In the afternoon I noticed that the Aphonopelma seemanni I keep was out in the open, on top of the piece of cork underneath which she has her burrow. I discovered that this large tarantula is a female the 28th of June, 2020 by inspecting her exuviae (molt).
In the above photo you can clearly see the beautiful pattern on her legs; I love the contrast it makes.
After I took the above photo I gave her two mealworms.
askgit provides a sql interface to your git repository. Lets install it and see what we can figure out about the repo.
Source: Using Askgit, an article by Will Schenk.
A question I often hear from teams - both new and established - is “should we host our stack on Kubernetes?”. Given all the buzz it gets in the tech world a lot of people assume so.
I’ve been working with k8s for several years - often with very powerful and complex platforms - and I think the truth is more nuanced.
Here’s my attempt at untangling that decision. It’s geared toward startups and self-sufficient teams in wider organisations with responsibility for hosting their own products. It might also have value to people in more traditional IT departments at larger organisations.
Source: Do I Need Kubernetes?, an article by Alex Hewson.
In this tutorial, I will teach you how to write your own virtual machine (VM) that can run assembly language programs, such as my friend's 2048 or my Roguelike. If you know how to program, but would like to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on inside a computer and better understand how programming languages work, then this project is for you. Writing your own VM may sound a little scary, but I promise that you will find it to be surprisingly simple and enlightening.
Source: Write your Own Virtual Machine, an article by Justin Meiners and Ryan Pendleton.
Just what exactly is a type?
A common perspective is that types are restrictions. Static types restrict the set of values a variable may contain, capturing some subset of the space of “all possible values.” Under this worldview, a typechecker is sort of like an oracle, predicting which values will end up where when the program runs and making sure they satisfy the constraints the programmer wrote down in the type annotations. Of course, the typechecker can’t really predict the future, so when the typechecker gets it wrong—it can’t “figure out” what a value will be—static types can feel like self-inflicted shackles.
But that is not the only perspective. There is another way—a way that puts you, the programmer, back in the driver’s seat. You make the rules, you call the shots, you set the objectives. You need not be limited any longer by what the designers of your programming language decided the typechecker can and cannot prove. You do not serve the typechecker; the typechecker serves you.
Source: Types as axioms, or: playing god with static types, an article by Alexis King.
When I was learning about Continuum Mechanics for the first time, the covariance and contravariance of vectors confused the hell out of me. The concepts gain meaning in the context of Riemannian Geometry, but it was surprising to find that one doesn’t need to learn an entire subject to grasp the logic behind co-/contravariance. An intermediate knowledge of linear algebra is enough—that is, one has to be acquainted with the concept of vector spaces and one-forms.
The duality of co-/contravariance arises when one has to define vectors in terms of a non-orthonormal basis. The reason such terminology doesn’t show up in engineering education is that Cartesian coordinates are enough for most engineering problems. But every now and then, a complex problem with funky geometrical requirements show up, like one that requires measuring distances and areas on non-flat surfaces. Then you end up with dual vector spaces. I’ll try to give the basics of duality below.
Source: Duality of Vector Spaces, an article by Onur Solmaz.
Before Unicode, each script (or script family) had its own encoding, or worse, lots of different incompatible encodings. Unicode is a superset of almost all of them, so can be used for interchange.
Source: Unicode In Five Minutes ⌚, an article by Richard Harris.
As of 2020-08-11, the first release candidate of Python 3.9 has been released - officially making it Christmas in August; let’s open presents.
Source: Python 3.9 Features I'm Excited to See, an article by Matt White.
HTML5 is not a new thing. We have been using several features of it since the initial release(January 2008). As part of #100DaysOfCode initiative, I have taken a close look to the HTML5 feature list again. See what I found? I haven't really used a bunch of it so far!
In this article, I am listing down ten such HTML5 features that I haven't used much in past but, found them useful now.
Source: 10 useful HTML5 features, you may not be using, an article by Tapas Adhikary.
In the afternoon I discovered that the Hapalopus sp. Colombia "large" I've kept since the 7th of April, 2020 had passed away. It had molted recenly and looked fine.
Earlier this week, the 10th, the little scorpion I kept, Chaerilus sp. Java, also passed away. I also had this little one since the 7th of April. As it was quite round I guess it got stuck while attempting to molt. Or maybe the high temperatures in the room; more than 30°C (86°F), were too much for the two of them.
So that leaves me with 9 tarantulas and zero scorpions. I am going to move the 9 to a cooler place in the house, our bedroom, just to be sure.
I’ve been a big fan of Nassim Taleb’s Incerto. He wrote a series of essays on life, where all the topics revolve around decision making under uncertainty. I wanted to dig deeper on some of the more technical concepts he alluded too, so last year I explored a few textbooks on probability theory.
I was surprised with how elegant the field was. The most inspiring idea to me was how the originators interpreted probability through set theory. Not only is it a beautiful way to look at things, but by seeing it this way, they could apply few axioms, leverage set theory, and badabing badaboom they had a whole field’s worth of discoveries.
