My Guide for Rubber Duck Debugging: A Better Process
Would you believe it if I told you that something called "rubber
ducking" is actually one of the most insightful debugging techniques
ever suggested? When you run into a programming snag you can't
figure out, just find a rubber duck and start talking to it about
your problems. Sold, right? Me neither.
I actually love rubber duck debugging, but not in the way it's
usually explained. Turns out, it's hard for adults to take seriously
the idea of talking to a literal rubber duck on their desk. And even
if you guessed the duck is not really the point, you'd be surprised
by how many engineers miss the point entirely. In this article, I'm
going to explain what rubber ducking is, why it does actually work,
and provide a step-by-step process for the way I do it that I think
can change your debugging chops for good.
Saving a Third of Our Memory by Re-ordering Go Struct Fields
In past projects at Qvault we had an
application that typically ran with ~2GB in memory at any given
time. By simply changing the order of some uint variables we managed
to drop the memory usage to less than 1.4GB. The vast majority
of this allocated memory is due to an enormous slice of stats
structs.
Pysa is a security-focused tool built on top of our type checker for
Python, Pyre. It’s used
to look at code and analyze how data flows through it. Analyzing
data flows is useful because many security and privacy issues can be
modeled as data flowing into a place it shouldn’t.
I've been wanting to write a big project in
Rust for a while as a learning
exercise, and actually started one in late 2018 (a FUSE server
implementation). But then life happened and I got busy and never
went anywhere with it. Due to certain world circumstances I'm
currently spending a lot of time indoors so
rust-fuse
(docs)
now exists and is good enough to write basic hello-world
filesystems. I plan to polish it up a bit more with the goal of
releasing a v1.0 that supports the same use cases as
libfuse.
I took some notes along the way about things that struck me as
especially good or bad. Overall I quite like Rust the language, have
mixed feelings about the quality of ancillary tooling, and have
strong objections to some decisions made by the packaging system
(Cargo + crates.io).
For 500 days I have been blogging on Plurrrr non-stop, one post a
day. Thank you for reading and following!
The JavaScript Promise Tutorial
This post is intended to be the ultimate JavaScript Promises
tutorial: recipes and examples for everyday situations (or that’s
the goal 😉). We cover all the necessary methods like then,
catch, and finally. Also, we go over more complex situations
like executing promises in parallel with Promise.all, timing out
APIs with Promise.race, promise chaining and some best practices
and gotchas.
Debugging Python server memory leaks with the Fil profiler
Your server is running just fine, handling requests and sending
responses. But then, ever so slowly, memory usage creeps up, and up,
and up–until eventually your process runs out of memory and
crashes. And then it restarts, and the leaking starts all over
again.
In order to fix memory leaks, you need to figure out where that
memory is being allocated. And that can be tricky, unless you use
the right tools.
Let’s see how you can identify the exact lines of code that are
leaking by using the Fil memory profiler.
The new CSS property that boosts your rendering performance
The
content-visibility
property, launching in Chromium 85, might be one of the most
impactful new CSS properties for improving page load
performance. content-visibility enables the user agent to skip an
element's rendering work, including layout and painting, until it is
needed. Because rendering is skipped, if a large portion of your
content is off-screen, leveraging the content-visibility property
makes the initial user load much faster. It also allows for faster
interactions with the on-screen content. Pretty neat.
The main idea of functional programming is to treat functions like
any other data types. In particular, we want to be able to pass
functions as arguments to other functions, return them as values,
and store them in data structures. But what kind of data type is a
function?
This 9,000 word blog post is a complete introduction to Bayes
Theorem and how to put it to practice. In short, Bayes Theorem is a
framework for critical thinking. By the end of this post, you’ll be
making better decisions, realise when you’re being unreasonable, and
also understand why some people believe in UFOs.
Python .whl files, or
wheels, are a
little-discussed part of Python, but they’ve been a boon to the
installation process for Python packages. If you’ve installed a
Python package using pip,
then chances are that a wheel has made the installation faster and
more efficient.
