Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 06, 2026

• Elliot C Smith ☛ All the other bottlenecks

  Making code fast has started to reveal all the other things that stand in between your business and delivering value to your customers.

  Here's a few I've seen recently when talking to teams. There are plenty more and some are unique but these are a few I’ve seen enough to call them common: [...]

• [Old] Curt Corginia ☛ Heroes of Tech: Pieter Hintjens (1962–2016)

  In case you do not feel you have time to watch this entire talk by Hintjens himself, let me do my best to provide a summary: Hintjens was more proud of his work running a community than he was of his technical abilities. He said that many people fail to understand what really constitutes good code: In the beginning, Martin Sustrik and another talented programmer mainly coded ZeroMQ in a vacuum: A few people were producing amazing, logical, beautiful code that was not accounting for its users at all. So Hintjens believed in flipping the model on its head — get as many contributors as possible, accept their pull requests as quickly as possible, and in time the system will become self-correcting. He likened his model to that of Wikipedia: Everyone complained that the vandalism would be rampant, but in reality community members are empowered to correct what is wrong.

• Anna Liberty ☛ Returning to Zig

  Zig is rising in popularity. It hasn't yet seized the space occupied by even Rust or Go, much less C, but it has been adopted by a few major projects and countless smaller ones. As such, it's becoming an important language for the future. having been interested in Zig for several years, I decided to check back in on the language and see how I feel about it today.

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Reverse Sum with Raku

    The letter y is an English vowel, some of the time. See e.g. The Truth About 'Y': It's Mostly a Vowel for more info. The fourth example in our challenge, rythm, (wrongly) treats it as consonant when it really should not, so I'll do the same.

  • Perl ☛ Reading UTF-8 at GB/s

    That fix won’t help existing Perls, though. So I decided to implement a drop-in replacement in Unicode::UTF8: read_utf8. It reads and validates UTF-8 in one pass and is very fast, 7-16x faster than read(). The only caveat is that it does not support tied filehandles.

• R / R-Script

  • [Repeat] Rlang ☛ Understanding Tail Analysis in Financial Markets

    In financial markets, distinguishing between information-driven movements and liquidity-driven shocks is critical. The reference study we based our work on highlights the importance of tail analysis: comparing Gaussian (thin-tailed) and Student‑t (fat-tailed) distributions to understand whether price changes are more likely to reflect genuine information or temporary liquidity imbalances.