Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 05, 2026

• Sandor Dargo ☛ Time in C++: Closing Thoughts

  Time is time. We tend to think it’s simple to deal with it. But it’s more complex than it sounds. Both in programming and in real life.

  You want to measure how long something took, add a timestamp to a log entry, schedule a task for later, or display a date to a user in their local time. Each of these sounds straightforward — until clocks jump, time zones shift, or tests start failing randomly.

• Namanyay Goel ☛ AI is Killing B2B SaaS

  AI is bringing an existential threat to a lot of B2B SaaS executives: How to keep asking customers for renewal, when every customer feels they can get something better built with vibe-coded AI products?

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Package Management at FOSDEM 2026

  FOSDEM 2026 ran last weekend in Brussels with its usual dense schedule of talks across open source projects and communities. Package management had a strong presence again this year, with a dedicated devroom plus related content scattered across the Distributions, Nix and NixOS, and SBOMs and Supply Chains tracks.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ Fastmail Donates USD 10,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation

    One of the reasons that you don’t hear about Perl in the headlines is its reliability. Upgrading your Perl from one version to the next? That can be a very boring deployment. You code worked before and it continues to “just work” after the upgrade. You don’t need to rant about short deprecation cycles, performance degradation or dependencies which no longer install. The Perl 5 core maintainers take great care to ensure that you don’t have to care very much about upgrading your Perl. Backwards compatibility is top of mind. If your deployment is boring, it’s because a lot of care and attention has been given to this matter by the people who love Perl and love to work on it.

  • Perl ☛ 2026-02-01 [Older] ANNOUNCE: Perl.Wiki V 1.39 & Mojolicious.Wiki V 1.13

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-31 [Older] A new sponsorship model

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-31 [Older] Sydney February Meeting! 2025

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Miguel Grinberg ☛ Date Arithmetic in Bash

    Date and time management libraries in many programming languages are famously bad. Python's datetime module comes to mind as one of the best (worst?) examples, and so does JavaScript's Date class. It feels like these libraries could not have been made worse on purpose, or so I thought until today, when I needed to implement some date calculations in a backup rotation script written in bash.

    So, if you wanted to learn how to perform date and time arithmetic in your bash scripts, you've come to the right place. Just don't blame me for the nightmares.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Manuel Matuzović ☛ Introduction to the new HTML element <geolocation>

    There is a new HTML element called geolocation. I checked it out and here's what I learned.