Programming, Databases, Education With Free Software

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 04, 2026

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ How to Vim: Using Effectively the Command History

  One of the frustrating aspects of Vim for me is that in insert mode you’re quite limited in what you can do. That’s fine most of the time, except when you’re in command-line mode (meaning you’re typing something like :s). In command-line mode there’s no way to switch to normal mode, so if you make a typo or want to edit a command you’ve previous invoked that’s a bit painful.

  Recently I’ve discovered a way to mitigate the problem - namely the command history window. (see :h cmdwin for details) You can trigger in a couple of ways: [...]

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ The Package Management Landscape

  Each programming language ecosystem has at least one package manager, often several. The categorizing clients post covers their resolution algorithms, lockfile strategies, and manifest formats in detail.

• Bert Hubert ☛ Unsigned char std::basic_string<> in C++

  Brief post on a somewhat vexing and irritating C++ problem I ran into some time ago. I hope that this page will help other people deal with this problem more quickly than I did.

• Education

  • Martin Chang ☛ At the 39th Chaos Communication Congress

    Just a random post because I had much fun at 39C3. As per CCC's strict photo policy. Photos will not contain people unless they all concent to be photo'd. At least to the degree that they are not recognizable.

  • MIT ☛ The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

    Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!

• Back End/Databases

  • Hugo van Kemenade ☛ Localising xkcd · Hugo van Kemenade

    I gave a lightning talk at a bunch of conferences in 2025 about some of the exciting new things coming in Python 3.14, including template strings.

  • The New Stack ☛ Why AI Workloads Are Fueling a Move Back to Postgres

    I want to explain why this shift is happening (at least in my humble opinion). I want to describe why Postgres is silently becoming the anchor of modern AI development. I also want to explain why many teams should consider leaving fully managed databases behind.

    This is not about nostalgia and self-hosting in the old sense. It is about a new model that keeps the benefits of managed services while giving teams the performance, cost control and data locality they need for the next decade. The new model is BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud).