Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
I've worked on large products for large and small companies and written tens of thousands of lines of code across my career, solving complex, abstract, challenging technical problems in a variety of languages on a variety of platforms, sometimes under difficult conditions. I have often been a resource for my friends and co-workers when they have programming or technical questions.
I only recently learned how to correctly raise and lower window blinds--I had been doing it wrong my entire life. It was maybe the dumbest I have ever felt, and was a humbling reminder of how much I don't know about how much I don't know.
Have you had similar experiences?
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 374 ms ] threadone of these: https://sportsmansvintagepress.com/read-free/mauser-rifles-p...
Eventually got it together again, but it required assistance from my uncle who had given it to me. He laughed long and hard when i described the predicament, then said "yup, that one got me too". He also rebuilt Mercedes diesels as a hobby, so he was full of entertaining critiques of German engineering.
This was pre-internet so articles like that one weren't available to me. There may have been some trick to keeping springs where they were supposed to be as it reassembled too.
If OP came out assuming a Nairobi design that wasn't used anywhere else, or if they went to the heise.de forums and posted the above; now that would be odd/call-out worthy.
If an American that spoke German did the same in a German-majority space they would be met with pretty massive derision.
Incidentally, one of the cords on the blinds in my office is worn, and it dis a poor job of engaging. So one side will latch the others will not.
I "knew" this and a had a really good friend who did not. Both of us grew up in the same area, and we met in school, so you'd expect we should agree on this, right?
While "arguing" about it one day, it turns out the suburb they'd grown up in had several private subdivisions where the builders could do whatever they wanted. Houses were numbered sequentially following one direction of the private street, then the other. So the house nearest the entrance of the subdivision would be "100 Maple Street" and across the street would be "143 Maple Street".
Because they'd grown up mainly going to other friends' houses in the private subdivisions, my house address was the odd one and theirs were normal to them.
In the UK, oh wow, you will encounter some weird numbering issues. I live on the corner of a street in a very complex, 400 year old area, and I am forever leaning out of the window to shout instructions to utterly bemused couriers.
Also on older estates where spare green spaces have been used up by additional houses so you end up with 21,23,25,25A, 25B.
The UK can be weird....
And if you live in some regularly redeveloped bit of a town that grew in the Georgian era you can end up with clusters of houses that have almost no discernible pattern left over; I live in such a house. The naming around here is astonishingly complex, such that if I explain it too much I would identify where I live.
(I have three physical neighbours -- that is, I share walls with them. And we are on three different roads, legally speaking)
The plus side is that as you get to know the couriers who you've helped, you begin to understand that your packages will never go missing. There is an Amazon driver who smiles from ear-to-ear when he delivers for me, and I even get good service from Evri.
I move soon, and since I'm the only person here who works from home who has a clear view of where all the delivery drivers get out of their vehicles wearing a confused look, I expect parcel delivery accuracy to drop for my neighbours when I'm gone.
Somewhat useful for couriers, since a large number of houses are neither numbered or named, but the post office will know who lives where. I say somewhat, because they will often not use it when it's given.
The rule, ~if I remember correctly (and matches my experience)~ confirmed by Googling is:
1) distance in meters from the beginning of the street to the start of the terrain where the building is in;
2)rounded to even number on the lefthand side and to odd number on the righthand side of the street/road
I guess knowing the rule isn useful so you know if you are at Soandso st. 200 and yout destination is Soandso st. 2200 thats a 2km walk there
The rule is that moving away from the post office, the left and right are predictably odd or even.
The other popular rule is that say the north side of an east-west st is odd etc.
Neither of these are followed carefully these days.
The second one is a different design with a different icon. Not clear at all.
Before that moment I would manually unwind the cord just like I would wind it up. To make it worse, I even remember wondering why the swivel hook was there thinking it was poor design.
What was the moment of realization like?
As you should. Otherwise the cable gets twisted a few dozen times every time the vacuum cleaner is used.
EDIT: When I say “over” and “under” above, I’m referring to the technique RedNifre linked to in the sibling comment.
I've seen two different "systems", one where you do a quick pull on the cord and it spins back up, and one where there's a "roll up" button on the machine which winds up the cord, but I've never heard of anything you can do to make the unrolling easier ? Video ? Link? What is this magic you talk of ?
