Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 30, 2025

• Daniel Stenberg ☛ Decomplexification

  I believe we generally accept the truth that we should write simple and easy to read code in order to make it harder to create bugs and cause security problems. The more complicated code we write, the easier it gets to slip up, misunderstand or forget something along the line.

  And yet, at the same time, over time functions tend to grow and become more and more complicated as we address edge cases and add new funky features we did not anticipate when we first created the code many decades ago.

• The New Stack ☛ Why CI/CD Alone Won’t Cut It for Infrastructure as Code

  In a recent survey commissioned by Spacelift, 45% of organizations believe they have a high level of infrastructure automation, but only 14% do. There’s a huge gap between perception and reality. Companies think they’re operating at a mature level, but in practice, they’re still running into the same pitfalls: inconsistency, governance struggles, and the classic tradeoff between speed and control.

• Collabora ☛ Breaking language barriers 2.0: Moving closer towards fully reliable, production-ready Hindi ASR

  After cleaning up and expanding Whisper-Hindi to 3,000 hours, we now have explicit timestamp prediction, faster I/O, and fine-tuned models across all sizes, bringing us even closer to fully reliable, production-ready Hindi ASR.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppDate 0.0.6: New Upstream

  RcppDate wraps the featureful date library written by Howard Hinnant for use with R. This header-only modern C++ library has been in pretty wide-spread use for a while now, and adds to C++11/C++14/C++17 what will is (with minor modifications) the ‘date’ library in C++20.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: #48: r2u Talk Re-Recorded

  R⁴ series, and to video 8 in this series.

  Last week I had the honour of giving the opening talk at the 11eme Rencontres R at the Université de Mons in Belgium as an invited plenary talk. Big thanks again to Philippe Grosjean and Kathy Huet for the invitation, and for organising a lovely conference.