Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 03, 2026

• David Revoy ☛ Rubber Ducking - David Revoy

• Aurélien Gâteau ☛ On commit messages

  Writing good commit messages is not so easy, but clumsy commit messages can come bite you up in the future.

  There are already many articles on this topic, but I wanted to write down my personal collection of tips and opinions on how to write better commit messages.

• Ben Hoyt ☛ Every dependency you add is a supply chain attack waiting to happen

  So, please think twice, or thrice, before adding a new dependency to your project. As the Go proverb says, “a little copying is better than a little dependency”.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ A Better R Programming Experience Thanks to Tree-sitter

    A little bit less than two years ago, building on work by Jim Hester and Kevin Ushey, Davis Vaughan completed a very impactful JavaScript file for the R community: an R grammar for the Tree-sitter parsing generator. He even got a round of applause for it during a talk at the useR! 2024 conference! So, did he get cheered for… grammatical rules in a JavaScript file? 😅

    No, the audience was excited about the improved developer experience for R that this file unlocked. R tooling around Tree-sitter is how you get [...]

• Python

  • Sacha Chua ☛ Extract PDF highlights into an Org file with Python

    I've been trying to find a good workflow for highlighting interesting parts of PDFs, and then getting that into my notes as images and text in Emacs. I think I've finally figured out something that works well for me that feels natural (marking things.

  • Kenneth Reitz ☛ Free OP-XY Presets, Made from Python

    I love my OP-XY. It's one of the most elegant pieces of hardware I've ever used — Teenage Engineering at their best. Opinionated, beautiful, immediately playable. You turn it on and you're making music in seconds.

  • Kenneth Reitz ☛ Interpretations: An Album Written in Python

    I'm working on an album. Each track is a Python script. You run it, it renders a WAV file. That's the whole workflow.

    The project is called Interpretations, and it's built on PyTheory — the same synthesis engine I've been writing about lately. No DAW. No MIDI. No samples. Just Python files that describe music and a library that turns them into sound.

  • University of Toronto ☛ I should use argument groups in Python's argparse module more than I do

    For reasons well outside the scope of this entry, the other day I looked at the --help output from one of my old Python programs. This particular program has a lot of options, but when I'd written it, I had used argparse argument groups to break up the large list of options into logical groups, starting with the most important and running down to the 'you should probably ignore these' ones. The result was far more readable than it would have been without the grouping.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Ethan Sholly ☛ Command Line Corner

    An archive of useful Linux commands shared in Self-Host Weekly

• Java/Golang

  • Elias Mårtenson ☛ New GUI for Kap

    Turns out that while JavaFX is really neat, and does some things (especially animation) very well, it's also very much half-baked. The API can be very difficult to work with, and it seems like even the designers added many of the features needed to create a powerful native UI in a rush just to get something to work. It seems as though Oracle agreed, since they unbundled JavaFX into its own project, with Swing remaining in the JDK.

• Rust

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: docs.rs: building fewer targets by default

    Building fewer targets by default

    On 2026-05-01, docs.rs will make a breaking change to its build

    Today, if a crate does not define a targets list in its docs.rs metadata, docs.rs builds documentation for a default list of five targets.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 26.04’s sudo adds password feedback hide toggle

    Ubuntu 26.04's sudo-rs now includes a keypress toggle for password feedback. Switch between visible asterisks and silent input without editing a config file.