Plurrrr

I view at least half the written content I consume via my mobile phone, which belongs to the class of phones with a slightly smaller than average screen. In fact, it’s width as reported by the Firefox and Chrome viewport simulators is 375 pixels wide, small but not tiny. And yet many websites I visit hinder my mobile viewing experience because of a rather simple issue: horizontal scrolling.

In a realm known as Kumandra, a re-imagined Earth inhabited by an ancient civilization, a warrior named Raya is determined to find the last dragon.

The Agile Manifesto turned 20 this year, and there are two facts that seem self-evident:

1. Agile, as a label, won; nobody wants to be called non-Agile.
2. Agile, as it is practiced, falls woefully short of the revolutionary ideas of its founders.

How did we get to this point? Everybody says they do Agile and yet almost nobody is Agile.

In this post I'll talk about how I manage Firefox and mimick some of the behaviours/aesthetics I'd come to enjoy from using other browsers over the years.

On the Italian Riviera, an unlikely but strong friendship grows between a human being and a sea monster disguised as a human.

If you’re building a new app today, it might be worth taking a closer look at making it cloud-native and using Kubernetes from the jump. The effort to set up Kubernetes is less than you think. Certainly, it’s less than the effort it would take to refactor your app later on to support containerization.

New in Swift 5.5: Property wrappers can now be applied directly to function arguments, just like how they can be used to add additional functionality to a property or local variable.

Dependency Injection is a software design pattern in which an object receives other instances that it depends on. It’s a commonly used technique that allows reusing code, insert mocked data, and simplify testing. An example could be initializing a view with the network provider as a dependency.

With their warning about Lord Voldemort's return scoffed at, Harry and Dumbledore are targeted by the Wizard authorities as an authoritarian bureaucrat slowly seizes power at Hogwarts.

namedtuple has been around since forever, and over time, its convenience saw it used far outside its originally intended purpose.

With dataclasses now covering part of those use cases, what should one use named tuples for?

In this article, we take a look at exactly that, with a few examples from real code.

The Zip file format is now 32 years old. You'd think being 32 years old the format would be well documented. Unfortunately it's not.

I have a feeling this is like many file formats. They aren't designed, rather the developer just makes it up as they go. If it gets popular other people want to read and/or write them. They either try to reverse engineer the format OR they ask for specs. Even if the developer writes specs they often forget all the assumptions their original program makes. Those are not written down and hence the spec is incomplete. Zip is such a format.

A collection of tips to help take your CSS skills pro.

Putting images on websites is incredibly simple, yes? Actually, yes, it is. You use and link it to a valid source in the src attribute and you’re done. Except that there are (counts fingers) 927 things you could (and some you really should) do that often go overlooked.

In this post, I’ll summarize what I’ve learned from an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of two important concepts in programming: Python’s generators and Scheme’s continuation. The aim is not to teach Python or Scheme programming. Rather, what I want to do is to demonstrate that generators are special cases of a much more powerful construct - continuations. Continuations allow programmers to invent new control structures, and it is the foundation upon which iterators, generators, coroutines, and many other useful constructs can be built. I have found it very useful to understand how generators work from the deeper and broader perspective of continuations.

This weekend I was talking with a friend about how I'd planned and estimated a huge software project in one of my previous jobs. By that I mean not something which can be done by a single team in a sprint or two, but something which requires several teams, across several quarters of effort, involving many other departments of non-engineering team members.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a short thread on Twitter about the undying argument Is this really bad UI, or is it just you who are averse to change? — I’m publishing these observations here simply because it will be easier to find them and reference them in the future.

Docker is one of the tools that has simplified and eased the development of applications amongst teams. The application is being packaged in a container shipped and run giving the developers a better experience during development, testing, and deployment. This container is being created using a Docker image where all the application’s dependencies and runtime information are required to run it.

In recent years, developers have embraced this approach because they do not need to worry about installing all dependencies on their system. What is needed is just Docker on their computer.

