Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 31, 2026

• Trail of Bits ☛ Celebrating our 2025 open-source contributions

  Most of these contributions came out of client work—we hit a bug we were able to fix or wanted a feature that didn’t exist. The lazy option would have been forking these projects for our needs or patching them locally. Contributing upstream instead takes longer, but it means the next person doesn’t have to solve the same problem. Some of our work is also funded directly by organizations like the OpenSSF and Alpha-Omega, who we collaborate with to make things better for everyone.

• Rob Bowley ☛ Sixty years of learning the same lesson

  At its core, software exists to solve one problem: managing the flow of information. Information is not static. It is provisional, contextual, and constantly changing. Every use of a system creates new information that should influence what happens next. Many of its most important inputs only appear once it is in use.

  Software is therefore less a construction problem and more an ongoing conversation between users, systems and decisions. Its quality lies in the strength of its feedback loops and how effectively it enables learning and adjustment as conditions change.

• Martin Chang ☛ New project - dmake: A build system with CMake as input language

  Weird I started a new project - a (going to be, mostly) CMake compatible build system. Source not released yet as it is early stage. But it seems promising so I'll write about it. Despite the many efforts to improve the C/C++ build systems, notably Meson and Ninja did a great job, CMake remains the Lingua Franca of the C/C++ world. But CMake sucks in my very own and limited opinion. The splitting of configuration and build phase causes many, many problems. The most (in-)famous being GLOB isn't evaluated at build time. Often leading to wild goose chases on why files aren't compiled. Only to fugure a reconfiguration is needed. But also you can't expect people to switch to Meson and endure the pain of manually integrating with projects using CMake.

• Fernando Borretti ☛ Some Data Should Be Code

  I write a lot of Makefiles. I use it not as a command runner but as an ad-hoc build system for small projects, typically for compiling Markdown documents and their dependencies. Like so: [...]

• Daniel Miller ☛ Code Is a Liability

  These are (admittedly a lot of) snippets. Go to the original if you want the full Doctorow experience.

• Codemanship Ltd ☛ Coding Is When We’re Least Productive

  But if I hadn’t made that trip and seen for myself, and had a chance to talk to a department manager in that store, those three lines would have been applying special offers wrong. (If only the person who wrote the spec had done this in the first place…)

  Now multiply that error by 250 branches nationwide. I potentially saved my client a bunch of money and embarrassment with that 3-line change.

  Now, I consider that a productive day.

  But had I been measured on my contribution by lines of code, or commits, or features finished, it would have been seen as a very unproductive day by my manager.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Chloé Vulquin ☛ How I Use Shell (2026 Edition)

    So I make a variant of this blog post every 2 to 4 years now, it's kind of become a tradition. The reason is actually fairly simple: shell is by far the language I use the most, but we'll get into that. As a result of using it that damn much, and in the kinds of contexts that I use it in, I have very peculiar preferences. In this early 2026 edition of this post, I'll talk about where I've been, where I'm at, and what I would recommend to people that don't literally live in the terminal emulator.

    First, the short version: I'm back on zsh because I've been doing more server stuff again and do want a consistent setup. None of them are sensitive to the usual zsh issues, and I do appreciate having a lot of the funny features like =cmd and co. Currently, I'm fine recommending fish to people that aren't going to be doing anything too funny, and am probably likely to recommend bash otherwise, even though that's unlikely to ever be my personal choice.

• Rust

  • Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 636

    Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!