Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 30, 2025

• Leon Mika ☛ Merge Schema Changes Only When The Implementation Is Ready

  For anyone working on gRPC or other technologies that involve generating code from a schema, may I recommend this approach to integration. If what you’re working on involves a change the schema along with a change the implementation, then when it comes time to merging your changes to main, merge them at the same time. You can raise the merge request for the schema changes when they’re ready, and have others look at it while you work on the implementation, but hold off from pushing that “Merge” button until the implementation is also ready to merge.

• Alisa Sireneva ☛ Why performance optimization is hard work

  I’m not talking about skill, knowledge, or convincing a world focused on radical acceleration that optimization is necessary. Performance optimization is hard because it’s fundamentally a brute-force task, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  This post is a bit of a rant on my frustrations with code optimization. I’ll also try to give actionable advice, which I hope enchants your experience.

• Yoshua Wuyts ☛ Syntactic musings on match expressions

  One of the things that stands out to me is how similar match and if..else are semantically, while being diverging a fair bit syntactically. The reasons for that seem mostly accidental, and I have a sneaking suspicion we could make things a little easier by making both constructs look more similar.

• Chris ☛ Reading GHC Errors

  Whenever there’s a compilation error, ghc tends to spit out a wall of text. Experienced Haskell users know quickly which pieces of this wall of text are informative, and which can be ignored. This is my attempt at helping beginners learn that skill.

  This article is a collection of a few error messages I got in one session of writing a hobby project, and how I chose to read them.

• [Old] Julik Tarkhanov ☛ A Supermarket Bag And a Truckload Of FOMO

  A more important lesson

  …for me - is to mute the influencers. There is a list of a handful of folks - they are good folks, but what they are doing is absolutely toxic for what I need to do - namely, build stuff. So I am not only going to go all @levelsio on it and ignore the “best practice” advice – I will also mute all of them. I don’t want to second-guess myself at every bundle add and every brew install. I don’t want to go to sleep with an anxiety that every new tech is going to make me unhireable. And I don’t want to end every day with a feeling that I am a bad developer just because I don’t use nuxt-tailwind-immer-zod-whatever.

  Because I know that I can do just fine. If I am allowed space to build.

  I know they are not doing this out of malice, but I have to protect my creative spirits at least to some extent.

• Qt ☛ Qt for Android Automotive 6.9 Released

  Today, we released Qt for Android Automotive 6.9 release. It builds upon Qt 6.9 which by itself bring a myriad of new features and bug fixes. You can check the full list of features in Qt 6.9 Released blog post.

• LWN ☛ Meson 1.8.0 released

  Version 1.8.0 of the Meson build system has been released. Notable changes in this release include the ability to run rustdoc for Rust projects, support for the c2y and gnu2y compiler options, and a new argument (android_exe_type) that makes it possible to use the same meson.build file for Android and non-Android systems.

• Rlang ☛ sumdiff: Sum Minus Difference

  Exercise template for a very basic arithmetic task, namely computing the sum of two random numbers minus their difference.

• Rlang ☛ Spatial machine learning with R: caret, tidymodels, and mlr3

  This is the first part of a blog post series on spatial machine learning with R.

• Python

  • batteryinfo: A Rust-Powered Python Package for Laptop Battery Monitoring

    Curious about my laptop’s battery details and unsatisfied with the limited info most tools provide, I built batteryinfo, a cross-platform Python package using Rust, which lets Python developers access comprehensive battery stats like state, capacity, voltage, and much more.

  • The New Stack ☛ Basic Python Syntax: A Beginner’s Guide To Writing Python Code

    Every programming language has a unique syntax. Some languages borrow syntax from others, while others create something wholly different.