Recently, a colleague asked me if there is a way to customize an input caret using CSS. I knew you could change the color of it, but it got me thinking if we could completely replace it. The problem seemed interesting to solve.
Source: Custom giraffe caret, an article by Stanko Tadić
A while ago at $work, we had a performance issue with one of our core Python libraries.
This particular library forms the backbone of our 3D processing pipeline. It’s a rather big and complex library which uses NumPy and other scientific Python packages to do a wide range of mathematical and geometrical operations.
Our system also has to work on-prem with limited CPU resources, and while at first it performed well, as the number of concurrent physical users grew we started running into problems and our system struggled to keep up with the load.
We came to the conclusion that we had to make our system at least 50 times faster to handle the increased workload, and we figured that Rust could help us achieve that.
Source: Making Python 100x faster with less than 100 lines of Rust, an article by Ohad Ravid.
I finally had some time to play around with Nix - the immutable package manager and build system. This was on my agenda since a long time, but I finally took the plunge on my M1 OSX system. I by no means understand Nix fully yet, but making progress and it is usable to me already.
Source: My first steps with Nix on Mac OSX as Homebrew replacement, an article by Sebastian Kurfürst.
At a fundamental level, a programmer needs to manipulate bits. Modern processors operate over data by loading in ‘registers’ and not individual bits. Thus a programmer must know how to manipulate the bits within a register.
Source: Bit Hacking (with Go code), an article by Daniel Lemire.
In the evening I finished Children of Memory, Children of Time book 3 by Adrian Tchaikovsky.