Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 16, 2024

• Roman Kashitsyn ☛ Effective design docs

  Design docs are a controversial topic, especially among agile developers who "value working software over comprehensive documentation." Yet, all engineering organizations I worked at in the last decade, from tech giants to lean startups, employed writing design docs as an essential part of the development process.

  This article is an opinionated guide to writing design docs for software projects. It explains why and when to write design docs, how to think like a researcher, how to put words on the page like Neil Gaiman, and why Jane Street rediscovered ideas from the publishing industry.

• Rlang ☛ How to Analyze Your Data Faster With R Using summarytools

  Hey guys, welcome back to my R-tips newsletter. Getting quick insights into your data is absolutely critical to data understanding, predictive modeling, and production. But it can be challenging if you’re just getting started. Today, I’m going to show you how to analyze your data faster using the summarytools package in R. Let’s go!

• Arcan ☛ A Spreadsheet and a Debugger walk into a Shell

  Here we continue the series of posts on the development of a command-line shell which defies terminal emulation by using the display server API locally and a purpose built network protocol remotely.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppFastAD 0.0.3 on CRAN: Updated

  A new release 0.0.3 of the RcppFastAD package by James Yang and myself is now on CRAN.

  RcppFastAD wraps the FastAD header-only C++ library by James which provides a C++ implementation of both forward and reverse mode of automatic differentiation. It offers an easy-to-use header library (which we wrapped here) that is both lightweight and performant.

• Python

  • Simon Willison ☛ UV — I am (somewhat) sold

  • The New Stack ☛ Python Try … Except: What It Is and How to Use It

    The more complicated your code, the more you’ll depend on dealing with exceptions.

  • The New Stack ☛ How to Use Comments in Your Python Code (And Why You Should)

    I’ve been writing about Python for some time now, starting from the very simple first steps and migrating toward more

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Arcan ☛ A Spreadsheet and a Debugger walk into a Shell

    Here we continue the series of posts on the development of a command-line shell which defies terminal emulation by using the display server API locally and a purpose built network protocol remotely.

    For this round we have added an interactive spreadsheet representation and a Debug Adapter Protocol implementation. These come as two discrete sets of builtins (groups of commands), ‘dev’ and ‘spreadsheet’ with a surprise interaction or two.