Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 21, 2026

• Herb Sutter ☛ My BeCPP talk video posted: “C++ — Growing in a world of competition, safety, and AI”

  This talk is different from other talks I’ve given before because it’s focused, not on C++ code examples, but on three major industry trends that are fundamentally shifting our world right now and that directly affect C++: [...]

• Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti ☛ What makes docs beautiful?

  Docs are often thought of as a purely functional artifact, a packet of content that, when it works, it’s not remembered at all. Those who consume documentation, however, can tell whether a manual or docs site pleases our mind and senses in ways that others don’t. We know the feeling of a page that lands and the feeling of a page that drags.

  Now, if we agree that docs can be a product, why not seek to build them in a way that pleases consumers? If docs are the entry point for products, shouldn’t they produce a positive feeling that makes users return to them more often and trust them more? Docs that make users feel empowered, or that leave them with learnings. Docs that heal.

  The question of what makes documentation beautiful is an important one, especially in a time when docs are at risk of being mass produced by LLMs that have neither the taste nor the ability to discern good docs from bad ones. I’m writing this post to open up the question to debate, and perhaps to provide myself with inspiration.

• Łukasz Niemier ☛ Scotty, I need warp speed in three minutes

  After departing from Supabase I liked the project so much (mostly as learning ground) that I have created my own fork, where unrestrained from all business side of the project I could focus purely on squeezing as much of performance as I can. This project now lives as [Ultravisor][] - it is still nowhere near being done in a way that I like, but I still go back to work on it from time to time to find potential performance improvements.

  This is a story of things that I have done and learned during that journey.

• Python

  • Adam Johnson ☛ Django: fixing a memory “leak” from Python 3.14’s incremental garbage collection

    Back in February, I encountered an out-of-memory error while migrating a client project to Python 3.14. The issue occurred when running Django’s database migration command (migrate) on a limited-resource server, and seemed to be caused by the new incremental garbage collection algorithm in Python 3.14.

    At the time, I wrote a workaround and started on this blog post, but other tasks took priority and I never got around to finishing it. But four days ago, Hugo van Kemenade, the Python 3.14 release manager, announced that the new garbage collection algorithm will be reverted in Python 3.14.5, and the next Python 3.15 alpha release, due to reports of increased memory usage.

    Here’s the story of my workaround, as extra evidence that reverting incremental garbage collection is a good call.

  • Bernát Gábor ☛ Defense in Depth: A Practical Guide to Python Supply Chain Security

    I maintain several PyPA projects (virtualenv, tox, pipx, platformdirs, filelock) and work on corporate package hosting infrastructure. I’ve watched supply chain attacks targeting Python packages get nastier over the years from both sides: publishing to PyPI as an open-source maintainer and managing thousands of dependencies as an enterprise consumer. This post covers practical approaches to securing your Python supply chain. For a broader threat model across all ecosystems, the CNCF Software Supply Chain Security Whitepaper is an excellent primer. Here we’ll focus on Python-specific defenses — writing secure code, managing dependencies, scanning for vulnerabilities, and verifying package authenticity.

  • Bernát Gábor ☛ PyTexas 2026 Recap

    PyTexas 2026 ran April 17–19 in Austin. Friday was tutorials, Saturday and Sunday were talks with two keynotes and two lightning-talk blocks. A few themes kept coming back across unrelated talks: [...]

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Jack Baty ☛ Back to Fish Shell — baty.net

    This way, the login shell remains zsh but in Ghostty it's fish. So far it feels nice and clean.