Programming Leftovers
-
Coding skills initiative targets visually-impaired youth
According to a statement, the training and development programme for blind and sighted teachers entails 16 workshops throughout September.
The teachers are equipped with tactile tools, with the Tanks Coding App also used to empower teachers, to help them introduce visually-impaired learners to the world of coding.
The approach is to use physical activities, such as games and pen-and-paper exercises, to enhance 21 century skills, such as problem-solving, strategy, communication, computational thinking and group work, say the organisations.
Bona Africa is a collaborative project between non-profit coding skills development organisation Tangible Africa and the Bona uBuntu Eastern Cape non-profit programme.
Professor Jean Greyling, Tangible Africa founder and head of the department and associate professor at the Nelson Mandela University Computing Sciences Department, saysfunds were raised through a crowd-sourcing drive to support the development of the Bona Africa tools.
-
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.6.4.0 on CRAN: Another Upstream Bugfix
widely used by (currently) 1096 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 30.5 million / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 552 times according
This release brings bugfix upstream release 12.6.4. Conrad prepared this a few days ago; it takes me the usual day or so to run reverse-dependency check against the by-now almost 1100 CRAN packages using RcppArmadillo. And this time, CRAN thought it had found two issues when I submitted and it took two more days til we were all clear about those two being false positives (as can, and does, happen). So today it reached CRAN.
-
What I Have Changed My Mind About in Software Development
Am I changing my mind about enough things? I don’t know. But it is definitely worthwhile to once in a while examine your beliefs about how to develop software. In many of the above cases, it took somebody else to show me, or convince me, of other ways of working. My conclusion is that collaboration and pair programming is important for spreading good ideas.
-
The AWK book’s 60-line version of Make
In the wonderful book The AWK Programming Language by Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan, there are a few pages at the end of chapter 7 that present a simplified version of the Make utility – written in a single page of AWK code.
-
Has Software Development Become Slower?
What about the second line, though? Did software development become “bloated, overengineered, and slow”?
Let’s start with that first adjective – bloated. It comes up again and again in various comments on the internet: software has become bloated, which is used to mean that software uses too much memory, it’s slow, inefficient, and, actually, why do we need all that crap.
-
The roots of an obscure Bourne shell error message
Suppose that you're writing Bourne shell code that involves using some commands in a subshell to capture some information into a shell variable, 'AVAR=$(....)', but you accidentally write it with a space after the '='. Then you will get something like this: [...]
-
Problem Details for HTTP APIs - RFC 7807 is dead, long live RFC 9457
The specification adopts two specific media types as representation indicators, also considering the most used standards at the moment, for data transport, namely JSON and XML; resulting in two registered media types: [...]