I was trying to make it not intimidating by just writing what I knew, and _not_ researching all the odds and ends, instead, just saying "I don't know" etc as appropriate. Plus including my mistakes.
I'd like to add, as someone who is a novice programmer and trying to get more and more immersed in this world - it's posts like these that give you a small peek into thinking/being a programmer as opposed to doing programming as a job/profession/etc. Part of what makes programming and computers scary to beginners, speaking from my experience, is the notion that there is an infinite amount of complexity hiding just behind your IDE (things far beyond your grasp/ability to comprehend - i.e. You'll never know really how your program goes from the pretty syntax highlighted code in the IntelliJ window to x y or z app, or worse as in this case, when something goes wrong god forbid something with a sinister sounding name like 'segmentation fault'). Breaking that barrier down through the use of seemingly simple yet extremely powerful tools (Emacs, gdb, bash, etc) really helps, at least for me, feel less raw intimidation and self-loathing and more and more wonderment and inspiration to continue learning and hacking away.
I was trying to make it not intimidating by just writing what I knew, and _not_ researching all the odds and ends, instead, just saying "I don't know" etc as appropriate. Plus including my mistakes.