Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 02, 2024

• Nick Heer ☛ The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age – Pixel Envy

  I loved this essay from Thea Lim, as published in the Walrus, about our quantified digital lives subsuming our reality, but I have a quibble with this otherwise excellent paragraph:

• Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Rust needs a web framework for lazy developers

  I like to make silly things, and I also like to put in minimal effort for those silly things. I also like to make things in Rust, mostly for the web, and this is where we run into a problem.

  See, if I want to make something for the web, I could use Django but I don't want that. I mean, Django is for building serious businesses, not for building silly non-commercial things! But using Rust, we have to do a lot more work than if we build it with Django or friends.

• Hope in Source ☛ Hope in Source

  What is the state of modern software now, and how is it like losing at Tetris? Stephen Kell joins Henry to chat about Ivan Illich's thought (counter-productivity, radical monopoly, critique of institutions) applied to software! We talk about the software/hardware arms race, how our default is more is better, tech being all-consuming, tyranny of updates. (recorded in Dec 2020) (42 min)

• Python

  • Paul Chochrane ☛ A dinosaur learns poetry

    I’m a bit of a dinosaur. Well, I feel like one at times. I mean, I’ve been using Python since version 1.5 and that makes me feel old. Also, up until recently, I didn’t know that poetry was a big thing in the Python world for project dependency management.2 The things ya learn.

    Many years ago, I’d learned how to use requirements files after having read Test Driven Development in Python by Harry Percival (first edition).3 Since then, I’d simply continued using them. I’d heard of poetry over the years, but never really had any time to dig deeper. I guess that’s one of the downsides to being constantly snowed under at work. Strangely enough, now that I’ve gone freelance,4 I seem to have found the headspace to take more notice of such things. Maybe I just needed a change in scenery.

    Over the past few months, I’ve read a few blog posts mentioning poetry,5 and I thought I’d check it out. Here’s what I’ve learned and how (as far as I can tell) one should set up poetry on a pre-existing project.

    Please note that I’m aware that uv is the shiny new replacement for poetry that “everyone” seems to be talking about and moving to now. Let me catch up with one thing at a time, ok?

• Rust

  • JYN ☛ the rust project has a burnout problem

    the number of people who have left the rust project due to burnout is shockingly high. the number of people in the project who are close to burnout is also shockingly high.

    this post is about myself, but it's not just about myself. i'm not going to name names because either you know what i'm talking about, in which case you know at least five people matching this description, or you don't, in which case sorry but you're not the target audience. consider, though, that the project has been around for 15 years, and compare that to the average time a maintainer has been active ...

• Standards/Consortia

  • Trail of Bits ☛ Securing the software supply chain with the SLSA framework

    SLSA is a security standard that helps a consumer verify the process by which an open-source software artifact was created. Its cornerstone is a provenance file, a document signed by a build platform attesting to how a binary, container image, or other file was generated from source code through a project-specific build pipeline. However, SLSA is a relatively new standard (version 1.0 was released in April 2023), and in order for its benefits to be fully realized, multiple parties need to adopt and implement it. In addition to the technical work involved, it will also take time to build awareness and drive demand for SLSA-compliant tooling.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Celebrating Coolest Projects 2024, plus dates for 2025

    We share what young people and mentors told us about the benefits of Coolest Projects 2025, and announce the dates for the 2025 showcases.