I’ll let you in on a little secret. Unix “command line wizards” are just highly textually fluent. Textual fluency is powerful because only because its a widely applicable, special case of data fluency. If we understand and master general data fluency, we’ll be even faster coders. In this post, we’ll go over what data fluency is, why data fluency is important, which data formats to focus on, and then two real life examples of how I’ve applied data fluency.
Data Fluency
Data fluency is proficiency at reading, writing, and transforming data. Both manually (by hand) and programatically (with code).
Manual data fluency is done in your favorite text editor or your favorite hex editor if the data’s binary. Opening a JSON file in sublime and changing values is manual data fluency. Opening a compiled executable in Ghex and changing values is also manual data fleuncy. Generating JSON text using echo is manual data fluency, for example:
# Echo is great for generating test values to test with complic…