You're thinking of a vacuum cord that automatically winds onto a spring-loaded reel, commonly seen on canister vacuums.
They're talking about an upright vacuum where you manually wrap the cord around two hooks. One of the hooks can be rotated so that it no longer keeps the cord in place.
Look at the two black hooks in front of the yellow cord in this picture:
https://f.media-amazon.com/images/I/61XbxqH6%2BQL._SP523,128...
Note that the bottom one can be rotated upward. The entire cord can then be removed from the machine in one motion.
Look at https://bissellcdn.blob.core.windows.net/cdn-storage-contain... - the ONLY Mention it makes is "quick release power" but doesn't document how to do it (it's a turn the hook setup).
I was rooming with a girl I barely knew for the summer and was looking out the window while washing dishes. You know how fireflies tend to sync up? Suddenly I see hundreds of tiny yellow lights turn on and then off. On and then off.
I yelled for her to come in (at least to my credit I was more fascinated than afraid!), and she ended up dumbfounded that I had never seen fireflies before!
It's just not something you had any reason to encounter, and maybe you were off sick if it was mentioned in biology/science lessons.
Now consider it this way: the first time you experienced fireflies, you were an adult, and you could bring a fully adult, science-aware, sense of wonder to that experience.
I'd count it as a win.
I'm thankful I had maturity to simply say "yes, they're in the deer family, native to Canada and Northern Europe".
They were from China where they probably rarely mention reindeer, and only in the context of Santa Claus.
It's no different from a Westerner rarely hearing about tanukis, and only in the context of trickster spirits in anime and Super Mario Bros 3. How are you supposed to know they're real?
Good for you!
Though I think we geeks are more inclined to understand when others have their "Sherlock Holmes didn't know the Earth revolves around the Sun" moments. :-)
Unfortunately, the program was difficult to test (no unit tests) and very important, and difficult to verify correctness of output as well. (As in, you can't just look at it and say "yeah that's numbers lgtm").
Also unfortunately the previous author had not been very consistent in their programming style, so there was a lot of syntactic noise (some single line if statements used braces, some omitted them, etc)
Also unfortunately in my prior rewrite work in this, I had grafted the old UI onto my new backend to save time, but not brought the rigor there up to snuff (it's UI code, I had thought. It's well enough to have tests covering the business logic for now.)
Well anyway when I had rearranged some code, I hadn't realized there had been an extremely large block right underneath an if statement that wasn't using brackets, and I had accidentally split it into a few statements. N-1 of which were naturally now outside of the if statement.
The end result being that a bunch of code would run and the "is dirty" state worked fine, but if you clicked save on a "clean" state with no edits, it would blank the fields in the DB but not in the UI.
It didn't end up having any actual impact because we caught it in time, but god damn did it teach me something about "real" programming. I'm not sure exactly what all it taught me, but I think about that a lot as I do random other things now 8 years and 3 companies later.
Time to get into woodworking!
Make curly braces mandatory with a linter, of course!
Also, add tests before changing the thing.
There was an if that didn't need brackets when I wrote it. 6 months later it needed more stuff on a branch but i was tired and in a hurry so I didn't notice adding extra lines needs brackets. New code compiled but wasn't part of the if. Turned a 5 minute fix into 2 days.
Of course, all my ifs have had brackets on both sides since then.
Well, not in python...
I apparently have trouble learning life lessons.
In both time I knew it was happening, but I was too busy to fix it.
It almost happened again - I pulled the employee off the job, made him document everything, and put a team of people back in. He was banned from the job.
Kept both him and the customer.
My parents met in their early 20s through another couple, Des (flatmate of my father's) and Mary (schoolmate of my mother's). Des had a sore hip, and Mary's mother was a "bonesetter" (a kind of folk healer) so came to the men's flat to see him. "Seeing him" involved Des getting some kind of vigorous massage in the bedroom, and then being slathered with red ointment, while my mother and Mary sat in the other room listening to him moan in pain
When the ordeal was over my mother, making conversation, asked Mary's mother what was in the ointment. One of the ingredients mentioned was "dragon's blood"
My mother went home to the apartment she shared with some of her siblings, and related the story to them. "Dragon's blood??" said her brother
... "and that", says my mother, "was when I found out that dragons don't exist"
> Dragon’s blood is a natural plant resin. It’s dark red in color, which is part of what gives dragon’s blood its name.
