Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 17, 2023

• Rlang ☛ R lubridate: How To Efficiently Work With Dates and Times in R

  Data analytics and programming don’t often have a lot of things in common. But where they’re almost indistinguishable is the topic of dates. The skill of working with datetimes is an integral part of both areas and is something you’ll want to master sooner rather than later.

  Newcomers often find this area challenging due to the sheer amount of options available, but the truth is that you’ll only need 5% of the functionality on a daily basis, and the rest you can quickly find online. Today, we’ll show you this 5% through a set of 15 useful examples with R lubridate.

• Noel Rappin ☛ Better Know A Ruby Thing Bonus: Contestants and Nesting

  Sorry for skipping a week or two – I was approving copyedits on the book that is now called Programming Ruby 3.3, because we now want to be proactive about the next release.

  Coincidentally, the copyedit review does relate to this newsletter. I noticed a particular code sample as I was going through the book again, and it highlights a feature of Ruby’s constant lookup that I didn’t discuss last time.

• Matt Rickard ☛ Model Merge (Frankenmerge)

  Model merges (sometimes, “frankenmerges”) today are primarily used by hackers, not researchers or big corporations. It’s cheap, dirty, and takes a lot of trial and error.

  The goal of model merging: ideally, combine model understanding of multiple models without an expensive re-training step.

• SICP ☛ Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers

  On this day 80 years ago, 16th November 1943, the villagers of Tyneham near Lulworth was evacuated to allow Allied military forces to prepare for D-Day. Despite promises that the evacuation was temporary, the UK lurched directly from the second world war into the Cold War and decided to keep the land to practice against the new “enemy” and former ally, the Soviet Union. Tyneham remains uninhabited, and remains within a live firing range. People may only visit when the Ministry of Defence are ready for them.

• Zach Flower ☛ Automation for Automation's Sake

  But, as I've grown older, the concept of automation for automation's sake has started to wear on me. Maybe I'm just experiencing some malaise as I approach middle age, but I find it hard to see the point in unnecessary automation anymore. Instead of finding the joy in the act of creating the automation, all I can seem to find is the cost of future maintenance.

  What once had a low bar for action, my "let's automate it" instinct seems to have grown a bit more shrewd over time.

• Shell

  • Abin Simon ☛ Navigating around in your shell

    I have been using terminals for a long time, initially because I thought they looked cool, and later because I genuinely found them to be easier/faster to get stuff done. And since I've been at it for a while, navigating through directories is something I think I've gotten good at. In this blog, I would like to give some tips on ways you can navigate around in your shell quickly.

• Java

  • Why Mutable Members should not be Stored or Returned Directly in Java

    In Java, mutable members (variables whose values can change after object creation) should not be stored or returned directly from a class when dealing with encapsulation and maintaining object integrity.