Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 10, 2026

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

  I’ve been an Emacs fanatic for over 20 years. I’ve built and maintained some of the most popular Emacs packages, contributed to Emacs itself, and spent countless hours tweaking my configuration. Emacs isn’t just my editor – it’s my passion, and my happy place.

  Over the past year, I’ve also been spending a lot of time with Vim and Neovim, relearning them from scratch and having a blast contrasting how the two communities approach similar problems. It’s been a fun and refreshing experience.1

• Austin White ☛ Please Can We Address This

  Trust me, if you can collect the information from your users faster and with less hassle, they will understand and be happy.

• Isoken Ibizugbe: Starting Out in Outreachy

  So you want to join Outreachy but you don’t understand it, you’re scared, or you don’t know what open source is about.

  What is FOSS anyway? 

  Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) refers to software that anyone can use, modify, and share freely. Think of it as a community garden; instead of one company owning the “food,” people from all over the world contribute, improve, and maintain it so everyone can benefit for free. You can read more here on what it means to contribute to open source.

  Outreachy provides paid internships to anyone from any background who faces underrepresentation, systemic bias, or discrimination in the technical industry where they live. Their goal is to increase diversity in open source. Read their website for more. I spent a good amount of time reading all the guides listed, including the applicant guide and the how-to-apply guide. 

• Ken Kantzer ☛ Let’s be honest about Hey Hi (AI) Coding

  Ken’s early 2026 thoughts on the state of Hey Hi (AI) coding, Claude, Kernigan’s Law, and what technology has worked thus far

• Godot Engine ☛ Release candidate: Godot 4.6.2 RC 1

  Maintenance of maintenance? Is such a thing even possible!?

• Juan J Martínez ☛ Another Tomato

  How did it go? First of all, I’ve got much further, faster, writing OCaml than when I started with Haskell. Which may not mean anything, because I’m learning OCaml knowing some Haskell already, and that changes things quite a bit.

• Python

  • Kushal Das: In the land of XML

    One of the major thing at work is XML, due to all things identity. Yes, XML and SAML are very much alive. SWAMID is the identity fedeation for research and higher education in Sweden and edusgain which is the global identify federation around the world connected 80+ pariticipaaant federations connecting over 10k identify and service providers. And these are based on SAML.

    In the last few weeks I released two libraries in Rust and then python bindings for the same using pyo3. uppsala is the zero dependency XML library and pyuppsala is the python binding.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Get Better: loading multiple csv files in R

    In the test dataset from the previous post we have a single folder of 80 csv files. 4 experiments, 2 conditions, 10 files from each. And each file has 20 rows of data. See below for other scenarios.

    The goal is to load of the data into R and assemble into a single data frame. There are many ways to do this, I’ll show three of the most popular.

  • Rlang ☛ Learning PK/PD Simulation: A Beginner’s Monte Carlo Analysis With mrgsolve in R

    Population pharmacokinetics (popPK) is a statistical approach that describes how medications behave in the body across groups of people, accounting for variability between individuals. Instead of studying one person intensively, popPK analyzes sparse data from many patients to understand typical medication behavior and why people differ in their medication exposure.

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.3.13 on CRAN: Maintenance

    This release, the first in eleven months, rounds out a few internal corners and helps Rcpp with the transition away from Rf_error to only using Rcpp::stop which deals more gracefully with error conditions and unwinding. We also updated how the vignette is made, its references, updated the continuous integration as one does, altered how the documentation site is built, gladly took a PR from Michael polishing another small aspect, and tweaked how the compilation standard is set.