Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 23, 2026

• Ahmad Alfy ☛ Stop Hardcoding Your Timeouts

  I’m writing this from Cairo. My internet is decent, better than many places in the world. But it’s not 1 Gbps symmetric fiber. It’s not co-located next to an npm registry mirror. A git clone of a large repo takes time. Pulling a Docker image takes time. These are not failures. They are physics.

  When your tool dies silently after 60 seconds without any way to change that limit, you haven’t built a tool for the world. You’ve built a tool for your office.

  And this matters more than most developers acknowledge. The global developer community isn’t located in San Francisco or Amsterdam or London. It’s in Lagos, in Karachi, in Cairo. It’s people on 4G connections, on shared broadband, on connections that have real latency because the nearest CDN edge is 50ms away instead of 5.

  When you assume a fast connection, you’re not making a neutral technical decision. You’re making a statement about whose experience matters.

• Josh Segall ☛ What Async Promised and What it Delivered

  OS threads are expensive: an operating system thread typically reserves a megabyte of stack space and takes roughly a millisecond to create. Context switches happen in kernel space and burn CPU cycles. A server handling thousands of concurrent connections and dedicating one thread per connection means thousands of threads each consuming memory and competing for scheduling. The system spends time managing threads that could be better spent doing useful work.

• Qt ☛ Qt for MCUs 2.12.1 LTS and Updates

  Qt for MCUs 2.12.1 LTS has been released and is available for download. This patch release provides bug fixes and other improvements while maintaining source compatibility with Qt for MCUs 2.12 (see Qt for MCUs 2.12 LTS released). This release does not add any new functionality.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.3.14 on CRAN: Upstream Maintenance

  Another minor update 0.3.14 for our nanotime compiled for r2u (and will have to wait to be uploaded to Debian until dependency bit64 has been updated there).

• Rlang ☛ Analyzing Ecological Data with Detection Error

  This course is for researchers who analyze field observations. These data are often inconsistent because sampling protocols can change across projects, over time, or when older data are combined with new recordings.

• Rust

  • KDAB ☛ Building Reusable Slint UI Libraries with Rust Crates

    Slint now supports exporting components and types from Rust crates, enabling developers to build reusable UI libraries and extensions. This post explains how the new experimental module build feature works, what changed in the slint-compiler, and how to create and consume a custom Slint library in your application.