> The resin is extracted from many different tropical tree species commonly called dragon trees. These may come from the plant groups Croton, Pterocarpus, Daemonorops, or Dracaena.
> The plant resin has been used for thousands of years for distinct purposes. There are records of its use among the ancient Greeks and Romans and in India, China, and the Middle East.
- https://www.healthline.com/health/dragons-blood
You're correct it's not the end of the world, but you'll need to catch up quick once you realize something and maybe even completely rethink plans. This isn't always a bad thing and the stuff you come up with from ignorance might be useful in other ways.
In my opinion, ignorance is just a fact of life. Too much of it can be a disaster, but just enough can spark meaningful creativity. Often times though, it's just something to immediately move on from because you have way more other stuff to do.
For example, think of someone who is ignorant of the cultural practices of a certain minority of people despite seeing members of this group every day in their neighborhood, this tells me something not so positive about this person and how they view the world and other people. However it is never too late to change, either.
As SIO you are statutorily responsible for the joint worldwide intelligence, communication system (JWICS), maintenance, security, growth, interruptibility, etc… in addition to managing all Perssec for SCI holders, and maintaining control, security and for CNWDI as well as ACCM.
I was fresh home after a deployment to Iraq and thrown right into dealing with the Yp-Do crisis in SK and the Japanese Tsunami and Fukushima fallout that we had to provide HA/DR support for.
I was 28 years old with a one year old at home.
As part of maintaining security, I would regularly get inspected as you would expect for any manner of things. There is a special security team that lives at the defense intelligence agency primarily but also they have them for NSA and other organizations, that would do white hat penetration tests on secure information facilities, like all the ones that I was responsible for (I had a half dozen physical locations to manage).
One of these tests was during a large scale exercise. Two civilians who had perfect credentials, were trying to access our primary headquarters SCIF. At the time I think I was managing a top-secret briefing preparation and so I delegated access control, and interrogation of these two people to another Lieutenant, as well as the actual special security officer who was an E6.
They had previously tried to penetrate all of the other places on base, but failed.
The process for getting access to a SCIF if you are not housed there is that that you send a visit request from your home security office to the visiting security office which will then transfer clearance details so that you can understand what access levels to give these people.
About a month before their visit, there was a new guidance released saying that all visit requests had to have a digital requst in 100% of cases whereas are previously you could just print out your details and bring them with you, The special security officer would then look them up in a system (I won’t name), and then it’s up to the security office whether they give you access or not.
My Special Security officer and my lieutenant came to me and said they have everything that they need per the requirements that we were operating under, and that they were comfortable giving them access to a terminal where they could do what they needed to do.
I said “that’s perfectly fine however LT I want you to sit behind them basically and make sure they don’t walk off or do anything more than I’m giving them access to.”
So for like 30 minutes, we had two people in our SCIF who logged onto JWICS, we’re being actively monitored and were able to send an email and then logged off and left.
The next week, my commander asked me to go to a meeting and the penetration team briefed to the whole base how they got into all these places including my SCIF and one other facility
The good thing was, we were basically written up with flying colors, and this was the hardest possible test that they were able to get through and so everybody was generally happy with us.
This was really just one of those things where it was a specific detail that we were not up-to-date with but didn’t have any major defense in depth risks.
op worked at us airforce base managing access control to global intel systems. he delegated authorisation check to jr. jr told op they checked out, however, jr had not adhered to latest security protocol that required cross checking request against request database, relying instead only on physical credentials. op granted access however asked that an officer watch the civilians’ access directly.
a week later it turns out the civilians were conducting pen testing for the systems and op had to debrief how they gained access.
But hey, if that didn’t come through, at least it was an exposition problem ;)
I had been a personal trainer for awhile when I got a new client. An eighty something professor who taught Dante’s Inferno, Italian, collected degrees, and was actively pursuing some field in psychology (forget what one).
For about 6 months, we’d work out on Saturday mornings and he’d always ask of my adventures since we last saw each other. I’d regale him and that was that.
One morning after going though it all, he asked, “what else is there?” or something. Whatever it was, it stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t answer. That question hit me harder than a freight train.
