Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 12, 2026

• Jan Wildeboer ☛ Conway: Think Networks First, Actors Second

  Unfortunately This is also why decentralised solutions are hard to monetise while centralised solutions make that easy. This is why it is so hard to keep open solutions, well, open for all. All too often have I seen well-meant communities of practice experiencing a hostile takeover by ego-driven people that “steal” the ideas to try to make a more closed, centralised version and monetise that, leaving the community outside of the walled garden they want to build.

• Julia Language Blog Aggregator ☛ cuTile.jl 0.2: New features, improved performance, and Julia 1.13 support

  cuTile.jl v0.2 is the first major update of the Julia package for writing GPU kernels using NVIDIA's tile-based programming model. This release adds many new features, supports more of the Julia language, and greatly improves performance. We will be presenting about it in a joint webinar with NVIDIA on May 12.

• Bilal Elmoussaoui: goblin: A Linter for GObject C Code

  Over the past week, I’ve been building goblin, a linter specifically designed for GObject-based C codebases.

  If you know Rust’s clippy or Go’s go vet, think of goblin as the same thing for GObject/GLib.

• WerWolv ☛ USB for Software Developers

  Say you’re being handed a USB device and told to write a driver for it. Seems like a daunting task at first, right? Writing drivers means you have to write Kernel code, and writing Kernel code is hard, low level, hard to debug and so on.

  None of this is actually true though . Writing a driver for a USB device is actually not much more difficult than writing an application that uses Sockets.

  This post aims to be a high level introduction to using USB for people who may not have worked with Hardware too much yet and just want to use the technology. There are amazing resources out there such as USB in a NutShell that go into a lot of detail about how USB precisely works (check them out if you want more information), they are however not really approachable for somebody who has never worked with USB before and doesn’t have a certain background in Hardware. You don’t need to be an Embedded Systems Engineer to use USB the same way you don’t need to be a Network Specialist to use Sockets and the Internet.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Collaborating between Bioconductor and R-universe on Development of Common Infrastructure

    For more than two decades, the Bioconductor project has been a cornerstone of the R ecosystem, providing high-quality, peer-reviewed tools for bioinformatics and computational biology. Its curated repository model, rigorous review standards, and tightly coordinated release process have helped establish Bioconductor as one of the most trusted distribution channels in scientific computing.

    However, the infrastructure that supports such a long-standing and large-scale project inevitably accumulates technical debt. Legacy build systems, bespoke tooling, and historically grown workflows add up to costly and unsustainable maintenance work. For this reason, Bioconductor is collaborating with R-universe to gradually modernize parts of its infrastructure, while accommodating the project’s scale, governance, and established processes. In turn, Bioconductor is helping R-universe expand and refine its features as we learn to serve the complex needs of the Bioconductor community.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Max Leiter ☛ Per-directory terminal colors in fish shell

    My terminal background color changes based on the current directory. It's a small touch that makes it easy to tell which project I'm in at a glance, which is especially useful when juggling AI agents.