Source: Sets and Probability, an article by Stepan Parunashvili.
When we will write a Telegram bot with Rust, we will use a technique called asynchronous programming. Let’s tackle what that means.
Source: Async Unicorns love Rust, an article by Kirill Dubovikov.
In the afternoon I noticed that the Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens I keep had molted. The common name for this tarantula is Green Bottle Blue, GBB for short, after the colors the adults have.
The previous time this spider molted in my care was the 19th of June, 2020.
Much like the DMV, the PostgreSQL query planner is a powerful, mysterious entity to whom we semi-blindly entrust our well-being. It has the crucial responsibility of picking the most efficient execution plan for every query. Here we’ll explore what data Postgres takes into account when creating query plans, and how we used that context to help the query planner come up with more efficient plans for some of our most important query patterns.
Source: How we used Postgres extended statistics to achieve a 3000x speedup, an article by Jared Rulison.
I got into a discussion about monads recently. On a search to find some resources to share, I realized that most essays explained them with type signatures and rules. A missing ingredient to grok them, I think, is to understand the intuition behind them. How could you end up inventing monads?
Source: Inventing Monads, an article by Stepan Parunashvili.
As Python programmers, we write scripts. Many times they are quick and dirty; never meant to be seen by others or even yourself after accomplishing it’s task. However, in some cases the script is meant to live on, perhaps being modified and shared regularly. It’s in this case that we often want to create a GUI for the script. There are a few options for Python which include Tkinter, PyQT/PySide, wxPython, Kivy, PySimpleGui, and so on. These are all great libraries which serve their respective purposes, but in a lot of cases they can be overkill, requiring just as much code and thought as the script it’s meant to wrap. This is where DearPyGui shines. So to start, you need to get DearPyGui…
Source: Python GUIs with DearPyGui, an article by Jonathan Hoffstadt.
WebAssembly (wasm) allows code written in languages other than JavaScript to run on browsers. If you haven’t been paying attention, all the major browsers support wasm and globally more than 90% of users have browsers that can run wasm.
Since Rust compiles to wasm, is it possible to build SPAs (Single Page Applications) purely in Rust and without writing a single line of JavaScript? The short answer is YES!
Source: Single Page Applications using Rust, an article by Sheshbabu Chinnakonda.
On my quest towards building a GoLang Desktop application I found some useful frameworks, Lorca and Webview (which I wrote about in my previous post). These frameworks create a window which GoLang can inject HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build the UI.
But I don’t want to write JavaScript(!) and deal with all the complexities that comes with it like npm, webpack, typescript… Fortunately, I can just compile GoLang to WebAssembly (WASM) and use that in place of JavaScript. WASM is a binary format that can be executed natively in most modern browsers.
Source: GoLang Desktop App with webview/Lorca, WASM and Bazel, an article by Graham Jenson.
My friend Juan Paucar directed me to a paper from the magnificent Programming Languages and Systems 28th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2019, related to Codata. I have been very interested in codata, mainly because it relates to data in a category-theory way, but, as usual, I didn't understand many of the words involved. This paper helped me understand a lot, and also helped me understand and shape my mind on how to connect the worlds of FP and OOP. But, before that, we must go on tour over a bit of theory.
Source: Codata in action, or how to connect Functional Programming and Object Oriented Programming, an article by Javier Casas
At work, I’ve recently been asked to advise our engineers on how to write blog posts. A lot of such articles are already available. However, they tend to focus around two main themes:
- The technical publishing platform e.g. Jekyll, Medium, etc.
- Metrics e.g. readability score, SEO, etc.
Beyond that, everyone is on one’s own. But I believe that writing a good technical article is as much art as engineering.
In this post, I’d like to try to address this gap: I’ve been writing this blog for more than a decade. I hope I’ve learned some things along the way, so here are my advices.
Source: Advices on writing blog posts, an article by Nicolas Fränkel.
I’ve been continuing to write pages about CSS! Here are 6 more.
Two of them are about how to think about CSS in general (“CSS isn’t easy” and “backwards compatibility”), which is something I’m still trying to wrap my head around.
Source: Some more CSS comics, an article by Julia Evans.
Kubernetes is a popular, cloud-native container orchestration system. Adoption of Kubernetes in production environments has rapidly increased over the last several years. As Kubernetes adoption increases, there is often pressure to migrate applications that are currently deployed via other means onto Kubernetes. Performing an effective migration of these applications to Kubernetes may help organizations adopt DevOps practices, and it will allow organizations to unify their operations onto a single set of cloud tooling and expertise.
However, cloud-native software architectures are different from traditional architectures in a variety of ways. As a result, migration of a system into a cloud-native environment is not as simple as a rehosting migration. This post introduces a generic process that provides a useful set of questions to ask when planning a Kubernetes migration. The answers to the questions can then be used to make informed choices about how to use the various deployment options available within Kubernetes.
Source: Migrating Applications to Kubernetes, an article by Richard Laughlin.