At that moment, I realized there was a massive issue with myself. I wanted a change, but a) didn’t know what to change, b) how to change, 3) how to feel about myself. We continued to work on him and his goals, which was to bench 135 safely. He got to his goal. ;). He also helped me to get to mine, which was to focus more on internal validation and be happy with self.
I was able to shift from heavily skewed external validation to external validation probably being now around 20%-30% and the rest being internal.
Because of him, I was able to embrace myself and lean into the information seeking snd knowledge gaining person I am today and get to a level that someone with my academic background should not be at.
A quote that I came up with many years ago that explains all of this and the transformation I had, “you’re not going to change until the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same.”
One other one too. From him, the professor. I have severe adhd and can read the same sentence 50 time and not remember what I just read, if it’s not something I’m highly interested in. I came to him and told him that it’s so damn boring and it’s just a fight to sit there and attempt to read it.
He gave me a mind shift: instead of thinking how it’s important or exciting to you, try to imagine why the author of it thought it was so exciting, to where they spent their career learning about that subject. That allowed me to completely change how I read and that too has helped me more in the past years than I could imagine.
So humbling I could compare it with a train crash. Sadly possibly over-compensating for it now, but I don't want to go back to the external validation spiral.
Amd thank you for sharing, and putting into words what I didn't manage.
A thought I have had in the past also, I think it is very true.
Yeah. I studied psychology and it was the most prominent mind shift for me too. Watching what people do you need to see what is going on in their heads, not the outside things. Looking at a product of someone's work you should see the person who did it.
It completely changed my attitude to discussions. I was a math guy, any statement either true or false, and you need to decide on each one before going further. But now people say things, and I do not see them as things by themselves, I see them as things said by persons. Oftentimes it is completely irrelevant are these things true or false.
Interesting... for me, a fair amount of decisions are weighted--I can see that damn payoff matrix in my head.
I said it in another comment, "each person has their viewpoint from their own vantage point."
My question to you is, how were you able to make that change? I'm going to presume that it still rears its head time to time and when it does, do you notice it quickly and are able to adapt in the same conversation or is it mostly a reflection and realization you were like that? or am i not even asking the right questions?
Each person, company, industry, street, city, country, state, country, ..., each thing has their own viewpoint from their own vantage point and will most likely see, interpret, view what's being conveyed differently than the sender.
Each person has their own view and it's valid, i just may not agree with it, but i still want to understand why they think / believe / convey that.
at the same time, i'm obtuse and sometimes forget to look outside myself. :|
Also related, learning something, only to find out later that your understanding of something was incorrect, or made incorrect assumptions. Always humbling.
Though of course I do some things well I’ve been doing most things poorly all my life. That’s what learning as an adult feels like.
Good luck.
I've spent the majority of my career looking for wook rather than doing work, and have lost at least 7 jobs in the first 12 years for one reason or another. This is going on the 3rd time I've spent more than a year without working at all in any job. It never gets easier, and each time I get to spend a ton of time reflecting on how things went and what I'm actually good at. It's usually humbling, because so far the list of things I'm good at professionally has only dwindled. Another humbling aspect to this is realizing that most other people don't lose their jobs... like ever, unless it's seasonal or severe economic downturn.
During one of those periods I spent so long unemployed that I literally ran out of money and moved into a car from my relatively nice apartment, and then worked at Starbucks as a barista, which taught me that I can be good enough at speaking with customers, but what I thought were trivial tasks turned out to be almost laughably untenable, like remembering how much syrup goes in Karen's caramel macchiato, or just showing up on time.
https://www.inc.com/danny-iny/woody-allen-said-show-up-to-su...
If it's not hard, why can't everyone seem to do it?
I have a friend who's a defense lawyer. He tells me that prison must be the happiest place on earth, given the lengths that people go to just to get a chance of getting in. It's funny and illustrative, just like the Woody Allen quote about showing up.
To understand how hard it is, imagine that you have periodic blackouts during which you completely forget not only that you need to be on time for work, but that work is a thing that exists in this universe. You cannot control when one of these blackouts will hit, you just get to deal with the fallout.
Luckily, the long list of coping mechanisms significantly reduces the incidence of these catastrophes. But "when will my brain malfunction again" is a constant source of anxiety.
What doesn't help is how many leaks there are in the systems we operate in, that are just overlooked because we've either accepted them as fundamentally important, or because most other people will manage to pull it off despite the systems' inadequacy.