Wheels are a component of the Python ecosystem that helps to make
package installs just work. They allow for faster installations and
more stability in the package distribution process. In this
tutorial, you’ll dive into what wheels are, what good they serve,
and how they’ve gained traction and made Python even more of a joy
to work with.
Reading type signatures will become the part of basic computer
literacy curriculum taught in elementary schools.
While they taught you how Microsoft spreadsheets operated kids in
future will learn some lambda calculus instead.
Types will be the standard user interfacing element to access
computer systems. It will replace the buttons and text boxes of the
present day and ordinary people will use them every day.
This article tells what these "types" are and gives a taste of how
to read type signatures. Then I explain why I think this is useful
and conclude with an example of reading code with types. I assume
that you understand a bit of basic algebra.
How Link-Begging Became the Most Annoying Search Engine Tactic
Businesses want to show up on the front page of a specific search
term, and they’re willing to annoy you to get a backlink from
you. Please never do this.
We present the earliest evidence for domestic cat (Felis catus L.,
1758) from Kazakhstan, found as a well preserved skeleton with
extensive osteological pathologies dating to 775–940 cal CE from the
early medieval city of Dzhankent, Kazakhstan. This urban settlement
was located on the intersection of the northern Silk Road route
which linked the cities of Khorezm in the south to the trading
settlements in the Volga region to the north and was known in the
tenth century CE as the capital of the nomad Oghuz. The presence of
this domestic cat, presented here as an osteobiography using a
combination of zooarchaeological, genetic, and isotopic data,
provides proxy evidence for a fundamental shift in the nature of
human-animal relationships within a previously pastoral region. This
illustrates the broader social, cultural, and economic changes
occurring within the context of rapid urbanisation during the early
medieval period along the Silk Road.
Source: The earliest domestic cat on the Silk
Road, an article
by A. F. Haruda, A. R. Ventresca Miller, J. L. A. Paijmans, A. Barlow,
A. Tazhekeyev, S. Bilalov, Y. Hesse, M. Preick, T. King, R. Thomas,
H. Härke & I. Arzhantseva
A Technical Introduction to Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning is a paradigm where agents learn through
interaction with their environment.
If you’re managing a complex git codebase with multiple developers,
then you may well be using a tool like GitHub or BitBucket to delve
into the history and figure out branch and merge issues.
These GUIs are great for providing a nice user interface for
managing pull requests and simple histories and the like, but when
the workflow SHTF there’s no substitute for using git log and its
relatively little-known flags to really dig into the situation.
Time Traveling In Haskell: How It Works And How To Use It
I recently got to use a very curious Haskell technique in
production: time traveling. I say this with the utmost
seriousness. This technique worked like magic for the problem I was
trying to solve, and so I thought I’d share what I learned. In
addition to the technique and its workings, I will also explain how
time traveling can be misused, yielding computations that never
terminate.
At their core, neural networks are functions. They take some input,
perform a series of computations, and produce an output. Though most
networks operate in the realm of vectors and matrices, it can be a
useful exercise to see them without the extra barrier of linear
algebra. For this purposes of this explanation, we will only cover
single variable functions, but the principles we will see can be
extended into any number of dimensions.
And while everyone is wondering where perl7 is going, the other
crucial question is where perl5 is going; will it stop where it is
now (the current official plan), will there be a 5.34 (something I
have repeated argued for because it makes no sense for the
sunsetting release to have experimental features, and is lacking a
perl5 executable out the box), will perl5 development continue as it
did before? This is something that isn't talked about much and I'm
not sure yet what will happen, but I am pretty sure that decision
shouldn't be taken by the people who don't want to use it.
Exactly-Once Initialization in Asynchronous Python
A common situation in
asyncio Python
programs is asynchronous initialization. Some resource must be
initialized exactly once before it can be used, but the
initialization itself is asynchronous — such as an
asyncpg database. Let’s
talk about a couple of solutions.
You’ve read a lot of posts about the shortcomings of the Go
programming language, so what’s one more.
