Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 20, 2026

• Wouter Groeneveld ☛ KTConf 2026 Creative Coding Slides

  In the context of coding, the same concepts apply: you’ll need to have some technical background in order to judge whether something is creative—during both the process (the code) and the end product (the thing that hopefully makes your end users happy). Thus, technical knowledge is one of the prerequisites for being a creative programmer. The talk, entitled A Critique On AI-Assisted ‘Creative’ Programming, predictably included a summary of my book The Creative Programmer.

  Here’s the executive summary of the talk: [...]

• Sean Goedecke ☛ Grit your teeth and ship it

  Being good at building and being good at shipping are two separate skills. In the short term, they’re actually countervailing: if you have a gift for building, you’re likely to be worse at shipping. Ira Glass has a classic quote about this.

• Helen Chong ☛ Announcing PyOmgLol, an Unofficial Client for omg.lol

  After my study at 42 the computer science school ended due the suspension of the student programme of my local campus in late May, I have been trying to look for a software project to make to put the programming knowledge and skills I gained from my study there to good use. Eventually, after checking out various community tools for omg.lol, I came up the idea of making my own omg.lol client built on top of omglol's API, with Python as the language since I had learned a lot more about Python during my study at 42 the school. Making an omg.lol client meant to be released publicly is also one of my ways to give back to the omg.lol community.

  I decided to name my Python client of omg.lol PyOmgLol, which is a combination of Python and omg.lol. Furthermore, I got to put my graphic design skills to use by designing PyOmgLol's logo.

• Let's Encrypt ☛ How We Built a Data Warehouse Using ClickHouse

  When the scripts that generate the data for letsencrypt.org/stats broke yet again, we decided to retire it rather than repair it. Let’s Encrypt issues six to ten million certificates each day, producing a large volume of logs that keeps growing. It became increasingly time-consuming and difficult to answer questions about our own issuance like “how many certificates use the ‘shortlived’ profile.” Using raw logs, this requires finding, parsing and extracting relevant portions of loglines. Querying the database behind our issuance API is not a practical option, as it’s built for transactions rather than analysis. We’d also used a log search SaaS product, but our bills were growing much faster than we’d like, and while it was fine for searching, it wasn’t able to do the analytic workloads we needed. We knew we could dream bigger and better.

• Jessica Kerr ☛ Who are we Now? – Jessitron

  With this mindset, Viceo laid the basis for anthropology, ethnography, sociology, comparative law, historiography… a whole slew of fields. And he nailed my favorite feeling in software development.

  When I write a program—or change it enough to be integrated with it—I understand it in a way that’s deeper than other tools. Like the software is an extension of me, because I know where and how it can flex, I can figure out what broke, and I feel powerful changing it. Vico named this feeling: verum factum. I hold the truths of this software, because I made it.

• Giovanni Dicanio ☛ The C++20’s u8/char8_t Backward-Compatibility Fiasco

  There is a myth according to which every new C++ version is backward compatible with the older versions. While there is a common general trend to try and keep backward compatibility across different C++ versions, that’s not always the case.

  A “recent” example is provided by C++20’s u8 and char8_t.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] Two Optimisation Tasks in the Weekly Challenge 391

  • Perl ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] ANNOUNCE: Perl.Wiki V 1.54, etc

  • Perl ☛ 2026-09-14 [Older] This week in PSC (235) | 2026-09-14

• Python

  • Adam Johnson ☛ Python: join my optimization workshop in Lisbon, 10th October - Adam Johnson

    It’s a small, in-person, hands-on session on optimizing Python code, with a Django flavour. Here are the details: [...]

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ From URL to Theme: How {css2r} Steals a Website’s Colours, and Where It Gives Up

    We have all been there. The analysis is solid, the model is good, the tables are clean. And then someone from the communication team walks past your screen and says, very politely, that “it doesn’t really look like us”. They are right. Your app is blue-ish, your company is orange. Somewhere there is a 60-page brand book you have never opened, and you have no intention of reading it before 2pm.

    So here is the naive question we asked ourselves at ThinkR: the company website already carries the brand. The colours are in its CSS, right there, publicly served over HTTP. Why not just go and take them?

  • Athanasia Mo Mowinckel ☛ Why ggseg Atlases Became Function Calls

    Re-exporting lazy-loaded datasets is not possible in R-packages, since they don’t exist in a package’s namespace. This created a conundrum for me as I was reinventing how the ggseg-ecosystem would look like in the future. Here, I walk through the problem and solution I ended up with, with the help of good colleagues in rOpenSci.