Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 20, 2025

• Karl Seguin ☛ Is Zig's New Writer Unsafe?

  But what should the size of buffer be? If this was a one-and-done, maybe we'd leave it empty or put some seemingly sensible default, like 1K or 4K. If it was a mission critical piece of code, maybe we'd benchmark it or make it platform dependent.

• Dayvi Schuster ☛ Dev Culture Is Dying The Curious Developer Is Gone

  If you have been in software development for a while, you might remember a time when developers were launching unique and innovative products and projects just for the sake of curiosity, learning or even just because they had a particular interest in a specific topic.

  This curiosity and problem solving mindset gave us some of the best tools that we still use today such as VLC, Linux, Git, Apache HTTP Server, Docker(arguably), and many many more.

  These tools were not created by large corporations or solopreneurs looking to increase their MMR or ARR. They were created by curious developers who wanted to solve a unique problem they had or even just wanted to learn something new.

• Dayvi Schuster ☛ In Defense of C++

  C++ has often and frequently been criticized for its complexity, steep learning curve, and most of all for its ability to allow the developers using it to not only shoot themselves in the foot, but to blow off their whole leg in the process. But do these criticisms hold up under scrutiny?

  Well, in this blog post, I aim to tackle some of the most common criticisms of C++ and provide a balanced perspective on its strengths and weaknesses.

• Uwe Friedrichsen ☛ The process deadlock

  We discussed the origins of business processes, including the accompanying roles, hierarchies and templates. We saw how they tend to grow and solidify over time, reducing the effectiveness as well as the efficiency of the company even if they were introduced in the first place to improve them.

  We have seen why a process-driven company cannot properly respond to surprises and is not able to adapt to the changing needs of a highly dynamic post-industrial market exhibiting VUCA properties. Finally, we discussed what we need instead to build a resilient organization that is able to adapt and thrive in post-industrial markets.

• Daniel Doubrovkine ☛ Turning Hypermedia APIs into MCPs

  I’ve written and talked extensively about Hypermedia APIs for about a decade. The HATEOAS constraints in representing resources for a RESTful API has numerous advantages in API design, readability, discoverability, and performance over a hand-rolled REST API. Unfortunately, adoption of Hypermedia APIs is very low compared to, for example GraphQL, but I find the implementation a lot simpler and continue adding Hypermedia APIs to my pet projects.

• R / R-Script

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ RcppArmadillo 15.0.2-2 on CRAN: Transition to Armadillo 15

    Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1261 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 41.4 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 647 times according to Google Scholar.

• Python

  • Marijke Luttekes ☛ Use trimmed in Django blocktranslate

    Django offers us the blocktranslate tag to generate expansive or complex translation strings (messages), but it is not without its quirks.