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Programming Leftovers
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Sean Goedecke ☛ Working with designers
The first problem with design systems is one of incentives. The engineering team that owns the design system is incentivized to produce elegant components that will look beautiful all the time. The engineering teams that use the design system are incentivized to produce systems that meet inelegant or ugly customer requirements. So you have this permanent battle where a product team demands something — say, the ability to embed arbitrary images into the dropdown component — and the design team pushes back because they’re worried it will look bad.
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Kris Shamloo ☛ irritation driven development
My gift and my curse is that I have a strong critical eye. Although I think the phrasing "critical eye" isn't quite right, maybe a better way to put it would be: a sensitivity for inefficiency.
This sensitivity has served me well at work.
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Artyom Bologov ☛ Teeny Scheme
Shopping around for smaller Schemes, I found TinySCHEME. TinySCHEME is probably the most balanced of smaller Schemes, implementing most of R5RS in mere 6K lines of code. It also had a relatively simple structure I could iterate on. So let this post be a small tribute to TinySCHEME!
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Daniel Holden ☛ Simple SDF Collisions
One idea for this is to try to find not just if there is a collision, but also the point within the intersection region which has the greatest combined depth to both surfaces. This can be done with a slight adaption to our algorithm. Rather than early-outing when we find a collision we're instead going to update our best candidate point (and it's combined depth), and only ignore regions of the space which are either entirely outside the intersection region, or cannot contain a better candidate.
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Aaron Swartz Day ☛ Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon | November 8, 2026 – 10am-5pm – Internet Archive and around the world!
We are having an IN PERSON hackathon in San Francisco at the Internet Archive on Sunday November 8th!
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Wasp Inc ☛ A Maintainer's Advice on Contributing to Open Source in 2026
As an open-source maintainer, you imagine the ideal contributor as an individual that is excited about your project, uses it and understands it, and wants to contribute to make it better for themselves, others, or because of an exciting technical problem. You get to share ideas with them, learn from each other, maybe even get to know them a bit as a person in the process, and they inspire you to do better work. A profoundly human, intellectual interaction, inspiring and fulfilling, sometimes even resulting in a life-long relationship.
When that happens, it is an amazing experience, absolutely my favorite part of building open-source software.
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[Repeat] uni MIT ☛ From Linux to Wikipedia: How Volunteers Build the Internet
Linux took nearly every aspect of this proprietary software development approach and threw it out the window. The Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux operating system were built by volunteers collaborating outside firms, without hierarchical management structures, without money as the primary incentive, and without the typical legal or technical arrangements to restrict access, adaptation, or reuse of the underlying source code. The vast majority of early Linux contributors only wrote small amounts of code. But despite this unusual production model, Linux’s high quality and growing market share were undeniable by the end of the 1990s.
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Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: prrd 0.1.0 at CRAN: Now With Real Concurrency
A new release of prrd arrived at CRAN today, and has already on r-universe. The prrd package facilitates the parallel running [of] reverse dependency [checks] when preparing R packages. It is used extensively for releases I make of Rcpp, RcppArmadillo, See the (somewhat dated) screenshot (running six parallel workers, arranged in a split byobu session).
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Perl / Raku
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University of Toronto ☛ That Perl makes it easy to use hacks is a nice thing (and good)
In my view, this sort of quick thing is what Perl is good at and is one of its strengths. In a language like Python, there's probably a proper and more elegant way but it's definitely going to be a lot more verbose. In Perl? You roll up your sleeves and get a bit messy because it's the direct, simple way, and Perl is happy to help.
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Perl ☛ NetAddr::IP 4.080_08: another trial, please smoke test
The last post here covered 4.080_05. Since then, 4.080_06, 4.080_07 and 4.080_08 changed constructor, parsing, comparison and method behaviour, and they added new4() and NetAddr::IP::Count. In almost every case, the behaviour changes handle bad or ambiguous input better: they reject it, return undef, or croak with a clear error instead of producing a wrong address. The 4.080 series is also relicensed to the MIT license. This post lists the API changes you may need to check in your code.
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