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Programming Leftovers
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Noel Rappin ☛ When Books Could Code 2a: _Extreme Programming Explained_ Explained Extremely
The set of practices is very much colored by the state of software development in the 1990s when the book was written, meaning largely for software that was actually released to users, rather than server-side software that is just deployed. Like a lot of books written in the early 2000s, this book was written in a context that was significantly different the context in which it would later be read.
I would absolutely write an entire series with a separate post on each of the twelve practices because it’s fascinating to me the different trajectories they took. But in lieu of that, here’s a quick tour of the Original Dozen.
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Tim Bradshaw ☛ Blank generation
My destructuring-match macro has a notion of ‘blank’ variables: any variable whose name is "_" is both unique and ignored. This is useful because when pattern matching you often only care about some of the thing you matched: the rest is just placeholders. Štar does the same thing.
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JuliaGPU ☛ cuTile.jl 1.0: Tile windows, atomics, and sparse views
Previously, walking an array tile by tile meant passing the array, index, and shape to every ct.load and ct.store. The new ct.eachtile instead returns an indexable collection of fixed-shape windows. A blocked matrix multiplication shows the difference: [...]
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Perl / Raku
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Python
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ 31st is for recap
This year, I decided I wanted to write on a theme again and I found my way to Python topics again. This time, I chose the theme to be “A to Z of Python” that I had been thinking of doing many times over the years.
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University of Toronto ☛ Getting LSP servers and other tools to work in venvs in GNU Emacs
After playing around with this for a bit I think I have a recipe that works, although I'm not sure it's completely correct.
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R / R-Script
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Giles Dickenson-Jones ☛ Identifying skills-based occupational transition pathways with the O*NET
This post estimates potential labor market transition pathways based on the similarity of skills, abilities and knowledge required by occupations. The approach broadly follows Bratanova et al. (2026). Like their research, the considered transition pathways are for workers currently employed as truck drivers. Unlike their approach, we’ve used a more recent version of the O*NET database and a different SOC-to-ANZSCO crosswalk. Although the point wasn’t to precisely replicate their results, our approach largely did, with differences in similarity scores likely stemming from our different mapping of the SOC to the ANZSCO rather than from the method itself.
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