news
Programming Leftovers
-
Matt Birchler ☛ Rapid iteration in the modern coding world
If the feature works, then great; I can refine it further to make sure it is as good as it can be and then release it to everybody. If it turns out people don't particularly like it, then I can just revert the change and not ship it to production. There's no real sunk cost I'm worried about in the way I would feel if I had spent several days of focused time implementing this.
-
Ken Koon Wong ☛ Setting Up A Cluster of Tiny PCs For Parallel Computing - A Note To Myself
Why do we do this? We want to take advantage of the multicore of each nodes as opposed to using clusters on future as the overhead network may add on to the time and makes optimization less efficiency. Instead, we will send a script to each node so that it can fork its own cores to run the simulation. Also, if we specify packages on our script, we can automate the process of installing these packages on our nodes. code
What we did above is basically a template script (We are saving this as par_test_script.R), one where we can edit where to begin and end in terms of which iteration to start and end per node. And also instruction to save result. This is when we can put a little more effort in incorporating some instructions to inform us when task is completed (e.g., via email) and also it would also be nice to know what is the ETA of the entire task by perhaps benchmarking how long the first iteration took to complete, then multiple by total iters per node. Again, this can be sent via email, and also maybe only for the first node as opposed to all nodes, so we’re not bombarded with messages beginning and the end. 🤣
-
J Kenneth King ☛ Taking Things Apart
I started using C back in the early 90s. You may have picked it up yourself at some point. I learned about the stack and the heap. When you initialize a variable in a scope it takes memory from the stack. When you want to initialize a value on the heap you need to use malloc. I had learned that the stack grows, “from the top” of the program’s memory. The heap, “grows from the bottom.”
Why is that? I had never really needed to know. Such facts were enough for all of the programs and work I’ve done. And so I decided I wanted to find out.
-
Abhinav Sarkar ☛ Implementing Co, a Small Language With Coroutines #5: Adding Sleep
In the previous post, we added channels to Co, the small language we are implementing in this series of posts. In this post, we add the sleep primitive to it, enabling time-based coroutine scheduling. We then use sleep to build a simulation of digital logic circuits.
-
[Old] Bruce Ediger ☛ Depth-first Unary Degree Sequence - Information Camouflage
Given a k-ary tree, determine whether it is symmetric.
This problem is less well described than I thought when I worked on it in 2020.
-
Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSpdlog 0.0.26 on CRAN: Another Microfix
Version 0.0.26 of RcppSpdlog arrived on CRAN moments ago, and will be uploaded to Debian and built for r2u shortly.
-
Perl / Raku
-
Coder Legion ☛ RakuDoc - More than just a documentation markup
This is the first article in a series about the markup language RakuDoc. In subsequent articles I will explore some of the interesting aspects of RakuDoc and how to add customisations.
In this first article, I want to discuss how RakuDoc came about, why its design allows for a wide use, and how a reader can easily (for some definitions of 'easily'?) experiment with RakuDoc in a browser using a docker image.
-
-
Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
-
Coder Legion ☛ Bash Scripting in 2026: What Still Matters (and What Doesn’t)
Bash scripting hasn’t disappeared. It has simply evolved.
In this article, we’ll take an honest look at Bash scripting in 2026: what skills are still essential, what practices are outdated, and how developers can use Bash effectively without overengineering or falling into legacy traps.
-
-
Java/Golang
-
Frank Delporte ☛ First Test of Java on the VisionFive 2 Lite (RISC-V)
As part of my 2026 learning goals around Java on RISC-V (see this post about x86 versus ARM versus RISC-V), I’ve asking various suppliers to send me evaluation boards. I already published about two and adding a third one now: [...]
-