For example, feedback loops and focus time. Companies will design their workspace to be as distracting and dehumanizing as possible, where someone can roll up a chair at any random moment and start asking questions, meetings are scheduled sporadically throughout a day or week and don't have any positive value contribution. We'll use 3 different asynchronous communication systems that everyone needs to attend to all the time, but no integrated notification system between them; I'll miss that Jira comment because I forgot to check Jira, and then that someone responded to my code review because I'm not checking GitHub every 20 mins, and yet I can't focus on my code for longer than an hour because my boss asked me "How's it going" on Slack.
I highly recommend reading “ADHD is Awesome” as well as Mark Suster’s blog posts on ADHD.
For example, I might get in the shower with enough time to make it to my zoom call or an actual in-person job, and then start thinking about something or realize the hair has grown in on my shoulder, and literally forget that I had somewhere to be, or wildly misjudge how long I've been in there, and it can kick off a series of additional delays, like I might then miss the bus.
In one-off or irregular situations, this rarely happens, but given enough time, I'm bound to do something like this that doesn't fit into what my manager considers suitable conduct, and once they get this in their head, it's tough to recover from.
No, my normie friends don't get it at all, and everyone ALWAYS asks me "how the job search is going" even when I've told them every week for 6 months that I'm not trying to get a job, but trying to hold myself to their norms was a lost cause for me anyway.
Eventually something turns up.
Plus, one lucky break with some early equity goes a long way.
It's not the right game for everyone, but it's totally viable once you get the hang of its rules. And many of us find they're a better fit than the normal rules ever were.
It's been 8 years since I graduated. I started working at a Bank in a Management Rotational Program with great manager but dropped it within 4 months because young me dreaded being pigeon-holed at 9-5. I joined a promising startup but... the co-founder unexpectedly passed away. Long story short, I have had 6 jobs (incl. internships) within last 8 years: I have lost jobs for one reason or the other (startup folded, directions changed etc).
In good times, I am able to appreciate diversity my experience but I feel undervalued; I am more of a "jack of all trades, master of none" and feel I've taken 2 steps forward, one step back in my career. This has also damaged my professional as well as personal interests.
How do I move forward from here?
Preface: If you have considered counseling or asking your doctor about ADHD, then here's what you might expect. In my case, I eventually went down this path because I had returned to University Applied Computer Science because I was in this same low period and needed a change; I wanted to challenge my imposter syndrome and see if I could push myself through the curriculum.
After succeeding at nearly all of my data structures and algorithms assignments, persuasive essays, and anything remotely engaging, I suffered a few set backs, failing one of the 2 easiest courses I'd taken, bombing my DS+A exams, and basically getting nowhere. The Data Structures exam was all writing Java Abstract Data Types and LinkedLists etc.. by hand on paper over 3 hours, and I got bored of doing that halfway through, no increased blood pressure, no sweat, it just didn't provoke an urgency in me.
I'd also slept through the midterm, and failed one of the Geo labs that required me to draw many graphs each week by hand on paper. I failed in situations that other people would consider high-pressure (passing an exam) but nailed every practically interesting or applicable assignment, and this was in my late twenties. So I went to see the nurse practitioner, we talked, she gave me a series of family questionnaires regarding mental health to see what there was a history of, and offered a prescription for Concerta 27mg (extended release Ritalin). Since then, it's helped in a subtle way to reconnect me with a tenacity for getting things done that I think had been burnt out of me, but also helped me realize that I really did probably need this my whole life. It was scary, but the effect has been marginally helpful.
-- end preface --
I've been considering getting out of dev entirely, but I don't have a good feeling for which direction to go yet, if at all. Maybe a small investment in trade school, or maybe focusing on freelance, I have no idea whether I'd succeed at either and it's tough to in-debt myself more when money already isn't coming in. You mentioned getting out of the banking job early on, but that's something I've been considering as a boring and stable job for a while, even as a teller, that would allow me to pursue my hobbies more, but really I'm open to almost anything at this point. I'm still drawn to programming though, so I'm still focusing on that, and elaborate on below.
I'm trying to be critical of what I'm good at and what I'm not good at, and I feel like I lack efficiency and depth in the few areas that are hiring, and so I'm trying to work my way back up or rebuild my proficiency from first principles.
