Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 25, 2026

• Erlang ☛ Erlang/OTP 28.5 Release

  There is a new “Secure Coding Guidelines” document in Design Principles describing how to write secure Erlang code.

• Cambra ☛ Composition Shouldn't be this Hard

  Infrastructure engineers develop paranoia around change. We invest more effort testing and deploying changes than making them. We call it maturity, but I’ve never stopped questioning it. There must be a way to delegate the tedium to our tools and focus on what attracted us to this field: brainstorming ideas, trying them out, and seeing their effects.

  But what’s missing, exactly? Decades of effort by thousands of brilliant minds have gone into the field of computing, much of it directed at closing the gap between accidental and inherent complexity. Surely some major innovation in the foundation isn’t just waiting to be discovered—wouldn’t someone have found it already?

• Sebastian Wick ☛ How Hard Is It To Open a File? - swick's blog

  It’s a question I had to ask myself multiple times over the last few months. Depending on the context the answer can be:

  • very simple, just call the standard library function
  • extremely hard, don’t trust anything

  If you are an app developer, you’re lucky and it’s almost always the first answer. If you develop something with a security boundary which involves files in any way, the correct answer is very likely the second one.

• Bluesky Social PBC ☛ Serving the For You Feed

  I store all data in sqlite. A key advantage of sqlite for me is testability - I can create the database in memory for unit testing purposes. I don't need to mock or fake my storage layer. The setup/teardown is instant.

  For querying the data, I use the excellent sqlc.dev. It is a tool that gives me full control of the queries I want to run and takes care of the boilerplate through code generation.

• GNOME ☛ Michael Catanzaro: git config am.threeWay

  If you work with patches and git am, then you’re probably used to seeing patches fail to apply. For example: [...]

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Popular Scramble with Raku

    This is my response to The Weekly Challenge #370.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Tadej Janež: Modernize your Bash prompt colors

    Do you still use the default green-colored Bash prompt?

    Then it's time to upgrade to a much improved shell UX using the Bash Color Prompt (bcp).

• Java/Golang

  • Niel Madden ☛ Java sealed classes and exhaustive pattern matching

    Java 17 introduced sealed classes, which allow you to explicitly list the allowed sub-types of an interface or base class. For example, here’s a toy example using a sealed interface and records (inner classes are implicitly added to the permitted sub-types if an explicit list is not given): [...]

• Rust

  • Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 648

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

  • It's FOSS ☛ Will You Pay $119 For This Open Source KVM Built on Rust and Buildroot?

    The LeafKVM packs a 2.4-inch touchscreen, Wi-Fi 5, and PoE into a CNC aluminum box.