Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 11, 2023

• A Scaffolded Approach into Programming for Arts and Humanities Majors: ITiCSE 2023 Tips and Techniques Papers

  I am presenting two “Tips and Techniques” papers at the ITiCSE 2023 conference in Turku, Finland on Tuesday July 11th. The papers are presenting the same scaffolded sequence of programming languages and activities, just in two different contexts. The complete slide deck in Powerpoint is here. (There’s a lot more in there than just the two talks, so it’s over 100 Mb.)

  When I met with my advisors on our new PCAS courses (see previous blog post), one of the overarching messages was “Don’t scare them off!” Faculty told me that some of my arts and humanities students will be put off by mathematics and may have had negative experiences with (or perceptions of) programming. I was warned to start gently. I developed this pattern as a way of easing into programming, while showing the connections throughout.

• How It All Connects

  I don’t need any expensive plugins, or fancy (read: complicated) code to make this all work. It’s all just RSS, and it’s lovely.

• Testing Podcast Setup, RSS Unstable

  Fortunately my subscribers are technically literate, and I’m certain you all have their RSS readers set to check my feed every day or so rather than every fifteen minutes. If you catch posts appearing and disappearing while I sort this out, maybe check your reader’s settings?

• bridging fuzzing and property testing

  It's been over three years since Fitzgen published: "Announcing Better Support for Fuzzing with Structured Inputs in Rust", and a little over two years since arbitrary 1.0 was released. A few years agoI wrote a property-testing crate based on arbitrary, but never ended up writing about it. So I wanted to take a moment to change that. We'll start by taking a look at automated testing, then cover the different approaches to it, explain how to work with structured inputs, and finally introduce heckcheck - a small property-testing library.

• The easiest way to speed up Python with Rust

  However, if you just want to prototype a Rust extension, packaging and integration boilerplate can get in the way: every extra bit of friction prevents you from just doing the experiment of whether or not Rust will help.

• Lima: a nice way to run Linux VMs on Mac

  This post is very short, it’s just to say that Lima seems nice and much simpler to get started with than Vagrant.