Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 20, 2025

• Stefano Marinelli ☛ From Collaborators to Consumers: Have We Killed the Soul of Open Source?

  I discovered Open Source when I was just a teenager, back in 1996. At the time, in my eyes, it was a revolution: the ability to see the code, contribute, fork it, and give a project a new direction - perhaps a parallel one, or something completely different.

  Like OpenBSD from NetBSD, DragonflyBSD from FreeBSD, or Nextcloud from Owncloud - the examples are endless. It was about freedom, the chance to be part of something or, in some cases, at the very center of something: its development.

• [Old] Brian Hicks ☛ signing commits with SSH keys

  I'm gonna run some experiments to figure that out. To start with, I use two git forges: GitHub and Gitea (although I plan to migrate to Forgejo once it's in a stable version of nixpkgs.) I want to make sure that I can get verified commits on both.

  I'm most interested in what happens when I revoke keys. Generally speaking, I generate one SSH key per machine I use for development. That way, no key ever has to leave the machine it was generated on. So what happens if I retire a machine, along with its key? Will all my commits turn into unsigned commits? GitHub's documentation implies that it might be fine, but I don't know.

• Brian Hicks ☛ Should we design for iffy [Internet]?

  I dug around, and here's some data. My goal here is not to beat anyone over the head with "THOU SHALT NOT ASSUME GOOD INTERNET" but to give an idea about the scope of broadband rollout in the US in a way that can help inform choices we make when designing software.

  If you don't feel like reading this whole thing, here's the bottom line up front: you can probably assume [Internet] access in somewhere around 97% of US households, but you should not assume that it's better than around 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up, and latency may be significantly worse than you previously assumed. This is likely worse for B2C software than B2B.

• University of Toronto ☛ I feel open source has turned into two worlds

  Obvious general examples of the latter are the Debian Linux distribution and BSD distributions like OpenBSD and FreeBSD. These are independent open source projects that are maintained by volunteers (although some of them are paid to work on the project). Everyone is working together in cooperation and the result is no one's product or owned object. And at the small scale, everyone who incorporates libxml2, some Python module, or whatever into a personal open source thing is part of this cooperative sphere.

• [Old] J Kenneth King ☛ Agentultra - Designing Boring Software with Functional Programming - Part 1

  Functional programming languages, such as Haskell, have a reputation for being languages that are designed for researchers to write white papers and not for practical software.

  I believe this reputation is undeserved.

  In this post I’m going to show you how I design software in Haskell for businesses. Functional programming languages are all good at this. I happen to use Haskell at my job and on my stream and I think it is particularly well suited to the task of designing and building line-of-business software.

• Writing a Monadic Interpreter in Haskell

  Back in my second year of college, I had just started exploring functional programming. I was picking up Haskell out of curiosity - it felt different, abstract, and honestly a bit intimidating at first. Around the same time, I was also diving into topics like context-free grammars, automata theory, parse trees, and the Chomsky hierarchy - all the foundational concepts that explain how programming languages are parsed, interpreted, and understood by machines.

• Evan Hahn ☛ An unfinished post: "Compressing short Unicode strings with BOCU-1"

  This post is not finished. As you can see, several sections are unwritten, and it may contain errors.

  Even though I don’t intend to finish it, I thought it could be useful to publish anyway. If you’re interested in taking it over, let me know, and I can send you all the notes I have.

  With that out of the way, here’s my draft post.

  [...]

  BOCU-1, short for “Binary Ordered Compression for Unicode”, is a character encoding. You probably shouldn’t use it.

  As its name suggests, it is primarily focused on compressing text. It usually does a worse job than generic compressors like gzip, but can do a better job for short strings containing non-Latin-alphabet characters.

  This post aims to explain BOCU-1 well enough that you could write your own implementation, as well as describe its pros and cons.

  Again, you probably shouldn’t use it.

• Dave Gauer ☛ Store as HTML, Edit as LML

  If you’re feeling somewhat philosophical, you could say that this method uses an LML as an interface for editing HTML.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • TecMint ☛ 5 Bash Scripts I Use Daily as a Linux SysAdmin

    Bash scripts are like tiny assistants that help you automate common tasks, reduce human error, and save valuable time. Instead of running the same commands over and over again, you can let your scripts handle it – reliably and consistently.