Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 16, 2025

• [Old] uni MIT ☛ Looking back at Project Athena

  Project Athena was a campus-wide effort to make the tools of computing available to every discipline at the Institute and provide students with systematic access to computers. A new project that featured computer workstations and educational programming, Athena was a milestone in the history of distributed systems and inspired programs like Kerberos. It also revolutionized educational computing for the Institute and beyond, and created the computing environment that many students and faculty still work in today.

• Linuxiac ☛ Libxml2 Maintainer Steps Down

  And before you say, “So what, it’s just a library,” let me say this: even though libxml2 is not something most end users touch directly, it is a critical, fundamental component for the open source ecosystem and for software development in general. It’s the official XML C library developed for the GNOME project, which provides APIs to parse, validate, and manipulate XML and HTML documents.

• Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Custom for designing, off-the-shelf for shipping

  There is no general answer for that, of course. It's dependent on your situation. But there is a pattern that I've found helpful for problem-solving which balances the two approaches. You use as many custom components as you like for designing a solution, and then you use (mostly) off-the-shelf components for what you're going to ship.

• Josh Bleecher Snyder ☛ Security through intentional redundancy

  This is the path of lowest resistance to calling DeletePhoto. A developer (or an LLM) might write this code without thinking about security at all…and yet, it’s pretty solid, because DeletePhoto can enforce that the photo must be owned by the provided user. Only one person (the author of DeletePhoto) had to think about security. Everyone else gets it for free. This API fails closed.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ Announcing Dancer2 2.0.0

    The Dancer Core Team project is proud to announce the release of Dancer2 2.0.0!

    This release has been a long time coming, and while open source sometimes takes longer than we’d like, we believe the wait has been worth it. With fresh documentation, architectural improvements, and developer-friendly new features, version 2.0.0 represents a significant evolution of Dancer2 and the Perl web ecosystem.

    If you’d like a more extensive overview, I gave a talk at the Perl and Raku Conference 2025, about Dancer2 2.0.0, covering new features and where we’re headed next. You can watch the full presentation here: Dancer2 2.0.ohh myyy on YouTube →