Programming Leftovers
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Rlang ☛ Shockingly-fast data manipulation in R with polars
Hey guys, welcome back to my R-tips newsletter. Polars is NOW available in R! Yes– The shockinlgy-fast data manipulation library built on top of Rust is now in R. Today, I’m excited to show off some of Polar’s capabilities for fast financial and time series analysis. Let’s go!
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Nicolas Magand ☛ What else can I remove?
For the past couple of years, I’ve often asked myself this question: what else can I remove? The context of this is mostly around technology: list of apps installed on my devices, features and UI elements on this website, etc. In a very nerdy quest for eternal improvements and refinements of my use of technology — among other things — I find that asking myself this question helps me focus my efforts.
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Home-cooked, situated software
As a software developer, I mainly consider myself as a “Saturday evening hobbyist”: I love software development but the part of it that I enjoy the most is build small things for myself, my family, my friends and my communities rather than doing full-time professional software development (which I occasionally do to pay the bills).
Explaining it felt bit cumbersome though because it wasn’t easily clear to other people what that meant. That was until I read the notes and later saw the recording for Maggie Appleton’s Home-cooked Software and Barefoot Programmers (blog format) which lead me to learn how different people have described my approach in different ways. In her talk, she talks about how large language models (LLMs) can have a revolutionary impact on how non-professional developers can build software for their need.
I won’t be talking about LLMs but explore the ideas she shared about home-cooked software and how it relates to my relationship with software development and building tools.
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Air Force Times ☛ Drone warfare in Ukraine prompts fresh thinking in helicopter tactics
The vulnerability of combat helicopters has translated into a high number of losses on the Russian side. In February, a report published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies found that the Russian Aerospace Forces had lost 40% of their pre-war Ka-52 Hokum-B attack helicopter fleet.
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The Atlantic ☛ What the Microsoft Outage Reveals
In cases like this one, the fault is less likely to belong to any one engineer than to the inevitable complexity of modern software. Therefore, as Rosenthal and Jones argue—and as I explore in my book Overcomplicated—we must cope with that complexity by using techniques such as chaos engineering instead of trying to engineer it away.
As our world becomes more interconnected by massive systems, we need to be the ones breaking them—over and over again—before the world gets a chance.
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Rlang ☛ King of the Mountain: using R to bag a Strava KOM
One of the best features of Strava is the battle to be King (or Queen) of the Mountain. Originally, in cycling, segments were typically climbs or difficult sections of road, and the simple idea, is who can complete the segment in the quickest time. -
Perl / Raku
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Arne Sommer ☛ Sort of Reverse with Raku
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