A Command-Line Murder Mystery!
By Noah Veltman who appears to have impeccable gums.
By Noah Veltman who appears to have impeccable gums.
By Julia Evans. I don’t think an average dev will need anything more than what’s on here.
By the same author who wrote The Little Go Book
Trenchant, brilliant stuff by William Kennedy 💯 (Cached)…
Via Wikipedia. I am “not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke” the genesis of other styles. “Haskell Style” has to be a joke (like this masterpiece) and I just pray I don’t encounter it in the wild1 🙏 // Allman while (x === y) { func1(); func2(); } // Hor…
Molly White asks if Web3 is bullshit. Short and excellent talk.…
It’s what all the Patagonia-clads are raving about. They tell me it solves all perf problems in a snap. Update Here’s an NPM package. And, of course, Java if you’d like to deploy this in an Enterprise™ setting.…
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This really got me: My job is to keep our code running while other packagers are changing theirs. Lord have mercy. NPM continued use and existence is proof that (Almost) Every Day is a Miracle ✨…
Really cool stuff. Trained on the New York Times ingredients corpus (large 13.5MB CSV) and turns this ingredients = [ "3 large melons", "5 1/2 cups water", "2 cups flour", ] into this [ { "name": "melons", "unit": None, "qty": 3.0 }, { "name": "water", "unit": "cups"…
Saved me a ton of time with small project I’m working on right now. Looks like it’s written in C.…
Software is and has been engaged in an endless race to the bottom. Wrong. The Achievements of the software industry over the last thirty years are astonishing. They’ve managed to entirely negate several orders of magnitude of performance improvements provided by the hardware industry. Anonymous.…
Here’s a giant list of games people have created with it. Here’s a teeny little introductory adventure. I plan on playing The Quest of DuBebe this evening:…
Someday aliens are going to land their saucers in a field somewhere in New Jersey and everything is going to go just fine right up until we try to explain our calendar to them “yeah we divide our year into a number of sub units called ‘months’ made up a number of days, and they’re not all the same l…
This (beautifully formatted and well-paced-and-delivered and surprisingly sparsely attended) talk by Gabriel Lebec on the fundamentals of Lambda Calculus is one of my favorite talks ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VQ382QG-y4 As Lebec explains, the lovely bird names come from this book called…
Excellent stuff, particularly the mechanical keyboard envy1. There’s a Nikhil in it too! 💁♂️ I don’t think I’ll get into them. Got myself one of these (brown switches) about three years ago after outsourcing the research to a highly enthusiastic and helpful co-worker. The “L” key sticks sometimes…
The key takeaways in no particular order. Use <noscript>. If you are using it, use it a lot more. There is no guarantee that chunks will load after the main one does; the user’s location and/or network access might have changed! Think CalTrain. ISPs, Corporate VPNs, and Browser Plugins1 can m…
My university just announced that it’s dumping Blackboard, and there was much rejoicing. Why is Blackboard universally reviled? There’s a standard story of why “enterprise software” sucks. If you’ll bear with me, I think this is best appreciated by talking about… baby clothes! There are two types of…
Lovely stuff. Cached here.…
>>> n = 0 >>> print "%d item%s" % (n, "s"[n==1:]) 0 items >>> n = 1 >>> print "%d item%s" % (n, "s"[n==1:]) 1 item >>> n = 2 >>> print "%d item%s" % (n, "s"[n==1:]) 2 items # If you might want to print negative items, add abs to the test: >&g…
LaTeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX and ConTeXt. That’s a lot of TeX! This was most helpful, even though MacTeX solves all my problems.…
A still-very-relevant 9-year old article. Pandas has gone from strength to strength since he wrote that. In terms of expressing your computations, Hadoop is strictly inferior to SQL. There is no computation you can write in Hadoop which you cannot write more easily in either SQL, or with a simple P…
From over 10 years ago (I’m sorting through my old bookmarks). A single object looks like this: { "ACCTOUNT_NUMBER":"1234567890", "CUSTOMER_NAME":"ACME Products and Services, Inc.", "ADDRESS":"123 Main Street", "CITY":"Albuquerque", "STATE":"NM", "ZIP":"87101-1234" } He test…
Estimate Actual Time Very Easy 1 Hour Easy 2 Hours Quite Easy 4 Hours Looks Quite Easy 6 Hours Average 8 Hours Looks Average 12 Hours No Clue 16 Hours Seems Complex 24 Hours Complex 30 Hours Very Complex 40 Hours Can Take Some Time 48 Hours Fuck 60 Hours Yeah Looks Pre…
I loved how the author imagined persistence 💗…
me, a software engineer: large scale production systems are complex and require teams of experts to keep running. It’s near impossible to get right 100% of the time me, when an app I use goes down once: these fucking clowns, what the fuck @aweary…
Uber in 2016: “We have thousands of microservices.” Everyone: “That sounds insane." Uber in 2020: “It turns out that was insane.” @sandofsky…
With the trailing comma and sorted properties/imports/arguments/whatever. Makes symbols easy to scan from top-to-bottom and looks like this in Python: from constants import ( EXIT_CODE_ARTICLE_ROOT_NOT_FOUND, EXIT_CODE_NOT_A_GIT_REPOSITORY, EXIT_CODE_NOT_AN_ABSOLUTE_PATH, MARKDOWN_EX…
[…] it’s not okay to block old browsers, but it’s a waste of time to support them 100%. Chris Heilmann…
