Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 29, 2024

• Bill Mill ☛ Serving a billion web requests with boring code

  We released after about a year of development, and were able to help millions of people find and purchase health care - if you're in the US, you are pretty likely to know somebody who used this system.

  Though the US health care system is incredibly awful in many respects, I'm very proud of what the team I worked with was able to build in a short time frame and under a lot of constraints.

  The team of people that I worked with - managers, designers, engineers and business analysts - were excellent from top to bottom. I've never before experienced such a dedicated, collaborative, trusting team, and I learned a tremendous amount from them.

  I especially want to share this story because I want to show that quality software can get written under government constraints. It can! And if we all start believing that it can, we're more likely to produce it.

• Rlang ☛ How to load and save vector data in R

  If you have spatial vector data and are wondering how to load / save it in R, this tutorial is the answer to your questions. It presents practical examples for the most popular formats using the sf package. We will use free vector layers from Natural Earth as a data source.

• Godot Engine ☛ Godot Community Poll 2024

  We want to learn more about the Godot community, understand who the users of the engine are, and find out how we can better support you.

• Rlang ☛ SHAP Values of Additive Models

  This post investigates properties of SHAP values of additive models.

• Rlang ☛ Shiny ducks: connecting to MotherDuck from Shiny

  In a previous post I wrote about how to connect to MotherDuck from R. However, the process described there, where you click in the browser to authenticate, wouldn’t really work with a Shiny app, or for that matter with any productionized setup.

• Rlang ☛ Evaluation of the UEFA Euro 2024 group stage forecast

  How surprising was the group stage?

• Python

  • Stuart Ellis ☛ Modern Good Practices for Python Development · Field Notes

    Python has a long history, and it has evolved over time. This article describes some agreed modern best practices.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME ☛ Christian Hergert: Bisect’ing outside of the box

  There is a sort of thrill to a bug hunt once you dig your heels in deep enough. This is one of those stories.

  Earlier in the week a fellow Red Hatter messaged me about a bug in Ptyxis where if you right click on a tab, the tab stays in the active state. Clearly not a very good look. My immediate thought was that we don’t do anything special there, so maybe the issue is lower in the stack.

  Oopsie!

  Libadwaita?

  The first layer beneath that is of course libadwaita and so naturally I’ll test Text Editor to see if I get the same behavior. Lo-and-behold it exists there. Cool, file an issue in libadwaita while I simultaneously see if I can fix it.

  Nothing stands out too obvious, but I try a few things which make it slightly better but I can still get into this state with enough attempts. Bummer. Also, Alice thinks the real issue is in GTK because we’ve seen this in a number of places. It appears to be something wrong with active state tracking.

  GTK?

  No worries, I know that code-base well, so we hop on over there and see what is going on. First things first though, where does active state tracking happen? A quick git grep later we see it is largely in gtkmain.c in response to incoming GdkEvent.

  GTK or GDK?