Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 26, 2026

• Ryan Singer ☛ A Primer for Operators Who Need Software

  He sees a clear need, he knows this needs to happen. But before he's ready to hire a software developer, he wants to better define what he's picturing (good instinct).

  I'm sharing what I told him here because it can be a primer for anybody in the same situation, who's not a software developer but needs software in their workflow.

  I advised him to break the problem into three different things.

• Kev Quirk ☛ How I Develop Pure Commons Apps

  Git is a staple in my development workflow, so you'd think I'd use it the same way most other developers do, but I don't. You see dear reader, I'm a visual learner, so branches in Git are confusing to me as they're abstracted away inside the .git folder. This means I often forget which branch I'm on. Which in turn has led to all kinds of issues over the years when it comes to committing shit to the wrong branch.

• PulkoMandy ☛ Unsollicited advice about stackframes

  In my daily life I do a lot of debugging, reverse engineering, and software development. For some of these tasks, understanding how computer works in unnecessary detail is, well, sometimes useful. In particular, stacks and stackframes are very central to how most modern computing works. And, annoyingly, the implementation is slightly different depending on CPU architecture, compiler, operating system, but also CPU generation and compiler options.

  Every time I need to dig into it, I have to refresh my memory or re-understand how it works on a specific setup. I may save a lot of time, for myself and hopefully for others, if I start writing it down. So, here you go, my currently very incomplete guide about how stacks and stackframes work!

  This article does not attempt to retrace the history of how all features of a computer call stack work. For that I can recommend Sten Henriksson's A brief's History of the Stack, which will take you all the way to Babylonian folklore, with a brief detour through tax avoidance schemes. Here I will introduce concepts in a way that seem convnient for explaining them.

• R / R-Script

  • DataGeeek ☛ Quantitative Event-Driven Modeling: BTC Balance Sheet Shocks with SEC EDGAR Filings in R

    MicroStrategy (MSTR) has fundamentally transitioned from a traditional enterprise software firm into an equity-based Bitcoin (BTC) holding vehicle and treasury operation. Evaluating MSTR using conventional corporate finance metrics (such as Price-to-Earnings or EBITDA multiples) fails to capture the core driver of its equity valuation: the dynamic Net Asset Value (NAV) premium driven by programmatic Bitcoin treasury expansion.

    This technical article explores an end-to-end, reproducible quantitative pipeline built in R. Inspired by recent advancements in automated SEC parsing tools—specifically the secfile architecture highlighted in Interactive Brokers Quant Blog—this pipeline ingests real-time SEC EDGAR filings, dynamically extracts digital asset balance sheet facts, aligns mixed-frequency financial and market data, and models MSTR daily equity log returns using an out-of-sample 82.08% R-Squared structural tidymodels framework.

• Python

  • Philip Zucker ☛ A Lean Proof Printing Python Union Find

    It’s a useful capability for all sorts of reasons. If you want to use an e-graph as an theorem prover backend for another system it’s table stakes. Something I found interesting is that even if you are using e-graphs for optimization, a proof certificate might be necessary in some applications. Sam has mentioned that in the hardware industry, if you don’t have a certificate understandable to the tools with the golden seal of approval, it’s a no go. Makes sense, because mistakes in hardware can be very very expensive.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Giving up on PyPy for my own use (at least for now)

    Not all that long ago by my standards, I wrote about how PyPy had been quietly working for me, then earlier this year I wrote about my concerns with PyPy and Python 3 versions, which somewhat dented my enthusiasm, but not by a lot because at the time we didn't have very many machines with Python 3.14. Since then we updated our general login servers to Ubuntu 26.04, and things happened that have resulted in me abandoning PyPy for my Python 3 programs.

• Proprietary Qt

  • Qt ☛ Qt WebEngine Separate Release

• Java/Golang

  • Frank Delporte ☛ JavaFX Links of September 2026

    Here are the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of September 2026. This was a big month with the release of JavaFX 27!