A handy-dandy visual guide to the <script> tag, its various attributes, and how they relate to HTML parsing. Source unknown.…
It’s very simple and clever. This is an example of what’s rendered from this giant Markdown file 💙…
I love this more than I can describe.…
I just met you, And this is crazy, But here’s my number (delegate), So if something happens (event), Call me, maybe (callback)? LightStriker on StackOverflow…
Back in the good old days – the “Golden Era” of computers, it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called “Real Men” and “Quiche Eaters” in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones that understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones that…
The argument here being that, since the ‘general form’ of the conjecture is undecidable, TypeScript’s type system is undecidable. How does one even think of doing these things? I love Typescript, but it isn’t nearly ambitious enough. It would be vastly improved with an --extremelyStrict flag enforc…
About as ‘essential’ as it gets if you want to appreciate a tool you work with every day. (Cached)…
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolki…
Here’s a fairly recent (Dec 2018) interview with the creators of chrome://dino. It was called Project Bolan (which I had to look up), had 270M games played every month1, with most users coming “from markets with unreliable or expensive mobile data, like India, Brazil, Mexico, or Indonesia” and took…
Nexe and pkg are two compilers that create self-contained executables out of your Node scripts. Deno introduced this in a recent release, which got me looking for Node-based alternatives.…
Dylan Beattie is my new favorite nerd on YouTube.…
This is a new personal record. Will go six months the next time 🎸…
The Scunthorpe problem (or the Clbuttic Mistake) is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Wikipedia Example…
I’m not a great developer, I’m just really good at finding the magic one-liner fix on the 14th page on a repo’s GitHub Issues @iamdevloper…
a GraphQL server is just a SOAP API that’s studied abroad @iamdevlopr…
From a presentation by Jeff Dean. What about when technology evolves? Here’s a handy visualization. And here’s a way to think about these numbers. Nathan Hurst visualized the distances on Google Maps1. Operation Time (ns) Light Distance (m) Approximate Light Distance L1 cache reference 0.5 0.…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk…
Here’s how the author made that list. Here’s a cached version.…
Well… not really. Maybe. Brian Will examines the history of the OOP way of thinking and it’s over-application as a panacea to every problem domain, particularly in The Enterprise™ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM…
Dear web developers, The answer is zero. Zero. Get it through your thick skulls. Zero is the number of times anyone has EVER wanted something to autoplay on your site and start making noise. I’d honestly rather you mine crypto-currency in my browser than use my speakers. #kthxbye @MalwareJake…
Learn C and build a basic Lisp #VALUE 😍…
One should be good 80%+ of time between that and the awesome pgcli.…
Woo! Covers the biggest reason why I use jq (grep for fields) which, as the gron author notes, is more general-purpose and takes a little more effort to understand and use.…
Here’s a community-maintained "List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words" across various languages on Github. I was curious about a naïve frequency distribution of consonants across the English-language corpus (NSFW, obviously) and wrote a small script. Here are the results:…
On why GNU grep is fast. Via HN.…
Headed over to “Wisdom of Chopra” to get myself a slice of Deepak’s #cosmiconscious insight. Took that and had GPT-2 use it as a seed for more wisdom. Behold: The invisible is the foundation of total belongingness: When we feel like we belong and are at home, we are happy, healthy and in good spir…
and Advanced Custom Fields Pro are two must-have plugins for advanced Wordpressing according to my friend Mike, a seasoned Wordpresser.…
The software industry is currently going through the “disposable plastic” crisis the physical world went through in the mid-20th century (and is still paying down the debt for). You can run software from 1980 or 2005 on a modern desktop without too much hassle, but anything between there and 2-3 ye…
See also: “Creating a QR Code step by step”…
On the developer side, what I hope people are doing is trying to make, not just good code, but these days we’ve been very good about having explanations for the code. So commit messages to me are almost as important as the code change itself. Sometimes the code change is so obvious that no message…
Being a satirical take on the state of enterprise software development, and authored by smart people who presumably like to watch the world burn. The issues are highly entertaining as well.…
Started with this blog post about why one would need a monad (from a typing standpoint.) Then watched “What the 𝒇 is a Monad” which made a lot of things clear. Then watched this excellent, excellent talk on Lambda Calculus (with JS and Haskell code!) by Gabriel Lebec. Finished with a quick practica…
I’ve usually heard this phenomenon called “incidental duplication”, and it’s something I find myself teaching junior engineers about quite often. There are a lot of situations where 3-5 lines of many methods follow basically the same pattern, and it can be aggravating to look at. “Don’t repeat you…