Lack of sum types
Type assertions
Date and Time
Statements over Expressions
Erroring out on unused variables
Error handling
Source: Gripes With Go, an
article by Akshay Oppiliappan.
The Case Against OOP is Wildly Overstated
You can’t rule the development world for decades without attracting
some enemies. And object-oriented programming, which provides the
conceptual underpinning for dozens of languages old and new,
certainly has some enemies.
Maybe that’s why we’ve suffered through a never-ending series of hot
takes about OOP. They’ve described it as a productivity-destroying
disaster,
a set of deceitful programming
patterns,
and a mediocre
tool
designed to help poor programmers hide their incompetence. OOP was
even proclaimed
dead (14
years ago, so take that one with a grain of salt).
What all these rants have in common is that they point out
(rightfully) some of the pitfalls in modern software design and then
conclude (wrongfully) that this indicates a terrible rot at the core
of the programming world. Yes, object-oriented programming doesn’t
look so great if you conflate it with sloppy design practices and
fuzzy architectural thinking. But are these crimes really an
unavoidable part of OOP? Or are they just one of the wrong paths we
sometimes wander as programming neophytes, armed with too much
confidence and too much curiosity?
Most people who have come in contact with computer graphics know
that aliasing commonly refers to jagged edges that occur when
rendering triangles. In this article, we look at other
manifestations of aliasing in 3D graphics, and attempt to
theoretically unify them. We won't properly look at how to solve
aliasing, only focusing on reasoning about the problem instead.
Many people hack together shell scripts quickly to do simple tasks,
but these soon take on a life of their own. Unfortunately shell
scripts are full of subtle effects which result in scripts failing
in unusual ways. It’s possible to write scripts which minimise these
problems. In this article, I explain several techniques for writing
robust bash scripts.
In the afternoon, when walking back to our house, I spotted what I
believe to be a female Volucella zonaria; the hornet mimic hoverfly.
Side view of a Volucella zonaria female.
The first of July my aunt contacted me on Messenger asking if I could
identify an insect she had taken a photo of. I couldn't. But I used an
app on my iPhone 5 (can't recall which one) which identified it as
Volucella zonaria. Hence, why I believe the above insect to be a
Volucella zonaria as well. And since males have less space between
the eyes, I assume that this is a female.
The vocal red cat
On the way back to our house I encountered a very vocal red cat. It
kept meowing at me, insisting to be petted which I did. It kept
rolling on the sidewalk meowing and purring, requesting to be petted
some more.
The vocal red cat rolling on the sidewalk.
Different approaches to HTTP routing in Go
There are many ways to do HTTP path routing in Go – for better or
worse. There’s the standard library’s
http.ServeMux, but it
only supports basic prefix matching. There are many ways to do more
advanced routing yourself, including Axel Wagner’s interesting
ShiftPath
technique. And
then of course there are lots of third-party router libraries. In
this article I’m going to do a comparison of several custom
techniques and some off-the-shelf packages.
Unexpected cross-origin information leakage hinders web users'
privacy. A protective referrer policy can help.
Consider setting a referrer policy of
strict-origin-when-cross-origin. It retains much of the referrer's
usefulness, while mitigating the risk of leaking data
cross-origins.
Don't use referrers for Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
protection. Use CSRF
tokens
instead, and other headers as an extra layer of security.
Just before 4pm I noticed that the Caribena versicolor I keep had
molted for the first time in my care. In the early afternoon I had
added water to the enclosures of each of the ten tarantulas I keep,
mostly slings. And I guess the increase in humidity triggered the
molting process in the little spider. Or maybe it was just ready.
Caribena versicolor after molting.
After I had taken two photos with my iPhone 5 with a LED ring light
plus macro lens I
noticed a small mealworm crawling around in the enclosure. I always
crush the head of mealworms prior to feeding them to my spiders, but I
guess I didn't do it right with this one.