This article will detail the steps to follow whenever we want to Dockerize our application with Node.js. With that, we mean to achieve the smooth development experience Docker provides. This article will not focus on explaining what Docker is but we will look at a few reasons why we would want to Dockerize our application.

Don’t. Worker pools are not a great fit for Rust due to its ownership model. Instead, embrace functional programming and immutable data. Rust provides simpler to use and more elegant tools: parallel Iterators and Streams.

After the disappointment of my X1 Nano and learning that all future Intel “Evo”-branded laptops would lack S3 suspend, I started thinking about returning to my M1 MacBook full-time or building an OpenBSD desktop. I chose the latter, building my first desktop machine in many years.

I publish Perl stories on this blog once a week, and it seems every time there’s at least one response on social media that amounts to, “I hate Perl because of its weird syntax.” Or, “It looks like line noise.” (Perl seems to have outlasted that one — when’s the last time you used an acoustic modem?) Or the quote attributed to Keith Bostic: “The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.”

So let’s address, confront, and demystify this hate. What are these objectionable syntactical, noisy, possibly encrypted bits? And why does Perl have them?

The best case depth for a search tree is O(log_b n), if b is the arity (or branching) of the tree. Intuitively, we know that if we increase b, the depth goes down, but is that all there is to it? And if not, how do we chose the optimal branching b?

Many git tutorials focus on a set of commands and instructions to “get you up to speed” in git, without addressing the underlying concept of “how git works”. While the commands are important, I feel it’s more important for you to understand what’s going on behind the scenes.

My last post on this topic caught some attention, so I’m going to continue exploring some of the systemd features that may be useful to people writing network services. Here are some more things about socket activation I didn’t cover in the previous post.

Firstly, it’s not something that needs a binding to a specific library to work (although systemd does make one available for this task). It uses conventions that already exist in Unix, and have done for a long time. The network sockets are presented as file descriptors, and some information about them as environment variables.

On many Linux systems, systemd-journald runs as a daemon at boot and collects your logs. You can access them through journalctl but it turns out journald is a lot more complicated then just sending something to a text file. I’ll look at two main things here: What kind of information is included in a journald entry and how these entries get from programs to journald.

It's often said that the internet has democratized education: the sum of human knowledge is only a Google search away! And yet, having access to information is only half of the story; you also need to be able to convert raw information into usable skills.

Many people have contributed to developing and promoting the use of regular expressions since they were invented about half a century ago. Here's a short list of some of the most influential people behind the technology. I've written this up for two reasons:

1. For people who've only gotten into the technology recently but are interested in some of the history and pioneers behind it.
2. Since I fit the above description, I'm hoping readers will help fill me in on other people I've forgotten about or otherwise left out.

Most of the time you can get away with a fairly simple security posture on NixOS. Don't run services as root, separate each service into its own systemd units, don't run packages you don't trust the heritage of and most importantly don't give random people shell access with passwordless sudo.

Sometimes however, you have good reasons to want to lock everything down as much as humanly possible. This could happen when you want to create production servers for something security-critical such as a bastion host. In this post I'm going to show you a defense-in-depth model for making a NixOS server that is a bit more paranoid than usual, as well as explanations of all the moving parts.

I’ve sometimes seen people asking about dependency management, hooks, tracking bugs and other sort of higher level (to me) things than git provides. You can see this if you look at stackoverflow questions about submodules. What’s wrong with submodules? Well, compared to what exactly? When I do a clone of a project and run yarn install, it gives me a list of CVEs that match. When I do a bundle exec it loads my project and has an opportunity (with a very high level of context) to tell me that I’ve forgotten to run migrations or run yarn update in a while. You don’t get this with git. Maybe these examples are too web-tech specific. But I’d like to suggest that this pattern will probably apply to Go, Rust and whatever else. Git is below your project and your project is trying to get better stuff done. So stop trying to solve your problem with Git and listen to how a few other communities do their thing.