Plurrrr

This is not a tutorial. If you're looking for a quick, easy, "how to use git" kind of post, look elsewhere.

The goal of this post is to give you just enough understanding of the git internals that you can build up a correct intuition of what various git commands actually do under the hood.

Today I would like to share with you my simple yet useful zsh(1) shell config that I use daily.

This weekend, there was a lot of discussion about a denial-of-service vulnerability in aeson, the most popular JSON library for Haskell. Tom Sydney Kerckhove published a blog post titled JSON Vulnerability in Haskell’s Aeson library, and there was discussion on Reddit, Discourse, and a GitHub issue.

After several attempts and tweets at Google I/O, I started wanting to make my own notes into something more visually appealing and presentable so that I can share my notes with everybody else who want to learn the same subjects.

Apple’s default screensavers for Mac OS X are nice, but they get boring after a while. Any true nerd would take matters into their own hands when that happens!

If you want to make your own custom screensaver for Mac OS X, this article is for you. We’ll walk through a tutorial for making a screensaver which emulates the game Pong. It’s going to be super simple — this is just to get you started with how to make a screensaver.

In this article you’ll find some tips to reduce the amount of RAM used when working with pandas, the fundamental Python library for data analysis and data manipulation.

In this article you will find 42 recommendations about coding in C++ that can help a programmer avoid a lot of errors, save time and effort. The author is Andrey Karpov - technical director of "Program Verification Systems", a team of developers, working on PVS-Studio static code analyzer. Having checked a large number of open source projects, we have seen a large variety of ways to shoot yourself in the foot; there is definitely much to share with the readers. Every recommendation is given with a practical example, which proves the currentness of this question. These tips are intended for C/C++ programmers, but usually they are universal, and may be of interest for developers using other languages.

BuildKit is a new and improved tool for building Docker images: it’s faster, has critical features missing from traditional Dockerfiles like build secrets, plus additionally useful features like cache mounting. So if you’re building Docker images, using BuildKit is in general a good idea.

And then there’s Podman: Podman is a reimplemented, compatible version of the Docker CLI and API. It does not however implement all the BuildKit Dockerfile extensions. On its own, then, Podman isn’t as good as Docker at building images.

There is another option, however: BuildKit has its own build tool, which is distinct from the traditional docker build, and this build tool can work with Podman.

Let’s see where Podman currently is as far as BuildKit features, and how to use BuildKit with Podman if that is not sufficient.

DM is a modern Python package manager with PEP 582 support. It installs and manages packages in a similar way to npm that doesn't need to create a virtualenv at all!

awk is a powerful tool. It is actually a Turing-complete language, meaning that you can technically write any kind of program with it. You could implement the classic sorting algorithms or more complex things such as a parser or an interpreter. Examples of this kind can be found in the “AWK Programming Language” book written by awk‘s authors. The reason awk is still popular today, though, has nothing to do with its generality and more with its usefulness working in the command line.

Hello! I was talking to a Python programmer friend yesterday about debugging, and I mentioned that I really like debugging using a REPL. He said he’d never tried it and that it sounded fun, so I thought I’d write a quick post about it.

This debugging method doesn’t work in a lot of languages, but it does work in Python and Ruby and kiiiiiind of in C (via gdb).

Learn about three new data structures available in the Swift Collections package: Deque, OrderedSet and OrderedDictionary.

Images are a massive part of the Internet. On the median web page, images account for 51% of the bytes loaded, so any improvement made to their speed or their size has a significant impact on performance.

I’ve been using Go for a few years now, mostly in my open source project Lazygit. In my day job I use Ruby and Typescript, and I’ve also spent some time with Rust. Each of those languages have design quirks that can grind a developer’s gears, and although my own precious gears have been ground by every language I’ve used, Go is the only language that has made me feel indignant.

Years ago, OpenBSD gained two new security system calls, pledge(2) (originally tame(2)) and unveil. In both, an application surrenders capabilities at run-time. The idea is to perform initialization like usual, then drop capabilities before handling untrusted input, limiting unwanted side effects. This feature is applicable even where type safety isn’t an issue, such as Python, where a program might still get tricked into accessing sensitive files or making network connections when it shouldn’t. So how can a Python program access these system calls?

In this post, I want to look at the biggest strengths and weaknesses of Python, with more emphasis on the weaknesses, just because these problems have been there for years now and some of the rough edges bleed a lot.

When I decided the next post in my series on Python's syntactic sugar would be on async for, I figured it would be straightforward. I have already done for loops, so I have something to build off of. The language reference also specifies the pseudo-code for async for, so I really didn't have to think too much about what the unravelled form should be.

But then I decided I would break with my practice of using Python 3.8 as the reference version of Python I work from and instead pull from Python 3.10 due to two additions in that version: aiter() and anext(). That decision turned out to complicate my life a bit. 😉

Web scraping is the process of downloading data from a public website. For example, you could scrape ESPN for stats of baseball players and build a model to predict a team’s odds of winning based on their players stats and win rates. Below are a few use-cases for web scraping.

• Monitoring the prices of your competitors for price matching (competitive pricing).
• Collecting statistics from various websites to create a dashboard e.g. COVID-19 dashboards.
• Monitoring financial forums and twitter to calculate sentiment for specific assets.

One use-case I will demonstrate is scraping the website indeed.com for job postings. Let’s say you are looking for a job but you are overwhelmed with the number of listings. You could set up a process to scrape indeed every day. Then you can write a script to automatically apply to the postings that meet certain criteria.

Over the weekend, a reader of my blog contacted me basically asking about firewalls. Firewalls themselves are boring in my opinion, so let’s talk about something Alpine can do that, as far as I know, no other distribution can easily do out of the box yet: service isolation using the base networking stack itself instead of netfilter.

A recent Lobsters post lauding the virtues of AWK reminded me that although the language is powerful and lightning fast, I usually find myself exceeding its capabilities and reaching for Perl instead. One such application is analyzing voluminous log files such as the ones generated by this blog. Yes, WordPress has stats, but I’ve never let reinvention of the wheel get in the way of a good programming exercise.

I’ve been writing about performance for a long time. I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at it, but sometimes I look back on my older blog posts and cringe at the mistakes I made.

This post is an attempt to distill some of what I’ve learned over the years to offer as advice to other aspiring tinkerers, benchmarkers, and anyone curious about how browsers actually work when you put them to the test.

Writing functional code is often backwards and can feel more like solving puzzles than like explaining a process to the computer. In functional languages I often know what I want to say, but it feels like I have to solve a puzzle in order to express it to the language. Functional programming is just a bit too weird.

In my humble opinion, the best websites and web applications have a tangible “real” quality to them. There are lots of factors involved to achieve this quality, but shadows are a critical ingredient.

When I look around the web, though, it's clear that most shadows aren't as rich as they could be. The web is covered in fuzzy grey boxes that don't really look much like shadows.

In this tutorial, we'll learn how to transform typical box-shadows into beautiful, life-like ones.