Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 05, 2025

• Den Odell ☛ Escape Velocity: Break Free from Framework Gravity — Den Odell

  The problem isn’t React itself, nor any other framework for that matter. The problem is the inertia that sets in once any framework becomes infrastructure. By that point, it’s “too important to fail,” and everything nearby turns out to be just fragile enough to prove it.

• [Old] Volodymyr Gubarkov ☛ Using GAWK coprocess to speed up the script 50x | Volodymyr Gubarkov

  Note, the conversion hex → dec is done via bc.

  Why is that? Well, it appears, that if you do it in native GAWK, you’ll get the incorrect result due to the precision loss: [...]

• [Old] Volodymyr Gubarkov ☛ AWK technical notes

  In the previous article Fascination with AWK we discussed why AWK is great for prototyping and is often the best alternative to the shell and Python. In this article I want to show you some interesting technical facts I learned about AWK.

• Daniel De Laney ☛ Free software scares normal people

  People benefit from stuff like this, and I challenge you to make more of it. Opportunities are everywhere. The world is full of media servers normal people can’t set up. Free audio editing software that requires hours of learning to be useful for simple tasks. Network monitoring tools that seem designed to ward off the uninitiated. Great stuff normal people don’t use. All because there’s only one UI, and it’s designed to do everything.

  80% of the people only need 20% of the features. Hide the rest from them and you’ll make them more productive and happy. That’s really all it takes.

• [Old] Leandro Proença ☛ You don't need Kafka: Building a message queue with only two UNIX signals - Leandro Proença

  Yes, we built a message broker using nothing but UNIX signals and a bit of Ruby magic. Sure, it’s not production-ready, and you definitely shouldn’t use this in your next startup (please don’t), but that was never the point.

  The real takeaway here isn’t the broker itself: it’s understanding how the fundamentals work. We explored binary operations, UNIX signals, and IPC in a hands-on way that most people never bother with.

  We took something “useless” and made it work, just for fun. So next time someone asks you about message brokers, you can casually mention that you once built (or saw) one using just two signals. And if they look at you weird, well, that’s their problem. Now go build something equally useless and amazing. The world needs more hackers who experiment just for the fun of it.

• Dan MacKinlay ☛ Snakemake

  Wherein a build tool is described as a DAG‑driven workflow manager for reproducible analyses, with cluster profiles used to submit jobs to Slurm and other schedulers, and container support is noted.

• LWN ☛ A new kernel port — to WebAssembly

  Joel Severin has announced

  the availability of his port of the GNU/Linux kernel to WebAssembly; one can go

  to this page and

  watch it boot in a browser.

• Rlang ☛ An Introduction to Writing Your Own ggplot2 Geoms

  If you use ggplot2, you are probably used to creating plots with geom_line() and geom_point(). You may also have ventured into to the broader ggplot2 ecosystem to use geoms like geom_density_ridges() from ggridges or geom_signif() from ggsignif.

• Rlang ☛ Behavior-Driven Development in R Shiny: Setting Up Test Preconditions with Given Steps

  Learn how to set up test preconditions in Shiny BDD using Given steps. Master dependency injection, test doubles, and composable setup patterns for reliable R testing.

• Rlang ☛ Highlights from Shiny in Production (2025)

  This October, Jumping Rivers hosted the fourth installment of our conference “Shiny In Production”.
  

• Rlang ☛ maestro 0.7.0 introduces conditional pipelines

  The 0.7.0 release of maestro is out, and with it is the ability to conditionally run pipelines.

• AdaCore ☛ A New Booklet on AdaCore Technologies for Airborne Software

  AdaCore has posted a new version of its booklet AdaCore Technologies for Airborne Software: Supporting certification and tool qualification for DO-178C/ED-12C. This edition reflects the updates and enhancements to AdaCore’s toolsuites since the publication of the original booklet. It summarizes the DO-178C/ED-12C documentation suite (the core standard, its supplements, and the accompanying tool qualification guidance), explains AdaCore’s tools and technologies (the Ada and SPARK languages, the GNAT Pro development environments, and the static and dynamic analysis suites), and correlates these tools and technologies with specific objectives in DO-178C/ED-12C and its associated standards.

• Google Summer of Code 2025 Conclusion

  This year we again participated in Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code and we had 12 successful projects.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppCNPy 0.2.14 on CRAN: Minor Maintenance

  Another (again somewhat minor) maintenance release of the RcppCNPy package arrived on CRAN just now. RcppCNPy provides R with read and write access to NumPy files thanks to the cnpy library by Carl Rogers along with Rcpp for the glue to R.

• Perl / Raku

  • Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2025.44 Jimmy Wales on Audrey Tang

    The Seven Rules of Trust Andrew Shitov says:- I wanted to draw your attention to this new book by J. Wales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Rules_of_Trust. But actually to a part of the last chapter, where he mentioned Audrey Tang.

• Python

  • The New Stack ☛ Build Your First HTTP Server in Python

    There’s more to learn as this is a deep topic, but at this point, we’re ready to start building.

  • Reuven Lerner ☛ Want to learn uv?

    But using uv isn’t just about learning a few commands. It’s about changing how you think about packaging, and what commands you run on a regular basis.

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ sigmf-toolkit – Daniel Estévez

    I have published a new Python package called sigmf-toolkit. It is intended to be a collection of Python tools to work with SigMF files. At the moment it only contains two tools, but I plan on adding more tools to this package as the needs arise. These tools are: [...]

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Jeff Quast ☛ State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

    This is a follow-up to my previous article, Terminal Emulators Battle Royale – Unicode Edition! from 2023, in which I documented Unicode support across terminal emulators. Since then, the ucs-detect tool and its supporting blessed library have been extended to automatically detect support of DEC Private Modes, sixel graphics, pixel size, and software version.

    The ucs-detect program tests terminal cursor positioning by sending visible text followed by control sequences that request the cursor position. The terminal responds by writing the cursor location as simulated keyboard input. The ucs-detect program reads and compares these values against the Python wcwidth library result, logging any discrepancies.

  • [Old] Jeff Quast ☛ Terminal Emulators Battle Royale – Unicode Edition! · Articles

    It turns out that Unicode support in Terminals is a lot more difficult than it first appears. A quick overview of special support for Unicode characters in Terminals: [...]