Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 07, 2025

• Julik Tarkhanov ☛ The little Random that could

  My personal answer to that question, however, would be Random. To me, Random is a unsung hero of a very large slice of the work we need to do in web application, especially so when we need things to be deterministic and testable. So, let’s examine this little jewel a bit closer.

• J Kenneth King ☛ Trying Zig by Implementing CHIP-8

  I have watched the development of Zig way back in the early days when it was just Andrew Kelley posting his development streams. The idea was straight-forward: take the best parts of C, leave behind the warts, and make it easy to use. His enthusiasm for the subject and the progress he was making kept me watching. I’ve been following Zig from the side lines ever since.

  Some time ago I decided I wanted to try Zig on something small in scope but serious enough that I would be forced out of tutorials and have to think for myself. I’ve always maintained an interest in older computing platforms and systems so I thought I’d try an emulator. Only I didn’t want to start on the NES or even the GameBoy, I needed something even smaller. I needed CHIP-8!

• Brandon Rozek ☛ Flattening Cases to Avoid Nesting in Lean 4

  Nested cases in proofs increase cognitive load for the reader since they have to process not only the case recently stated but also all the case splits prior. That’s why if I can, I prefer to flatten out my cases so that we can see in one step all the variables we’re segmenting.

  I came across this recently in Lean when working on Lattice proofs over integers with $\infty$ and $-\infty$ In Lean, we can define this “extended integer” (EInt) by using WithTop and WithBot

• Andrew Healey ☛ Compiling a Forth

  I was curious how Forth worked so I built a bytecode compiler and a VM for a Forth-like language, as well as some visualizations to show how it all works.

  You don't need to know anything about Forth to follow along, aside from the fact it's a stack-oriented language.

• [Old] Gabriel Garrido ☛ Simple automated deployments using git push

  Using git push remains one of my favorite ways of deploying software. It’s simple, effective, and you can stretch it significantly until you need more complex workflows.

  I’m not referring to using git push to trigger a Github action which builds and deploys software. I’m talking about using git push web main to deploy your main branch to a server that you’ve named web.

• Education

  • Paolo Melchiorre ☛ My DjangoCon US 2025

    Like every time after a conference I feel the need to recharge and resume all the commitments put on hold and I end up letting too much time pass for it to make sense to publish an article about my experience.

    This year however I decided to embrace the approach of not waiting to have something perfect, so I decided to publish an article with all the Mastodon posts related to my experience in Chicago. Many of the people I met and the experiences I had are missing but the main ones are there.

• Python

  • Paolo Melchiorre ☛ Django: one ORM to rule all databases 💍

    In this article, I want to give a clear and practical comparison of the main Django ORM features across the main native database backends: PostgreSQL, SQLite, MariaDB, MySQL, and Oracle.

    My goal is to help you see quickly where each database works well and where it has some limits. I also hope this can be useful for anyone who wants to improve Django, or just understand it better.