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Programming Leftovers
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Colton Voege ☛ No, AI [sic] is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive
Let's start by looking at the simple math of 10-100x productivity. 10x productivity means ten times the outcomes, not ten times the lines of code. This means what you used to ship in a quarter you now ship in a week and a half. These numbers should make even the truest AI believer pause. The amount of product ideation, story point negotiation, bugfixing, code review, waiting for deployments, testing, and QA in that go into what was traditionally 3 months of work is now getting done in 7 work days? For that to happen each and every one of these bottlenecks has to also seen have 10x productivity gains.
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Daniel Hooper ☛ A Fast, Growable Array With Stable Pointers in C
The core concept is straight forward: items are stored in multiple contiguous segments, and each segment is double the length of its predecessor. New segments are allocated only when needed, and their pointers are kept in a fixed sized array. Here’s how that looks: [...]
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Python
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LWN ☛ On becoming a Python contributor
In the first keynote at EuroPython 2025 in Prague, Savannah Bailey described her path to becoming a CPython core developer in November 2024. She started down that path a few years earlier and her talk was meant to inspire others—not to slavishly follow hers, but to create their own. In the talk, entitled "You don't have to be a compiler engineer to work on Python", she had lots of ideas for those who might be thinking about contributing and are wondering how to do so.
She noted that she had recently gotten married and changed her last name from "Ostrowski"; she is ""a bit in-between last names right now"", she said with a chuckle. Most recently, she has been contributing to the new just-in-time (JIT) compiler for CPython, including as a co-author of PEP 744 ("JIT Compilation"). She is also the maintainer of the argparse module in the standard library, which attendees may ""know, use, love, [or] hate"".
She is the treasurer for the governing board of the Jupyter Foundation and her day job is to work on Python developer experience at Snowflake. As a mostly self-taught developer, she does not have a computer-science degree, which is something that she ""used to be very self-conscious about"" but now sees as a strength.
Most importantly, ""I am a cat mom of three"", complete with a photo of said cats and predictable reactions from the audience. ""What's a keynote without a cat picture?"" That question started something of a competition throughout EuroPython, featuring more cats, naturally, but also dogs, ferrets, and other pets.
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