Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 01, 2026

• Sean Goedecke ☛ Elegance and intelligence are anticorrelated

  For software engineers, the most important kind of raw intelligence is often the size of your working memory: how many moving pieces you can hold in your head at a given time. Software design involves finding elegant ways to reduce that number of moving pieces, typically by abstracting them away or moving them behind some interface. It can be frustrating1 to work with engineers with a giant working memory, because they don’t care as much about decomposing the problem into some elegant design — they don’t need to.

• Paul Krugman ☛ Azeem Azhar on the Explosion of Hacking and Other AI Issues

  Krugman: So my understanding is that basically the way the world works now is that there’s software everywhere. Everything is being run on software which is complicated and maybe not that carefully put together. Tell me if I’m wrong on this, but I think it’s sort of on stilts where you have newer software laid on top of older software, and God knows where the vulnerabilities are.

  Azhar: Well, software and technology is this really big industry that somehow managed for 50 or 60 years to escape any part of safety testing.

• Smashing Magazine ☛ How Baseline Can Help You Ship Less JavaScript

  The reason those libraries stick around isn’t laziness. It’s that most teams don’t re-audit their dependencies on a Baseline cadence, or are simply not aware of how fast browsers are shipping these days. You check npm audit for security, but is this library still doing something the browser can’t? is a question that rarely gets asked. So the libraries stay.

  In this article, we’ll run that audit together. Instead of going through dependencies one by one, we’ll work in clusters, because the wins tend to come in groups. We’ll do the bundle math, build a small decision framework you can reuse, and stay honest about the cases where the platform still falls short. By the end, you’ll have a repeatable process you can run on your own package.json.

• Graham Helton ☛ Fuzzy Friends and “Black October”

  Last week when the whole world started trying to get a reliable exploit for php2shell, it was fascinating to see the number of very smart people claim they had a working exploit, only to find out that their exploit relied on a vulnerable lab setup. If you don’t have a background in this type of work, it is very easy to overlook this and make grandiose and incorrect claims about security.

• Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso ☛ The Kluever Maneuver – The Scribbler of the Rueful Countenance

  In brief, it’s this: whenever you are doing a bugfix, do it in two commits.

  1. Write a passing test that exemplifies the buggy behaviour.
  2. Fix the bug and also fix the test we just wrote.

• Code Simplicity ☛ The Secret of Fast Programming: Stop Thinking

  Perhaps that sounds incredible, but it works remarkably well. Think about it—when you’re sitting in front of your editor but not coding very quickly, is it because you’re a slow typer? I doubt it—“having to type too much” is rarely a developer’s productivity problem. Instead, the pauses where you’re not typing are what make it slow. And what are developers usually doing during those pauses? Stopping to think—perhaps about the problem, perhaps about the tools, perhaps about email, whatever. But any time this happens, it indicates a problem.

  The thinking is not the problem itself—it is a sign of some other problem. It could be one of many different issues: [...]

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Absent Reflection with Raku

    This is my response to The Weekly Challenge #397.

• Python

  • Ludovic Rousseau: New version of PySCard: 2.3.2

    I just released a new version of pyscard. PySCard is a Python module adding smart cards support (PC/SC) to Python.

  • Ludovic Rousseau: New version of PyKCS11: 1.5.21

    I just released a new version of PyKCS11, a Python wrapper above the PKCS#11 API.

  • Jussi Pakkanen ☛ A slightly better ThreadPoolExecutor in Pystd through types

    In the previous post we looked at a simple multithreaded task executor that behaves roughly like its Python standard library counterpart. The biggest missing feature was being able to return values from run tasks via future objects. In a fully dynamic language like Python this is fairly straightforward, whereas in a language with static typing, such as C++, things are trickier.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Sal ☛ Trying Herdr

    I’m a bit concerned about it being VC-funded. But if it ever goes in a weird direction, I can easily fall back to tmux. Or fall forward into Rex!

  • Adam Johnson ☛ Zsh: glob case-insensitively with the (#i) glob flag and the no_case_glob option - Adam Johnson

    By default, Zsh globs are case-sensitive, so *.jpg matches beach.jpg but not CAT.JPG or dog.Jpg: [...]

• Java/Golang

  • Frank Delporte ☛ JavaFX Links of October 2026

    Here are the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of October 2026. You can find the weekly lists on jfx-central.com. Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com.