Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 22, 2023

• Geshan ☛ There are like nine actual full-stack engineers in the world, and you are NOT one of them

  The term “full-stack engineer” is often thrown around in the software industry, particularly in web development. Let me break the news to you, a real full-stack engineer is a mythical unicorn. In this post, you will learn about how and why there are ~nine actual full-stack engineers in this world, and you are not one of them. Still, you can be very successful in your software engineering career, carry on reading to know how.

• Thorsten Ball ☛ Notes From the Field: Learning Zig

  This was my week off and I wanted to learn some more Zig. What I did: dug into the Zig compiler, wrote toy programs to replicate parts of it, tried to understand the Zig way of doing things. I’ve also spent two days hacking a GTK feature into Ghostty, which is largely written in Zig. Feature is not done yet (god no.), but it’s probably been the most serious Zig coding I’ve done so far.

  So I figured I’d send you some early, rough, subjective thoughts on learning Zig. This is not a comprehensive analysis of Zig and reasons for or against learning it. It’s thoughts that went through my head this week while writing Zig.

• Rlang ☛ All The Right Friends: how does Google Scholar rank co-authors?

  On a scientist’s Google Scholar page, there is a list of co-authors in the sidebar. I’ve often wondered how Google determines in what order these co-authors appear.

  The list of co-authors on a primary author’s page is not exhaustive. It only lists co-authors who also have a Google Scholar profile. They also have to be suggested to the primary author and they need to accept the co-author to list them on the page. Finally, the profile page only displays the first 20 co-authors. Any further co-authors can be seen by clicking “View All”. As I understand it, there is a limit to the number of co-authors a primary author is allowed to have; I currently have 40 and haven’t yet hit a limit. The ranking of co-authors is determined somehow and the first 20 are displayed on the primary author’s profile page, in the sidebar on the right.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.8 on CRAN: QuantLib 1.32 Updates

  The eighth release of the still fairly new qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today.

  qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more.

  This release brings updates from the just-released QuantLib 1.32 version. It also avoids a nag from R during build (“only specify C++14 if you really need it”) but switching to a versioned depends on R 4.2.0 or later. This implies C++14 or later as the default. If you need qlcal on an older R, grab the sources, edit DESCRIPTION to remove this constraint and set the standard as before in src/Makevars (or src/Makevars.win).

• Linux Links ☛ 11 Best Free and Open Source Python Data Validation

  Our recommended tools for performing data validation using Python.