For example, I consider myself a frontend developer, but my last few roles have all been jumping into an existing complex projects and making incremental improvement or refactors, with no significant responsibility. Among some weak points are my knowledge of low-level software engineering, building SaaS products from scratch and scaling them, using AWS or Azure, and I've let my backend experience stagnate. To address these, I've been working through Nand2Tetris (highly recommended), and building up some basic projects from scratch using Django, Nuxt.js, Next.js, Postgres, and Tailwind, so I can at least speak more confidently about them and expand my job search for when the tides turn.
It's important to cultivate a good sense of self during these periods. If you can, get out into the mountains, or into nature, alone, and spend some time thinking on it. Independent from that, if you're not in good physical shape, just start showing up to the gym 3 times a week for about an hour each time. These are some of the non-tech ways I stay mentally engaged and are a...
I think the most humbling for me is seeing a real pro use something you use a lot, like a kitchen knife.
"Big wrap" is the biggest mistake I've done (and seen).
I also didn't know about the harmonics & putting a twist in the line. I also had a lot of problem with my lines working loose, which I don't have anymore, but I'm not sure I learned the fix in the video.
For instance, I learned that you should never trust what a customer says about reusing their existing code without actually looking at the code first. You can end up having to rewrite the code, and then have a dissatisfied customer, because the new code doesn't have the same problems as the old code and produces different results. It doesn't matter which one is correct, since the old code was already used for years and everything is based on it.
So the humbling experience has been not to become too optimistic and overconfident after some successful projects. You will become the bad guy if you over-promise and can't deliver, even if you feel someone else is actually to blame. Every time you start something new, you have to check for yourself what the requirements and conditions truly are before accepting a deadline. And you can never trust the documentation or description of an existing system without also looking at the actual system.
Whenever I start at a new company, I make sure to ask not just what breaks the system, but how the system breaks when it breaks. One person's broken pot is another person's cutting tool!
When I was first learning PHP as a teenager I also had similar problems. I did not know about SQL JOINs for at least a couple of years; which meant database querying was... overcomplicated to say the least.
The other epiphany I had was when I started to realise HTTP was just a request string getting parsed. Given I had used FTP and web servers like Apache previously for HTML and files, I was convinced the directory structure in the URL was the directory structure on disk. It took me a long time to get my head around the fact that you could just grab the request URL from the HTTP headers and not have to have hundreds of physical folders to make URLs like /category/subcategory/page (I'd managed to approximate this with making folder structures that looked like this with index.php files in).
I've never thought of it like this, but I didn't understand for a long time that a webserver was just a function that run with the request as an argument.
Like being able to type "println(x)" to get the value of x.
Took me a quite few years to discover the intricaties of the so-called debugger :D
It all came to a head when my employer was demoing some software that used my API and none of what they were trying to show worked because of multiple unrelated bugs in my code, causing us to lose this very large client. I somehow kept my position, worked with other departments to formalize QA processes, and started regularly communicating with the API users.
Before I was just making software for nobody with 0 stakes, the reality of having actual people, entire revenue streams dependent on my code being reliable didn’t fully register. At my previous (and only other at the time) employer I was basically a paid seat filler. I spent a lot of work hours making personal projects, it felt like going to work and getting paid to make hobby code.
I’m glad I was able to learn from the experience and it didn’t put me out of work or anything
And this only because it seems that the CEO noticed I can spin up prototypes to validate ideas before passing them to the actual devs.
I've worked with him for a total of 3 years however, and during that time, most of the time I felt like I was tinkering without making a real difference.
The only time that a bigger project was implemented that I had the lead on felt like a fluke and it was after probably 6 months of working on it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40557571
One complains about enterprise level architecture in run of the mill small projects.
One complains about bugs, which should just be covered by tests, nothing that should sound or be complicated.
This is still a learning experience, probably always will be one, and an opportunity to always grow.
My impetus wasn't a child, but a break-up and almost lost business. I saved the business in the end, but it didn't grow to what I had expected, and then I realized how much I had given up, just to try to make that work, and how much I had taken for granted the people around me.
cat backwards (tac) will display the file in reverse order :)
chown username: with the colon and the group name blank will set the permission to the user's default group.. very useful when you blend windows groups with spaces into an environment and it becomes a pain in the ass to put return characters in
https://github.com/rothgar/mastering-zsh/blob/master/docs/co...