Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 17, 2025

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Burst-driven Development: My Approach to OSS Projects Maintenance

  I’ve been working on OSS projects for almost 15 years now. Things are simple in the beginning - you’ve got a single project, no users to worry about and all the time and the focus in world. Things changed quite a bit for me over the years and today I’m the maintainer of a couple of dozen OSS projects in the realms of Emacs, Clojure and Ruby mostly.

• Ned Batchelder ☛ Why your mock breaks later

  That blog post explained why that rule was important: often a mock doesn’t work at all if you do it wrong. But in some cases, the mock will work even if you don’t follow this rule, and then it can break much later. Why?

• [Old] Balthazar Rouberol ☛ Just enough Makefile to be dangerous

  Over the years, I have developed a bit of a love-hate relationship with make. On the plus side, it is ubiquitous, preinstalled on most UNIX systems, and widely used. On the other hand, its syntax can feel arcane and clunky, and it can prove hard to debug. In this article, I will go over the basic make concepts, and the set of best practices I've come to embrace as my own, to make make enjoyable to use.

  Let's start with the beginning.

• Rlang ☛ container: v1.1.0 on CRAN

  The {container} package provides an enhanced version of base R's list.
  

• Python

  • Dan MacKinlay ☛ Parsl

    I recently switched my primary workflow engine from Snakemake to Parsl (Parallel Scripting Library). Parsl is not highly promoted and it doesn’t have many sexy hipster deisgn patterns or, indeed, much graphic design about its internet present. However, it turns out to solve a lot of my problems.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Benjamin Esham ☛ Making direnv easier on the eyes – Benjamin Esham

    Direnv is a utility that makes it easy to set and unset environment variables as you move between directories on the command line. It works great, but its output can be a bit noisy. For some projects I use direnv with Lorri to set an entire Nix shell’s worth of environment variables, and when I cd into one of these projects direnv produces a lot of output: [...]

• Java/Golang

  • Redowan Delowar ☛ Re-exec testing Go subprocesses

    When testing Go code that spawns subprocesses, you usually have three options.

  • Nicolas Fränkel ☛ Are you really wasting your time in Java without these 10 libraries?

    I recently read and shared You’re Wasting Time in Java Without These 10 Libraries. I commented on it a bit in my newsletter, but given the amount and intensity of reactions, I think a full-blown post is in order. The referenced libraries are: [...]