Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 05, 2025

• Simon Willison ☛ Identify, solve, verify

  My job is to identify problems that can be solved with code, then solve them, then verify that the solution works and has actually addressed the problem.

  A more advanced LLM may eventually be able to completely handle the middle piece. It can help with the first and last pieces, but only when operated by someone who understands both the problems to be solved and how to interact with the LLM to help solve them.

• Andrew Helwer ☛ A supposedly worthwhile contract I'll never do again -

  So overall this seems like a decent contract. The client got an audit of their design and a formal specification of their system. I got paid enough to cover life expenses for the next few months while making FOSS contributions. Why, then, am I writing this post?

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ smooth v4.3.0 in R: what’s new and what’s next?

    Since the beginning of the package, the smooth functions supported three ways for initialising the state vector (the vector that includes level, trend, seasonal indices): optimisation, backcasting and values provided by user. The former has been considered the standard way of estimating ETS, while the backcasting was originally proposed by Box & Jenkins (1970) and was only implemented in the smooth (at least, I haven’t seen it anywhere else). The main advantage of the latter is in computational time, because you do not need to estimate every single value of the state vector. The new ADAM core that I developed during COVID lockdown, had some improvements for the backcasting, and I noticed that adam() produced more accurate forecasts with it than with the optimisation. But I needed more testing, so I have not changed anything back then.

  • Jumping Rivers ☛ R Package Quality: Documentation

    In this post, we’ll take a closer look at package documentation and how it helps assess the “risky-ness” of a package The documentation score evaluates how complete and helpful a package’s documentation is. Package documentation comes in many guises. It could be a function examples, vignettes or even a website. While we don’t believe every package must have a website, vignettes, and examples. But the absence of all three usually points to weak documentation.

    When validating R packages, documentation contributes around 15% to the total.

  • Rlang ☛ An Introduction to Behavior-Driven Development in R

    Learn how to use Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) in R to ensure your software meets user requirements through executable specifications.

  • Rlang ☛ Open Science with a Latin American Identity: Meet the New Cohort of the rOpenSci Champions Program

    We’re very excited to introduce the new rOpenSci Champions!

• Java

  • Raymond Camden ☛ Building a CSV Report CLI Tool in BoxLang

    Before we get into the code, remember that yesterday I covered how to add CSV support to BoxLang with the opencsv Java package. My initial code simply imported what I needed, and parsed in the file: [...]