For those curious about the current status of the Corinna OOP project for Perl, Paul Evans is working on it in the feature-class branch. Today I decided to see how much of my Cache::LRU example I could get working.
Source: Current Corinna Status, an article by Curtis “Ovid” Poe.
Go does not have classes and objects, but it does have types that we can make many instances of. Further, we can attach methods to these types and they kind-of start looking like the classes we’re used to. When we attach a method to a type, the receiver is the instance of the type for which it was called.
Choosing the name of a receiver is not always a trivial task. Should we be lazy and name them all the same (like
thisorself)? Or treat them not unlike local variables by abbreviating the type (likesrvto aServertype )? Or maybe something even more nuanced?And what are the consequences? How will our code suffer if we choose one approach over the other? Let's explore.
Source: Neither self nor this: Receivers in Go, an article by Andrey Petrov.
self receivers in GoOk ok, hear me out. I know you're already lighting torches and sharpening your pitchforks (Side note: Can you sharpen a pitchfork?). I know I'm probably in the minority here, so please allow the little-guy to make a small case for the use of
selfas a receiver name.
Source: The case for self receivers in
Go,
an article by Cody Potter.
One of the most covered topics about pandas optimization is how to apply functions over columns. One option is to use
applybut is not a good idea (maybe this is one of the topics with more posts ever). It’s known that the optimal solution is to use vectorization, however, some functions that can’t be vectorized easily. What to do in these cases?
Source: Vectorizing impossible operations: boolean algebra, sets, and filters, an article by Alex Molas.
Infinite scrolling minimizes interaction costs and increases user engagement, but it isn’t a good fit for every website. For some, pagination or a Load More button will be a better solution.
Source: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It, an article by Tim Neusesser.
Combinators are a very interesting to make your code cleaner and more functional. Almost all the definitions you'll find on the internet will make your head explode 🤯 because they raise more questions than they answer.
Thus, here is my empiric definition: Combinators are methods that ease the manipulation of some type T. They favor a functional (method chaining) style of code.
Source: Learning Rust: Combinators, an article by Sylvain Kerkour.
If you were to search the internet for recent articles about Perl, you might well be led to believe that the language hasn’t changed in the last twenty years. And, sadly, that’s a completely understandable belief as the major version number hasn’t changed since 1994.
Source: This is not your grandfather's Perl, an article by Dave Cross.
In this series of articles, I will discuss how some of the principles and techniques learnt from typed functional languages can be applied to Python1 to achieve the same results. We’ll see that, while Python famously eschews the functional paradigm, we can build pythonic(ish) equivalents relatively easily.
Source: Functional Python, Part I: Typopædia Pythonica, an article by Christopher Harrison.
Nix has been able to generate Docker images for several years now, however the typical approach to layering with Nix is to generate one fat image with all of the dependencies. This fat image offers no sharing, is slow to build, upload, and download.
In this post I talk about how I fix this problem and use Nix to automatically create multi-layered Docker images, allowing a high amount of caching between images.
Source: Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix, an article by Graham Christensen.
A daemon is a program that runs in the background for an indefinite period of time.
An important daemon on Unix-like operating systems is the cron scheduler that can be configured to perform tasks periodically. Though there are many different types of daemons, we will explore how to create a cron daemon.
Source: Create a Daemon in Perl with Schedule::Cron, an article by Nicholas Hubbard.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s possible to ship portable executables of Python applications without sending your users to Python packaging hell.
Source: You Can Build Portable Binaries of Python Applications, an article by Hynek Schlawack.
Haskell is a pure and lazy programming language, and the laziness allows us to write some algorithms very elegantly, by recursively referring to already calculated values.
Source: More recursive definitions, an article by Joachim Breitner.
In this post we’re going to send a SYN packet (the first packet in a TCP connection) from a tiny Python program, and get a reply from
example.com.
Source: How to send raw network packets in Python with tun/tap, an article by Julia Evans.
SQLite is unique among embedded databases in that it not only has a transactional, b-tree storage layer but it also includes a robust SQL execution engine. Today, we're diving into how SQLite parses, optimizes, & executes your SQL queries.
Source: How the SQLite Virtual Machine Works, an article by Ben Johnson.
In a profession like this, you're bound to make enemies . . .
It all starts when Dr Temperance Brennan finds a box on her porch. Inside is a fresh human eyeball with GPS coordinates etched into it. They lead her to a macabre discovery in a Benedictine Monastery, and soon after she discovers a mummified corpse in a state park.
There seems to be no pattern to these killings, except that each mimics a killing connected to something a younger Tempe experienced, or barely escaped. Someone is targeting her, and she needs to figure out why before they strike again.
And then her daughter Katy disappears.
Someone is playing a dangerous game with Tempe. And they won’t stop until they have taken everything from her . . .
In the evening I started in Cold, Cold Bones by Kathy Reichs.
When it comes to static sites, there are a myriad of solutions for authoring and compiling, but talk about hosting these static sites, and we are still in the early 2000s. I discuss the challenges one faces when hosting, and even make a proposal to solve some of these.
Source: Static site hosting hurdles, an article by Ciprian Dorin Craciun.
FUSE-T is a kext-less implementation of FUSE for macOS that uses NFS v4 local server instead of a kernel extension.
The main motivation for this project is to replace macfuse (https://osxfuse.github.io/) that implements its own kext to make fuse work. With each version of macOS it's getting harder and harder to load kernel extensions. Apple strongly discourages it and, for this reason, software distributions that include macfuse are very difficult to install.
Source: Userspace FUSE for macOS.
I have long held very strong opinions about the Critical CSS pattern. In theory, in a perfect world, with all things being equal, it’s demonstrably a Good Idea™. However, in practice, in the real world, it often falls short as a fragile and expensive technique to implement, which seldom provides the benefits that many developers expect.
Source: Critical CSS? Not So Fast!, an article by Harry Roberts.
Even after 14 years as a Web Developer, I don't think of myself as a great developer, but I've always been curious about what it takes to become one.
So here's a short recap of what I've learned so far.
Source: Top 10 skills every programmer should know, an article by Julien Desrosiers.
There is a common misconception that partitioning a table in Postgres will improve performance, while it’s true in some cases, but sometimes partitioning may actually degrade your performance if done incorrectly.
Let me try to give a very brief overview about postgres partitioning in general and some guideline to consider before partitioning the table.
Source: Postgres Partitions, an article by John Pradeep Vincent.
In the evening I finished The Investigator, book 1 in the Letty Davenport series by John Sandford. I liked the story and look forward to the next one in this new series.