Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 09, 2025

• Yordi Verkroost ☛ Advent of Code 2025 - Day 8

  Ah yes, there it is. The 3D-grid. I was wondering when it would reappear from the depths of the Advent of Code caves.

  Prepare for battle.

• Roman Kashitsyn ☛ IC internals: replicated state machine

  Like all blockchains, the Internet Computer relies on state machine replication for fault-tolerance. This article highlights its two differences from most blockchains: restricted access to the network state and support for efficient fault recovery via state checkpoints.

• Idiomdrottning ☛ Call by value but the value is two pointers

  With push! from miscmacros you can cons onto that particular name whereas with mutate-cons! defined like this: [...]

• DJ Adams ☛ A simple exploration of status transition flows in CAP

  Recently I've been looking more closely at CDS modelling in general and CDL in particular, partly in the context of creating the exercise content for the Hands-on with CAP CDS workshop which I gave at UKISUG Connect at the start of this month. And I have come to value taking my time to understand the nuances of how models are expressed. Here are a few points of interest relating to the declarations here: [...]

• AdventOfCode ☛ Day 9 - Advent of Code 2025

  The movie theater has a big tile floor with an interesting pattern. Elves here are redecorating the theater by switching out some of the square tiles in the big grid they form. Some of the tiles are red; the Elves would like to find the largest rectangle that uses red tiles for two of its opposite corners. They even have a list of where the red tiles are located in the grid (your puzzle input).

• Jim Nielsen ☛ Icons in Menus Everywhere — Send Help

  It’s extra noise to me. It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful (more on that below). It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.

  This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of a icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”

• Rlang ☛ freeCount Bioinformatics Analysis Apps on Posit Cloud

  One way that you can use the freeCount R Shiny applications (apps) online is through Posit Cloud, which lets you access powerful data science tools in your browser without the need for installation or complex configuration.

• Perl / Raku

  • Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2025.49 Advent is Rolling

    Head on over to https://raku-advent.blog to see this year’s posts so far … thanks to all for the great contributions: Advent: Last Call for your Participation We already have 8 days under Santa’s belt with a further 7 posts lined up. So only a few slots left.

  • Rakulang ☛ Day 8 – HARC The Herald Angels Sing – Raku Advent Calendar

    Rudoph had long wanted wanted to write a website – he longed to share his hobbies and opinions with all the children, so that they wouldn’t just think of him as a first class pilot and navigator. He knew about Raku and he had skim read some information about Cro and Humming-Bird. But, being quite lazy, he wanted something very, very easy that he could use to whip up a site in a few lines.

    He had overheard Dasher and Vixen talking behind the bike shed about a new Raku web authoring tool – HARC – and that sounded more in tune with his thinking.

  • The Weekly Challenge ☛ Advent Calendar - December 9, 2024

    You are given an array of integers, @ints and a target element $k.

    Write a script to return the list of indices in the sorted array where the element is same as the given target element.

  • Perl ☛ Perl Advent Calendar 2025 - Run specific tests in Perl

    Have you ever had the experience of having many subtests in a single test file, making it difficult to see the test results for the parts you want to check?

    With Test2::Plugin::SubtestFilter, you can run only specific subtests. This is similar to vitest's --testNamePattern or go test's -run flag in other languages.

• Python

  • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Deprecations via warnings don’t work for Python libraries — Seth Larson

    This API was emitting warnings for over 3 years in a top-3 Python package by downloads urging libraries and users to stop using the API and that was not enough. We still received feedback from users that this removal was unexpected and was breaking dependent libraries. We ended up adding the APIs back and creating a hurried release to fix the issue.

    It's not clear to me that waiting longer would have helped, either. The libraries that were impacted are actively developed, like the Kubernetes client, Fastly client, and Airflow and I trust that if the message had reached them they would have taken action.

• Rust

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Making it easier to sponsor Rust contributors

    TLDR: You can now find a list of Rust contributors that you can sponsor on this page.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Tom MacWright ☛ A brief history of specifiers and protocols

    If you’re running JavaScript on a server, how do you import a module? Traditionally, imports looked like this, with CommonJS:

    const axios = require('axios');
    

    But now they look like this with ECMAScript Modules: [...]