Programming Leftovers
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Thorsten Ball ☛ The Basics
Here’s what I consider to be the basics. I call them that not because they’re easy, but because they’re fundamental. The foundation on which your advanced skills and expertise rest. Multipliers and nullifiers, makers and breakers of everything you do.
They don’t usually show up in technical books and yet without them a lot of brilliant effort can go to waste. I constantly have to remind myself of them, sitting on my own shoulder and wagging a finger in my face.
Here they are: [...]
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Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Thinking inside the box
littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only began to do in recent years.
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Rlang ☛ Little useless-useful R functions – Reverse Hello World
You know the feeling after long vacation and finally sitting in front of your favourite UI and even forgot how to write simplest “hello world” or “foo bar” function? Well, we got you covered! The reverse Hello world function is for all the people returning to the office after rather long vacation.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Simon Willison ☛ Building and testing C extensions for SQLite with ChatGPT Code Interpreter
I was thinking this morning about vector similarity, and how I really like the pattern of storing encoded floating point vectors in BLOB columns in a SQLite database table and then using a custom SQL function to decode them and calculate cosine similarity between them.
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Jamie Brandon ☛ Miscellaneous ideas
Last week I helped a friend who was struggling to write a relatively simple query against some sparse data in hive. Despite understanding exactly why the query was awkward in sql, my first attempt was also wrong. Even with the correct query, hive's query planner duplicated the CTEs so that each reference to a CTE in the query ended up recomputing the CTE from scratch. This kind of interactive data exploration and analysis seems like a good crack in which to insert a non-sql wedge: the query planning and execution is not as high-quality as in the database world, the data is already accesible to 3rd party tooks, queries are being written by humans rather than BI tools, and queries are written often and interactively so the pain is repeatedly felt.
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Education
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Kodi Foundation ☛ DevCon 2024 - Budapest - Part II
Good morning, dear reader (okay, "readers" - I'll be generous, and assume there's more than one of you!). It's a beautiful day, the skies are an endless sea of blue, the forecast is a congenial 20℃ spring day - and we're back in a sealed room, and ready to get going with Day Two of this year's DevCon.
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