As the Caribena versicolor shouldn't eat for at least a week after
molting I removed the mealworm and tried to feed it to the Hapalopus
sp. Colombia "large" I keep. This spider also molted recently; I found
an exuviae with it the 21st of this month. But it was not
interested in eating the small mealworm.
Hapalopus sp. Colombia "large".
In the end I fed the small mealworm to the Chromatopelma
cyaneopubescens, which detected the wriggling prey item and picked it
up to eat it.
Random Strings and Integers That Actually Aren’t
Recently the topic of generating random-looking coupon codes and
other strings came up on internal chat. My go-to for something like
that is always this
solution based on
Feistel networks, which I didn’t think was terribly obscure. But I
was surprised when nobody else seemed to recognize it, so maybe it
is.
This post describes a Sudoku solver in Python. Even the most
challenging Sudoku puzzles can be quickly and efficiently solved
with depth first search and constraint propagation.
I was making a quick project that require to scrape some information
from a
website. BeautifulSoup
is the library of choice.
Download takes 1-2 seconds per page, with high network latency
because the server is in US and I am in London.
After writing the downloader, it takes more like 4-5 seconds per
page, which is noticeably slow. How come? Could it be that large
HTML is slow to parse?
In the evening I noticed that the Pterinochilus murinus Red Color
Form (RFC) I keep was out in the open, eating a mealworm that I had
given to it earlier. Normally it eats inside its burrow, but now it
was outside!
Pterinochilus murinus eating near its burrow entry.
I carefully moved the enclosure; a plastic container, and moved the
clips away from the lid. Next, I got my iPhone 5 ready with a LED ring light
and a macro lens.
Pterinochilus murinus eating on top of its burrow.
While I carefully took several photos the tarantula moved around a
bit while holding its prey.
The spider has grown and changed a lot since it arrived at our
house. As far as I know
it has molted once
while in my care.
Mastering sed: part 1
In this tutorial, we will go over the basics of using sed, an
ancient and powerful text manipulator. This tutorial assumes basic
experience with bash.
We will go over real sed examples that you can copy paste into your
own terminal which explore various features and fundamental ideas of
sed. At the end, we will have a summary of the fundamentals.
Most of the programming languages are open enough to allow
programmers doing things multiple ways for the similar
outcome. JavaScript is no way different. With JavaScript, we often
find multiple ways of doing things for a similar outcome, and that's
confusing at times.
Some of the usages are better than the other alternatives and thus,
these are my favorites. I am going to list them here in this
article. I am sure, you will find many of these in your list too.
The open source Git project just released Git
2.28
with features and bug fixes from over 58 contributors, 13 of them
new. We last caught up with you on the latest in Git back when 2.26
was
released. Here’s
a look at some of the most interesting features and changes
introduced since then.
Every self-help book ever, boiled down to 11 simple rules
Why not condense the repeated lessons of an entire genre into one
article? That's what I've attempted here, after reading dozens of
history's biggest bestsellers so you don't have to. Here is the
essence of the advice I've seen delivered again and again.
The 19th-century discovery of numbers called “quaternions” gave
mathematicians a way to describe rotations in space, forever
changing physics and math.
Functional programming is a style of programming and modern
languages support this style to a greater or lesser extent. In this
article I want to explain how programming in a functional style
provides you with powerful abstractions to make your code cleaner. I
will illustrate this with examples in Raku and Python, which as we
will see are both excellent languages for functional programming.
Hello! I’ve been writing some comics about CSS this past week, and I
thought as an experiment I’d post them to my blog instead of only
putting them on Twitter.
I’m going to ramble about CSS at the beginning a bit but you can
skip to the end if you just want to read the comics :)
With thousands of apps created with the CLI so far and glowing
feedback from Forge developers, here are our 10 principles for
designing successful CLIs. If you’re building a CLI to support your
service, resource, or platform, we hope that you might use these
principles, too!
Destructuring is one of my favorite tools in JavaScript, in simple
terms, destructuring allows you to break down a complex structure
(like an array or an object) into simpler parts, though there’s a
bit more to it than that.
