Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 25, 2024

• Vadim Kravcenko ☛ Security at Startup

  In my opinion, security is one of the most forgotten aspects of software engineering. It rarely gets focused on until it’s too late. Even though at least one incident lands on HackerNews every week where some data gets leaked or someone gets hacked — people still think, “Nobody cares about my little startup.” You might think you're too small to be noticed by the big, evil hackers. Wrong. Size doesn't matter. You're always a target; there’s always data to leak and ways to exploit your business.

• Otávio C ☛ SwiftLint

  As the name suggests, SwiftLint is a tool used by the Swift community to enforce certain rules, styles, and conventions. And although I use SwiftLint in my own projects, its real value shows when used in a shared codebase. Code reviews, for instance, are expensive, requiring a lot of back-and-forth between the engineer who submitted the code for review and the reviewers. Quite frequently, the suggestions from reviewers are related to coding style and conventions, wasting everyone’s time.

  Team opinion should be automated whenever possible, reducing the time wasted in code reviews and leaving the practice for what really matters: logic, performance, code design, and architecture.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ A Local-first Codebase Opens the Door to More Collaborators

  When every single feature you build has to scaffold the lifecycle around fetching, updating, and revalidating the data that’s being changed, you alienate people who could otherwise collaborate on the front-end because they don’t know how to build the show spinner -> fetch -> render -> update -> show spinner -> revalidate loop (we spend a lot of time and effort on the coordination problem).

• Rlang ☛ The Crucial Role of Release Control in R for Healthcare Organizations

  Here is what we have: four companies and four somewhat complex bespoke solutions. It seems likely that if we interviewed a hundred representatives from a hundred different companies we would get at least a hundred different solutions. It is also not difficult to imagine that multiple protocols for managing R and package versions imposed a fairly complex project management solution on the FDA as it simultaneously deals with submissions from multiple sponsors.

• DataGeeek ☛ Polynomial Support Vector Machines: Why Warner Music Entering the South Asia Market?

  The Warner Music Group launched a new company in April, Warner Music South Asia targeting region markets that include Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The company thought that the region was populated and diverse. I will analyze the reasons behind that decision based on some economic data related to South Asia.

• Otávio C ☛ Replacing Type Methods to Improve Testability

  Whether we like them or not, type methods, also known as class methods or static methods, are heavily used in Swift and are part of our daily lives as engineers.

  From analytics trackers to requesting system permissions, we’ve all encountered type methods from external libraries that we have no control over. Testing code that interacts with them might seem difficult without using method swizzling, but fortunately, this isn’t always the case.

• James G ☛ Sketching algorithms in separate files

  I knew that this would be a complex task: tracking incremental changes would not be easy. There was one part of the project in particular that I was trying to reason through. I wondered how I could add incremental build support for data files. Data files are single files that contain records. Each record gets a file. A single data file could have 5,000 records. How would I deduplicate?

• Perl / Raku

  • Rakulang ☛ 2024.26 CCR Matters

    A potential defacement of a blog spotted by Ralph Mellor, showed the importance of the Raku Collect, Conserve and Remaster Project. So if you’re looking around for something to do in the holiday season (or any other time of the year): any work on this project would be deeply appreciated!

  • [Old] PerlMonks ☛ Parsing Ada Based Constants

    While this worked fine for what was needed, some one asked "Why didn't you make a proper implementation?" My reply, of course, was "This serves our needs" and left it as is. For about a week. My thoughts kept drifting back to it, so I gave in and said "Challenge accepted."

    So, I made the "proper implementation" per the Ada standard, including floating point conversion. There is a base converter in CPAN I might have used, but Horner's Method is simple and efficient - and almost habitual to use. I haven't tested whether using a hash or using index (with lc or uc) would be more efficient. I used a hash.

• Java

  • Frank Delporte ☛ Links of the BeJUG Presentation: Lessons Learned from #JavaOnRaspberryPi

    I started experimenting with Java on the Raspberry Pi a few years ago because I wanted to learn if I could control electronic components with my favorite programming language. The short answer is: of course! But during that journey, I learned a lot more, and I want to share that with you…