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Programming Leftovers
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Sean Voisen ☛ Philosophy for Designers 2: Parts and wholes and moments, oh my!
The structural form of parts and wholes serves as a kind of reality check for designers, reminding us to design with the whole in mind. Every time we isolate a component from its context, we may inadvertently create unnecessary complexity. Every specification document that treats a UI element as standalone risks multiplying questions it cannot answer. Every separation of a control from its meaningful context of use risks misleading users. This isn’t to say that working in these ways is always incorrect, unhelpful or harmful. Rather, it reminds us that only working in these ways can indeed lead to these poorer outcomes.
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Bert Hubert ☛ Microstacks or megadependencies over at Webdevcon 2025
tl;dr: A meandering talk that reminds us of the risks of shipping unknown build time dependencies (as from npm), and also highlights how many services now have runtime third party service dependencies. These are very serious choices about the future of a project, and we can wonder how well we are making these choices. Is anyone thinking about the long term costs and impact? The talk then covers “microstacks”, whereby a project relies in a minimal number of build dependencies, and no runtime service dependencies. Interspersed, there is discussion of what this means now that geopolitics has become so exciting, and that it can also be pretty hard to find people that can deliver services based on (virtual) servers & containers. The talk ends up describing one specific microstack based project, and recommends that people consider ‘mesostack’ deployments that have modest dependencies on third party dependencies and services.
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Rlang ☛ Generating Synthetic Data with R-vine Copulas using esgtoolkit in R
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Rlang ☛ Key improvements in shapviz and kernelshap
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Python
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University of Toronto ☛ Our Django model class fields should include private, internal names
Let me tell you about a database design mistake I made in our Django web application for handling requests for Unix accounts. Our current account request app evolved from a series of earlier systems, and one of the things that these earlier systems asked people for was their 'status' with the university; were they visitors, graduate students, undergraduate students, (new) staff, or so on. When I created the current system I copied this and so the database schema includes a 'Status' model class. The only thing I put in this model class was a text field that people picked from in our account request form, and I didn't really think of the text there as what you could call load bearing. It was just a piece of information we asked people for because we'd always asked people for and faithfully duplicating the old CGI was the easy way to implement the web app.
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Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD": Zaphod is now on PyPi as zaphodtex
A quick announcement post.
I had written Zaphod several years ago. It is a python wrapper around LaTeXdiff that enables a Git workflow for generating diffs in LaTeX documents. A demonstration is in the initial announcement post. It lets you generate a diff, and it also lets you pick and choose what bits from the diff you want to incorporate. It does all of this using Git, so no work is every lost, and everything can be undone (or redone).
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R / R-Script
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Michael's and Christian's blog ☛ Key improvements in shapviz and kernelshap
Our two sister packages are continuously being improved. A brief summary of the latest changes: [...]
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