Plurrrr

Python supports default values for arguments to functions, but those defaults are evaluated at function-definition time. A proposal to add defaults that are evaluated when the function is called has been discussed at some length on the python-ideas mailing list. The idea came about, in part, due to yet another resurrection of the proposal for None-aware operators in Python. Late-bound defaults would help with one use case for those operators, but there are other, stronger reasons to consider their addition to the language.

Calling Rust code from Python is made easy by PyO3. You can write a Rust library and rely on the combination of PyO3 and maturin, a supporting tool from the PyO3 ecosystem, to compile the Rust library and have it installed directly as a Python module. Among others, PyO3 can translate types between Python and Rust as well as make it easy to export Rust functions to Python through a set of macros.

Inside pretty well every folder that you’ve ever opened is a hidden file, one which even showing hidden files doesn’t reveal: .DS_Store. As with other under-the-hood features which Apple really doesn’t want you to know about, you’ll only come across it when it causes trouble.

Pinning in Rust is a powerful and very convenient pattern that is, in my eyes, not supported well enough in the wider ecosystem.

A common sentiment is that it's hard to understand and that the pin module documentation is confusing. (Personally, I think it works well as reference to answer questions about edge cases, but it's a dense read and not necessarily a good intro text.)

This post is my attempt to make the feature more approachable, to hopefully inspire more developers to make their crates pinning-aware where that would be helpful.

The Load Balancers play a significant role in any System Design. And the beauty of its design is that every engineer takes it for granted, that this will work — one of the best system designs and a lot to learn from this simple yet powerful solution. The LB acts as a middle-man between clients and servers; the client sends requests to LB and internally, via physical NIC to VIPs, forwards to attached web servers.

I have been working on a serialization project recently that involves endianness (also known as byte order), and it caused me to explore parts of the Rust standard library that deals with endianness, and share my thoughts about how endianness should be represented in a programming language and its standard library, as I think this is also something that Rust does better than C++, and also makes for a good case study to talk about API design and polymorphism in Rust.

If you work a lot with containers, then there’s a good chance you’ve wanted to look inside a running container’s filesystem at some point. Maybe the container is failing to run properly and you want to read some logs, maybe you want to check some configuration files inside the container...or maybe you’re like me and want to place some eBPF probes on the binaries in that container (more on this later).

A simple act of kindness always sparks another, even in a frozen, faraway place. When Smeerensburg's new postman, Jesper, befriends toymaker Klaus, their gifts melt an age-old feud and deliver a sleigh full of holiday traditions.

Although UDP is simple in principle, there is a lot of domain knowledge needed to run things at scale. In this blog post we'll cover the basics: all you need to know about UDP servers to get started.

Modern languages such as Go, Julia and Rust don’t need complex garbage collectors like the ones use by Java C#. But why?

To explain why, we need to get into how garbage collectors work and how different languages allocate memory in different ways. However, we will start by looking at why Java in particular needs such a complex garbage collector.

Here at Typeable, we use Haskell as the main development language and, while everyone else was disputing whether Haskell is ready for production, we just used it and regarded this as a competitive advantage. Based on this experience, we would like to share our opinions.

I’ve been lurking the fish shell for a couple of years now (and the nushell but it is another story for another time). Not so long ago, I decided to try it, and it’s simply… amazing. If I had to state one feature that makes me like to use it, it’ll be the autocompletion, hands down. It’s the first time I just take a shell and without customization it’s pleasing to use.

Recently, a group of Haskellers within Tweag had a knowledge-sharing event where we shared our varied Haskell setups with each other, and learned some nice tricks and tips for every-day life.

The idea was raised of sharing these findings via the blog, so without further ado, let’s explore the varieties of the Tweag Haskelling experience by covering a few of our personal setups!

Transformers were introduced in this 2017 paper as a tool for sequence transduction—converting one sequence of symbols to another. The most popular examples of this are translation, as in English to German. It has also been modified to perform sequence completion—given a starting prompt, carry on in the same vein and style. They have quickly become an indispensible tool for research and product development in natural language processing.

Whenever I start a new project, the first order of business is to sand down some of the rough edges in the CSS language. I do this with a functional set of custom baseline styles.

When the AWK tutorial came out, one of the questions on hacker news was how you use AWK with CSV (comma-separated value) files.

You might be surprised to hear when you visit a file in Emacs that the syntax highlighting you are shown on your screen is – most likely – a potpourri of regular expressions with a dash of functions and syntax table definitions. As it turns out, this approach is just about good enough right up until the point where it isn’t.

This is the first article in a series where I try to understand systemd by creating small containerized examples.

Some googling showed me that over past 11 years people have noticed that Firefox uses optimized zip files. This inspired me to document thinking behind the optimized zip format I implemented in Firefox in the pre-pandemic 2010.

My hope is that by exposing a list of my personal tmux configurations and my reasoning behind them, you will see a general pattern and understand it enough to make tmux your own.

I tried to learn Nix, and it was pretty hard. I kept a diary of every command I tried, every wrong assumption that I made, and every realization that I had along the way.

As of a couple weeks ago, Docker’s BuildKit tool for building Dockerfiles now supports heredoc syntax! With these new improvements, we can do all sorts of things that were difficult before, like multiline RUNs without needing all those pesky backslashes at the end of each line, or the creation of small inline configuration files.

By reading this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use PostgreSQL with the Go programming language using the pgx driver and toolkit in a very productive manner. Furthermore, with the provided source code, you’ll be able to learn how to write efficient and sound unit and integration tests, ready to be run locally or on a Continuous Integration environment, such as GitHub Actions.