Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 05, 2025

• Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.120 released

  Version 0.120 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated): [...]

• Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging: The Blue Door

  I've got two chunky features I'm working on for two clients at the moment. One is fun, and one is absolutely tedious. Because I am an idiot, I finished the fun one yesterday and still have about half the tedious one left.

• Dayvi Schuster ☛ Is Odin Just a More Boring C?

  My recent posts have been diving deep into Zig and C, a shift from my earlier focus on React and JavaScript. This isn’t a pivot but a return to my roots. I started programming at 13 with C and C++, and over the years, I’ve built a wide range of projects in systems programming languages like C, C++, Rust, and now Zig. From hobby experiments and custom Linux utilities to professional embedded systems work think vehicle infotainment, tracking solutions, and low-level components I’ve always been drawn to the power and precision of systems programming. Alongside this, I’ve crafted tools for my own environment and tackled plenty of backend engineering, blending my full-stack expertise with a passion for low-level control.

• Colin Leroy-Mira ☛ Optimizing a 6502 image decoder – part II: assembly

  In the first part of this article, I focused on the algorithm itself, removing parts I wouldn’t use (like color), making it simpler, less loopy, etc. This yielded a ten-times improvement on a modern architecture, but would still be very slow if simply translated to assembly by a compiler like cc65.

• Frederick J Ross ☛ Getting better at software engineering

  Given that diversity, is there some kind of map of the cliff face that we can give a young software engineer to know what “getting better” can look like for them? It might be tempting to set out a checklist of stuff to learn, one after another, or a set of areas and what you need to learn to level up in each area. I’m not convinced that there are useful levels, especially that make sense for the whole of our field. After dredging through the literature, looking for some kind of principled way to addres this, I gave up trying to build a giant table. All I’m after is a taxonomy that is simple enough to be useful and comprehensive enough to provide a guide to more than a narrow part of software engineering. My highly idiosyncratic list of categories is: [...]

• Simon Ser ☛ Simon Ser: Announcing vali, a C library for Varlink

  In the past months I’ve been working on vali, a C library for Varlink. Today I’m publishing the first vali release! I’d like to explain how to use it for readers who aren’t especially familiar with Varlink, and describe some interesting API design decisions.

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Reverse Broken Again with Raku

    You are given a string containing English letters only and also you are given broken keys.

    Write a script to return the total words in the given sentence can be typed completely.

• Java/Golang

  • Rui Carmo ☛ Go (lang) - Tao of Mac

    A great systems-oriented programming language I’ve taken up to complement Python due to its ability to cross-compile and produce (mostly) self-contained static binaries.