Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 16, 2025

• Michał Sapka ☛ Commodore 64 Assembler, Day 1: Hello World and basic Emacs setup

  This is a famous CPU, powering the Apple II series of computer. But I'm European, I have never seen Apple II in my life. Commodore on the hand, I have seen. Never owned, as my household jumped into DOS from the get go (it was 1993 after all), but C64 was always there.

• Fernando Borretti ☛ Two Years of Rust

  I recently wrapped up a job where I spent the last two years writing the backend of a B2B SaaS product in Rust, so now is the ideal time to reflect on the experience and write about it.

• Sean Goedecke ☛ Wicked features | sean goedecke

  Wicked features are requirements that must be considered every time you build anything else

  They massively increase implementation complexity and coordination cost

• Sean Goedecke ☛ Software engineering under the spotlight | sean goedecke

  Think of a tech company as a giant, dimly-lit factory. Work goes on throughout the factory as components shuffle back and forth, and finished products get steadily carted away, but the coordination and efficiency of each section is fairly low. Some parts of the factory get jammed up and don’t do anything for days. Other parts are manically producing broken components which are thrown away unused. However, the factory manager - i.e. the tech company CEO - has one tool to combat this problem. That tool is the spotlight.

• Andreas Zwinkau ☛ The 5 Levels of Configuration Languages

  Code is data and data is code. Years ago, I had a brief affair with Lisp and there I picked up this meme. Today, I believe there are also benefits in separating code and data.

  Glimpses of this debate come up whenever people discuss the syntax for yet another configuration schema. There are 5 levels of power for configuration languages. If you design a new schema, be aware of all of them.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ AsioHeaders 1.30.2-1 on CRAN: New Upstream

  Another new (stable) release of the AsioHeaders package arrived at CRAN just now. Asio provides a cross-platform C++ library for network and low-level I/O programming. It is also included in Boost – but requires linking when used as part of Boost. This standalone version of Asio is a header-only C++ library which can be used without linking (just like our BH package with parts of Boost).

  The update last week, kindly prepared by Charlie Gao, had overlooked / not covered one other nag discovered by CRAN. This new release, based on the current stable upstream release, does that.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • XDA ☛ 4 ways Apostrophe is my new go-to editor for markdown over Obsidian

    I've used GNOME for years, but I've never tried out Apostrophe, an app created and maintained by Manuel Genovés on GNOME Circle. Available to everyone running Linux, this handy, lightweight markdown text editor is superb at creating a distraction-free interface for typing thousands of words. It has integrated robust spell-checking, document statistics, live preview support, and supports a variety of file formats. I'm a heavy Obsidian user, yet I find the app sometimes too heavy-handed for the current task at hand, which is where Apostrophe comes into play.

• Kernel Space

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Intel's P-Core only Bartlett Lake chip inches closer to reality with new Linux patch

    An defective chip maker Intel engineer has validated the existence of a P-core only counterpart to Bartlett Lake-S, rumored to arrive with up to 12 Raptor Cove cores.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • [Old] Cassidy Williams ☛ Customizing my Zsh Prompt

    I have a little .zshrc file to customize my terminal, and I’ve always wanted a fun prompt besides the default, but haven’t really done much to learn it.

    So, after some research, I figured out the basics of how to make my little prompt useful without being too overwhelming or distracting!

• Golang

  • Redowan Delowar ☛ Capturing console output in Go tests

    Ideally, every function that writes to the stdout probably should ask for a io.Writer and write to it instead. However, it’s common to encounter functions like this: [...]