Programming/Development and Education

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 11, 2025

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Row the Distance with Raku - Arne Sommer

    Write a script to find the highest row sum in the given matrix.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Nick Heer ☛ When All You Have Is a Robots.txt Hammer

    Last year, Robb Knight figured out how Perplexity, an artificial intelligence search engine, was evading instructions not to crawl particular sites. Knight learned that Perplexity’s engine would use an unlisted user agent to scrape summaries of pages on websites where Perplexity was blocked. In my testing, I found the summaries were outdated by hours-to-days, indicating to me the pages were not being actively visited as though guided by a user. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, told Mark Sullivan, of Fast Company, it was the fault of a third-party crawler and denied wrongdoing.

  • Médialab Sciences Po ☛ A love letter to the CSV format

    Every month or so, a new blog article declaring the near demise of CSV in favor of some "obviously superior" format (parquet, newline-delimited JSON, MessagePack records etc.) find its ways to the reader's eyes. Sadly those articles often offer a very narrow and biased comparison and often fail to understand what makes CSV a seemingly unkillable staple of data serialization.

    It is therefore my intention, through this article, to write a love letter to this data format, often criticized for the wrong reasons, even more so when it is somehow deemed "cool" to hate on it. My point is not, far from it, to say that CSV is a silver bullet but rather to shine a light on some of the format's sometimes overlooked strengths.

• R / R-Script

  • TomazTsql ☛ Little useless-useful R functions – Markov babbler

    This one is named, yes, you guessed it, after Markov chains. 🙂 The babbler is there to connotate the simplicity of useless R function.

    It’s simple calculation of probability of words chaining and drawing the multiple times appeared chained words reminds of markov chain (although this is not it!).

• Education

  • Remkus de Vries ☛ I Created The Course I Wish Existed 10 Years Ago

    After 20+ years of working with WordPress, building, optimizing, securing, scaling, and fixing sites others gave up on, I’ve finally put everything I know about performance into one course.

    It’s called Make WordPress Fast.

    And today, the prelaunch is open.

    This is the first course I’ve ever released, and I didn’t want it to be “just another WordPress course.” So I built the one I wish someone had handed me when I started taking performance seriously. Covering all layers, not just the “add a cachings plugin” layer.

    Let me explain why.

  • Arduino ☛ The Things Conference 2025: shape the future of IoT with Arduino!

    We’re excited to announce that the Arduino team is returning to Amsterdam as an ecosystem partner at The Things Conference 2025, the world’s leading LoRaWAN event, taking place September 23rd-24th. This year, we’re bringing more tech, more insights, and more real-world use cases than ever – to give you all the tools you need to future-proof your innovation.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Our summer travel diary

    Welcome to the ‘ber months! If you don’t think the ‘ber months are the best time of the year, you are wrong. However, we did have an epic summer of travel and community outreach. Every Raspberry Pi fan who came up to our booths, the hundreds of handshakes shared between us, and the gazillions of stickers and merch items handed out made for a memorable few months. Here are some highlights and a look ahead to an even busier autumn.