Programming Leftovers
-
Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Writing your own C++ standard library from scratch
The C++ standard library (also know as the STL) is, without a doubt, an astounding piece of work. Its scope, performance and incredible backwards compatibility have taken decades of work by many of the world's best programmers. My hat's off to all those people who have contributed to it.
-
Rlang ☛ Thanks, on its way to CRAN
The generic seal of approval from the CRAN team – countless hours spent tabbing between R CMD check and R CMD build logs, ‘Writing R Extensions’ and Stackoverflow approved, with a single line. The equivalent of “Noted, thanks” after a painstakingly well-written e-mail to your professor – except, this has an amazing feeling and a clear meaning: {SLmetrics} (finally) found its way to CRAN!
-
Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Big endian and little endian
Every time I run into endianness, I have to look it up. Which way do the bytes go, and what does that mean? Something about it breaks my brain, and makes me feel like I can't tell which way is up and down, left and right.
This is the blog post I've needed every time I run into this. I hope it'll be the post you need, too.
-
Keith Harrison ☛ SwiftUI Default Scroll Anchor
Changing the default behaviour of a scroll view to center content only when it’s smaller than the scroll view container.
-
Dmitry Dolzhenko ☛ Launching Magit from IntelliJ IDEA
For a large portion of git operations I use daily, I find Magit’s interface much more convenient than git’s own CLI or IntelliJ’s UI. Although, I don’t use Emacs for all my coding projects, I’d like to have a shortcut to quickly open Magit for any git repository, either from a terminal or IDEA.
-
Mac Chaffee ☛ Avoid building a security treadmill
The eye-watering complexity of this solution isn't even my main issue with it (it's not bad for a modern platform team). My issue is that it's a "security treadmill".
It's the oldest trick in the blogosphere book: giving a catchy name like "security treadmill" to a common phenomenon. A security treadmill1 is a piece of software that, due to a weakness of design, requires constant patching to keep it secure. Isn't that just all software? Honestly... kinda, yeah, but a true treadmill is self-inflicted. You bought it, assembled it, and put it in your spare bedroom; a device specifically designed to let you walk/run forever without making forward progress.
-
Rlang ☛ cor Function in R | Calculate Correlation Coefficients in R
How can learning the cor function in r transform your data analysis workflow into a precise, insightful, reproducible process that measures relationships between variables and drives actionable insights in research and business?
-
Rlang ☛ Appsilon at ShinyConf 2025: Pushing the Boundaries of Shiny Development
ShinyConf 2025 is almost here, and we’re excited to bring the community together again. As the organizers, we’ve put together a lineup of talks and workshops that focus on making Shiny apps faster, easier to use, and more scalable.
-
Perl / Raku
-
Arne Sommer ☛ Sort of Equal with Raku
You are allowed to remove the rightmost character of a string to make all equals.
Write a script to return the number of operations to make it equal otherwise -1.
-
-
Python
-
Eliseo Martelli ☛ ML model to guess WWDC dates
With this massive dataset, I decided on using Leave-One-Out Cross Validation which trains on (N-1) samples and tests on the remaining one, repeating for all points. It's computationally intensive but maximizes the training data for small datasets.
I'm training two different models (RandomForest and Ridge) for each target variable (day, month, lead time, weekday) and picking the winner based on Mean Absolute Error scores. It's like Masterchef, but for regression models. The results? RandomForest dominated in most categories: [...]
-
Max Bernstein ☛ Optimizing Django by not being silly
It’s a really cool feeling watching a project grow up. What used to shell out to CPython to compile bytecode from inside the runtime (wild thing to do in practice, but it worked well for bringup) now had its own bytecode compiler and could run a webserver and was being profiled and optimized for performance.
-
Max Bernstein ☛ Prospero challenge, now with more garbage collection | Max Bernstein
Matt Keeter put up The Prospero Challenge, which is like catnip for me. It’s a well-scoped project: we have a slow program. Make it faster within these constraints. In this post, I will describe two very small changes that can speed up his sample program with minimal effort.
-