“You might be surprised to learn that in a developer’s life, there aren’t all that many chances to impress girls with your coding skills.”
Ha ha. When my wife and I were new she asked to use my laptop and was surprised that it “had no icons”. (No window system). So I started to show her how to avoid using a GUI. 12 years later she uses a terminal about half of her time as a stock administrator.
So far I've managed to seriously impress my SO with my computing skills just once. People from her old company asked if she'd like a side gig, involving backing up years worth of philosophical Facebook posts of their boss (he's quite a writer), into Word documents (one per post). It would be ridiculous to attempt it by hand, but by applying a small amount of Lisp and pandoc on Facebook data export dump, I was done in 3 hours.
These days I mostly help her when she needs bunch of photos mangled into a format that can be accepted by upstream contractors; it usually involves some ImageMagick one-liners.
It’s not always boys impressing girls though. Reason why I am in tech is a girl showed me how to delete a read only file from a terminal. I had never used a terminal before.
Impressed a girl once who's friend had a Mac Classic with important files that needed to be removed. The only removable storage option was a broken floppy drive. It did have a network card, but couldn't find any way to move files to my modern mac, linux, or windows machines over the network.
It did have an ancient version of Netscape, so I tried to upload the files, but the browser was just too old to handle Dropbox, Google Drive, or any other service I could think of. An obvious solution, then, would be an upload service built for ancient browsers.
So, in about 5 minutes flat I made a sinatra app that used the simplest HTML upload form possible and dumped uploaded files to a folder on my desktop machine.
Maybe there was an easier solution I missed, but she found mine quite impressive.
You must see the faces of everyone when using my computer (is more effective this way!) they discover it can move the mouse cursor between MONITORS!
(I have 2. A TV and Screen. Somehow not connect that both are monitors...)
The face of disbelieve is amazing. It impress the girls everytime. Is super-effective!
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A better anecdote was when I was in an incubator years ago. I was located in front of the main big-glass entrance. My monitor face it, so everyone that get in see what I was doing.
And suddenly a dozen or more of kids get in in the exact moment when I was moving some screens around the monitors...
My wife is the only non-dev, family or friend, male or female, who I ever convinced to switch to Linux from Windows/Mac and who actually loved it and stuck with it despite me being a major Linux evangelist for about 10 years. Coincidence? (Although sadly I've now caved and use Mac and she's on a Chromebook. Fucking kids have ruined us!)
One of my ex-girlfriends switched to Ubuntu on my suggestion. Hilariously, the guy she cheated on me with and left me for bonded with her over it originally!
What do you use? -- I've tried with lynx and its ilk but I find that too many websites these days are completely broken without javascript, and the layout often unreadable without CSS.
I use Lynx as a "distraction free mode" when I'm learning a new language from a good web resource. I'll split the terminal (terminator) vertically in two, then split the right part horizontally. Left: web page. Right upper: playground (REPL or edit & compile). Right lower: Markdown notes in vim.
Ha ha. When my wife and I were new she asked to use my laptop and was surprised that it “had no icons”. (No window system). So I started to show her how to avoid using a GUI. 12 years later she uses a terminal about half of her time as a stock administrator.