Plurrrr

As the author of GoAWK, an AWK interpreter written in Go, I was wondering one day how hard it would be to translate AWK programs into Go code. Couldn’t be that hard, right? I decided to try it.

Like many others, I spend enough time in the shell that even small improvements can yield huge productivity gains. This post is an attempt to catalog several of quality-of-life enhancements I've made over recent months to my shell setup.

Spack is a package management tool designed to support multiple versions and configurations of software on a wide variety of platforms and environments. It was designed for large supercomputing centers, where many users and application teams share common installations of software on clusters with exotic architectures, using libraries that do not have a standard ABI. Spack is non-destructive: installing a new version does not break existing installations, so many configurations can coexist on the same system.

Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) is one of the most common forms of broken access control which OWASP recently listed as the number one application security issue in 2021. A quick search for "IDOR" on Hacker One's Hacktivity feed shows that many top tech companies (and even the U.S. Department of Defense) have fallen victim to IDOR, in some cases paying out well over $10,000 per bug bounty. In this post, I'll explain what IDOR is, what causes it, and ways to protect your application against it.

Protocols in Python provide a nice way to use duck typing while still having some static type guarantees. You can define contracts for your functions without caring too much about the actual types of your inputs.

Building minimal Docker images to deploy Rust brings up a lot of benefits: it’s not only good for security (reduced attack surface) but also to improve deployment times, reduce costs (less bandwidth and storage), and reduce the risk of dependency conflicts.

When bitten by a genetically modified spider, a nerdy, shy, and awkward high school student gains spider-like abilities that he eventually must use to fight evil as a superhero after tragedy befalls his family.

My favorite game is bridge. It’s an excellent test of cooperation and strategy. I’m in a discord chat devoted mostly to the game and folks often share interesting bridge hands with one another. I decided it would be fun to build a program that parsed a simply-formatted bridge hand and produced a plain text bridge diagram.

When I started using containers back in 2015, my initial understanding was that they were just lightweight virtual machines with a subsecond startup time. With such a rough idea in my head, it was easy to follow tutorials from the Internet on how to put a Python or a Node.js application into a container. But pretty quickly, I realized that thinking of containers as of VMs is a risky oversimplification that doesn't allow me to judge:

• What's doable with containers and what's not
• What's an idiomatic use of containers and what's not
• What's safe to run in containers and what's not.

This post is an attempt to explain directly how modern transformers work, and why, without some of the historical baggage.

I was doing some work with Django 3.2.9 and Python 3.10 recently, and I came across a strange issue. The root cause of this was that the pyenv shims had disappeared from my PATH and so the system Python version was being used. Here’s how to fix it.

Process isolation is a key component for containers. One of the key underlying mechanisms are namespaces. In this second (and last) part of the series we examine the USER, MNT, UTS, IPC and CGROUP namespaces, and finally we combine everything to build a fully isolated environment for a process.

In this article I will persuade you, CEO at a brand-new Spark'ing startup that, sometimes, Bash'ing is all you need.

There’s more to color on the web than meets the eye, and it’s about to get a lot more interesting! Today, we’ll take a look at the best ways to use colors in a design system, and what we can expect from our colors in the not-too-distant future.

As we all know, a task group consists of multiple child tasks that run concurrently. When one of the child tasks encounters an error, how should the task group handle the error? What happens to those child tasks that are still running?

Closure is the concept of storing a function and its environment together. When you create a function, it stores the functions local environment and its outer environment together. If you are ever confused about what value will be present, understand what value existed when the function scope was created!

Process isolation is a key component for containers. One of the key underlying mechanisms are namespaces. We will explore what they are, and how they work, to build our own isolated container and better understand each piece.

Writing robust and predictable unit tests for asynchronous code has always been particularly challenging, given that each test method is executed completely serially, line by line (at least when using XCTest). So when using patterns like completion handlers, delegates, or even Combine, we’d always have to find our way back to our synchronous testing context after performing a given asynchronous operation.

With the introduction of async/await, though, writing asynchronous tests is starting to become much simpler in many different kinds of situations. Let’s take a look at why that is, and how async/await can also be a great testing tool even when verifying asynchronous code that hasn’t yet been migrated to Swift’s new concurrency system.

PostCSS allows developers to write simpler CSS and push the complexity at build time. It act as a pre-processor, an autoprefixer and a linter for your CSS code.

This is a very long guide about setting up tmux “from scratch,” which is to say without any of the default keybindings or any default behavior. It’s mostly an excuse to demonstrate a simple ~/.tmux.conf, and to explain how you can set up tmux to do exactly what you want it to, and nothing more.

I found that some query was dealing with a relatively small fraction of rows in the table, but the query execution was based on some regular index. Postgres indexes come with a lot of various flavors: besides the type of the index you may choose, there are multicolumn, functional, partial, and – since Postgres 11 – covering indexes. For the SELECT queries, I was oxptimizing, using a partial index was a natural choice. It improved the SELECT indeed, as expected. But it also made UPDATEs to the same table significantly slower!

This was a big surprise. I know that this will be a surprise to many of my readers too. Let's buckle up and travel thru a series of short experiments to explore how this may happen: we'll check various index options looking at the performance of both SELECT and UPDATE queries, and in the end, we'll try to draw some useful conclusions, as well as discuss how we can build an optimization approach that would follow the "first, do no harm" principle.

It seems that Apple has quietly added a new tool in macOS Monterey for measuring your device’s Internet connectivity quality. You can simply call the executable networkQuality, which executes the following tests:

• Upload/download capacity (your Tx/Rx bandwidth essentially)
• Upload/download flows, this seems to be the number of test packets used for the responsiveness tests
• Upload/download responsiveness measured in Roundtrips Per Minute (RPM), which according to Apple, is the number of sequential round-trips, or transactions, a network can do in one minute under normal working conditions

The open source Git project just released Git 2.34 with features and bug fixes from over 109 contributors, 29 of them new. We last caught up with you on the latest in Git back when 2.33 was released. To celebrate this most recent release, here’s GitHub’s look at some of the most interesting features and changes introduced since last time.