is handy for commiting shared hooks into a repo so you no longer need workarounds like a script to copy them into the default $GIT_DIR/hooks folder or creating symlinks or relying on tools like Husky. This post is a good example of how you can use it.