Dependencies (coupling) is an important concern to address, but it’s only 1 of 4 criteria that I consider and it’s not the most important one. I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order. I’m willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code mo…
I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make m…
Was looking try something other than my beloved Operator Mono and came across Dank Mono which claims to be a “rather special coding font.” I love it. Looks like the cooler twin of Inconsolata. I remain quite tickled by how many of my co-workers find the italic variants of monospaced fonts ‘disturbin…
Linus Torvalds on git I’d also like to point out that unlike every single horror I’ve ever witnessed when looking closer at SCM products, git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I’m a huge proponent of designing your code around the dat…
When I was little — and by the way, I was little once — my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker. And what this guy had done: he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches. And one day, one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he’d…
No Code is the best way to write secure and reliable applications. Write nothing; deploy nowhere. Start by not writing any code. Brilliant. I love both the presence and contents of the Dockerfile in that repo. As is always the case with such projects, the issues and pull requests are 💯 And if one…
Michael Leggett, lead designer of Gmail from 2008-2012 “It’s like Lucky Charms got spewed all over the screen,” he says to me, as he scrolls through his inbox. It’s true. Folders, contacts, Google apps like Docs and Drive–and at least half a dozen notifications–all clutter Gmail at any given moment…
Good talk by Siteshwar Vashisht at FOSDEM 2019 on maintaining the Korn shell and old codebases in general. I came by his work while reading up on the fish shell. Featured this nugget He talks about how they removed dead/inapplicable code and micro-optimizations, refactored a lot of legacy code, imp…
Via Rotten Tomatoes and with the awesome ChartJS. Dots are episodes, contiguous lines are seasons (static version.) #got-ratings-canvas { -moz-user-select: none; -webkit-user-select: none; -ms-user-select: none; margin: 1.25em 0!important; height: 350px; } /* eslin…
Vicki Boykis’ excellent article on every aspect of ‘Data Science’ I can think of: a little history, employment prospects, skills, education, and continuous learning. It would appear that more than half the job, at least, is wrangling (replicating, cleaning, imputing, transferring, understanding, aug…
Peter Norvig: (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)). See also: HyLang. Looks super cool and always makes me wonder if anyone’s ever used it in production.…
Back in the second century BC, Cato the Elder ended his speeches with the phrase ‘Carthago delenda est,’ which is to say, ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ It didn’t matter what the ostensible topic of the speech was: above all, Carthage must be destroyed. My opinion towards JavaScript is much like Cat…
Via GLP, a University Title Generator that generates “prestigious” titles and associated salaries. A few random gems Associate Coordinator of the Subcommittee for Community Services Deputy Vice President of the Office of Alumni Planning Provost for the Subcommittee for Investor Diversity Vice Chair…
OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them. – Dr. Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Obje…
Garrett Whisten made a most amazing CVS receipt generator (cached). He even wrote a scraper that gets real product names off their website 🙏 🙌…
A pure CSS still life by Ben Evans who appears to be working on an online story with pure CSS illustrations as well. Via Deepu.…
In programming, it is also common to refer to the “NIH syndrome” as the tendency towards reinventing the wheel (reimplementing something that is already available) based on the belief that in-house developments are inherently better suited, more secure, more controlled, quicker to develop, and incu…
A highly configurable, free-for-private-use typeface…
For a single project I made the mistake of working on in my Dropbox folder: Wonder what the downsides are to hardlinking by default. And, fundamentally, why creating an amazing, Python-like standard library is such an intractable problem in the first place. […] core-js is also utils library, qui…
The original comic…
Advent of Code (via BE, 25 challenges.) The Elevator Saga (via co-worker, 18 challenges.)…
Made a “Literary Clock” inspired by Jaap Meijer’s repurposing of an old Kindle. Might not be a bad use for an old iPad. Reminds me that I need to get Mark Formanek’s Standard Time onto a Raspberry Pi at some point. Update 08/24/18 There’s an app (of course)…
Saw this minor dis by Safari and then this video on the history of Java. Also by the author: something of a tribute to Flash (RIP.)…
margin: 0; padding: 0; ... margin: 0 !important; padding: 0 !important; ... sudo margin: 0 !important; sudo padding: 0 !important via @thebarrytone…
This project adds ligatures to Operator Mono, my favorite coding typeface 😍 Fira Code is also very beautiful and ships with ligatures…
XKCD. Add to the mix virtualenvwrapper pyenv pipenv pythonbrew Conda Then there’s Python’s packaging and distribution kerfuffle……
Peruse from time to time to learn more than ye olde {print $3}…
All a typical dev would need to know really.
All these years and I find myself reaching for this reference quite a few times…
I bookmarked this in 2015 and it’s crazy how relevant it continues to be.