Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 27, 2026

• Simon Späti ☛ The Dagster Almanack: From Complexity to Composability

  I have read the “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” by Charlie Munger and thought about what it would take to write one for Dagster. A complete guide with all the insights, tips, and some predictions for the data platform engineer, just like an Almanack provides, with practical information for daily life.

  My goal is to offer a collection of wisdom, insights, and principles gathered over the years. Giving you an outside view from someone who has used Dagster since back in 2019, used it at enterprise scale but also for my hobby projects (e.g. real-estate project). The piece should give you a holistic view of Dagster’s place in the data ecosystem, how to deal with the complexity of data architecture and enterprises, and scaling your data jobs.

  This article shows you how orchestrators such as Dagster are built for an open data platform that integrates the full data ecosystem, with the shift to data assets instead of DAGs, reducing complexity and applying data engineering best practices.

• Matt Birchler ☛ Micro app 17: Next Up

  This micro app is properly micro. It's literally just a Mac app that runs in the background that waits for you to hit a keyboard shortcut (Command + Option + Control + N) to see what my next meeting is.

  This app solves a problem that basically every other calendar app tries to do in some way as well. The typical way I've seen is to display a countdown and a meeting title in the menu bar, which is okay when you want it, but I find it clutters the experience and can potentially be a distraction as you see the numbers count down through the day. Next Up aims to be a quick way to get what I want to know when I wonder, "wait, what was my next meeting?" and then get out of my way once I know what it is.

• Kevin McDonald ☛ Why Networking Built Its Own Data Modeling Language

  The networking industry has been undergoing a quiet revolution, moving away from archaic, string-heavy command-line interfaces (CLIs) and legacy protocols like SNMP. In modern networks, gNMI (gRPC Network Management Interface) is establishing itself as the standard for telemetry and configuration. But protocol interfaces are only half the battle. Agreeing on the data schemas (representing the thousands of configuration knobs and operational states of a core router) is a far harder challenge.

• Artyom Bologov ☛ Reverse-engineering Prose From Internet Lingo

  So we all communicate over Internet. And we don’t really care much about punctuation or capitalization. Which is fine, I guess? But what if someone (like me) wanted a proper literary text instead of this all-lowercase-no-punctuation soup? Well, why not reverse-engineer text from that into prose?

  Alternative villain origin story: I used to make this website in Lisp. Like, text too, as raw symbols in nested lists denoting HTML. But Lisp is case-insensitive and has too much syntax to my taste. So I had to come up with a number of heuristics to manage that. And reconstruct proper prose from code.

• Akseli Lahtinen ☛ Stop advertising in your commits!

  I don't get why people just gleefully add these ads for companies to their open-source projects that do not pay them a penny (but actively take money from them in subscription fees).

  "Assisted by blabot", "co-authored-by: slopgpt", "sent from my fartphone"

  Why? It's a fucking ad. I bet you use ad blockers, yet you add ads to your commits.

  Stop that.

• Josh Lospinoso ☛ C Constructs That Still Don’t Work in C++ — and a Few That Changed

  The practical lesson is the same, but sharper: when you discuss C/C++ compatibility, label the language mode. “Valid C” and “valid C++” are not precise enough anymore. You often need to say C17, C23, C++17, C++20, or C++23.

  I also put the examples behind this post in a small companion repository. The repository is for repeatable checks; its Compiler Explorer links are for quick diagnostics.

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Common Beauty with Raku

    This is my response to The Weekly Challenge #375.

  • Perl ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] This week in PSC (225) | 2026-05-18

• Python

  • University of Toronto ☛ My views on some Python LSP servers in GNU Emacs (as of mid 2026)

    Some languages have to make do with one LSP server. By contrast, Python has an embarrassment of riches; I know of at least five modern LSP servers for it. I've recently been experimenting with some of them in GNU Emacs, specifically Eglot, so before I forget I want to note down my views. The five Python things with LSP servers that I believe are modern and current are python-lsp-server ('pylsp'), Facebook's pyrefly, Astral's ty, Microsoft's pyright, and technically Astral's ruff.

  • Pimoroni ☛ Dr Footleg Saves The Galaxy! Creates Tufty 2350 Asteroids Game

    The biggest technical challenge was making the architecture independent of specific MicroPython libraries. He explains.

  • RTL-SDR ☛ OpenWXSDR: A Streamlined Automated Multi-Sonde Decoder for Raspberry Pi with RTL-SDR or Airspy

    Thank you to Mike (DL2MF) for writing in about the release of OpenWXSDR, a new open-source Python framework that turns one or more RTL-SDR dongles or Airspy SDRs into a fully automated radiosonde ground station running on a Raspberry Pi 4/5 or Linux x86 machine.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Behavior-Driven Development in R Shiny: Modeling User Behavior with When Steps

    This article is part of a series on Behavior-Driven Development for Shiny applications. We’ve been building a data submission form from scratch, adding an email notification feature, and managing preconditions with Given steps.

    Read the previous articles to get up to speed, or continue here to focus on how to write When steps.