20 random bookmarks

2025-06-26

124.

The plan-execute pattern

mmapped.blog/posts/29-plan-execute.html

I feel uneasy about design patterns.
On the one hand, my university class on design patterns revived my interest in programming.
On the other hand, I find most patterns in the Gang of Four book to be irrelevant to my daily work;
they solve problems that a choice of programming language or paradigm creates.

My litmus test of a good design pattern is its cross-disciplinary applicability.
I’m more likely to accept an idea that pops up in fields beyond software engineering.
And the most convincing patterns are the ones that help me in everyday life.

This article describes a universal pattern that billions of people rely on daily, but software engineers rarely discuss—the plan-execute pattern.

2025-04-29

106.

No-engine gamedev using Odin + Raylib

zylinski.se/posts/no-engine-gamedev-using-odin-and-raylib

Games can be made in many different ways. Many games are made using big, general purpose game engines such as Unity and Godot. I enjoy using the Odin Programming Language combined with Raylib.
Odin is a C-like programming language and Raylib is library for drawing graphics, checking input and playing sounds. So it’s just a program that uses a simple library, no engine!
There are no objectively best ways to create games.

2025-04-04

104.

Pitfalls of Safe Rus

corrode.dev/blog/pitfalls-of-safe-rust

When people say Rust is a “safe language”, they often mean memory safety.
And while memory safety is a great start, it’s far from all it takes to build robust applications.
Memory safety is important but not sufficient for overall r…

2024-12-17

91.

Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS

sailor.li/aocnds.html

Solving AoC on the DS with Rust.

2024-11-22

89.

New stuff in Emacs 30

www.mgmarlow.com/words/2024-07-28-emacs-30-news

Reading through the Emacs 30 NEWS file and picking
out the stuff I think is the most interesting.

2024-10-04

80.

Snappy UI Optimization with useDeferredValue

www.joshwcomeau.com/react/use-deferred-value

useDeferredValue is one of the most underrated React hooks. It allows us to dramatically improve the performance of our applications in certain contexts. I recently used it to solve a gnarly performance problem on this blog, and in this tutorial, I'll show you how! ⚡

2024-09-16

74.

Wayland: i3 to Sway migration

anarc.at/software/desktop/wayland

2024-08-28

69.

There can't be only one

www.b-list.org/weblog/2024/aug/27/highlander-problem

There's a concept that I've heard called by a lot of different names, but my favorite name for it is …

2024-08-15

67.

Writing a C Compiler

nostarch.com/writing-c-compiler

A fun, hands-on guide to writing your own compiler for a real-world programming language.

2024-08-09

64.

Store Code Discussions in Git using Git Notes

wouterj.nl/2024/08/git-notes

Code discussions contain relevant information. Isn’t it a shame that we
keep these in the centralized GitHub/GitLab servers, far away from our
decentralized Git code? As soon as we move provider, we’ll lose all old
discussions! And how do you ever find the pull requests back from 5
years ago? Symfony has implemented a lightweight solution to this problem
years ago using a less-known feature of Git: Git Notes.

2024-07-03

59.

Announcing wcurl: a curl wrapper to download files

samueloph.dev/blog/announcing-wcurl-a-curl-wrapper-to-download-files

2024-06-24

52.

Counting Immutable Beans: Reference Counting Optimized for Purely Functional Programming

arxiv.org/abs/1908.05647

Most functional languages rely on some garbage collection for automatic memory management. They usually eschew reference counting in favor of a tracing garbage collector, which has less bookkeeping overhead at runtime. On the other hand, having an exact reference count of each value can enable optimizations, such as destructive updates. We explore these optimization opportunities in the context of an eager, purely functional programming language. We propose a new mechanism for efficiently reclaiming memory used by nonshared values, reducing stress on the global memory allocator. We describe an approach for minimizing the number of reference counts updates using borrowed references and a heuristic for automatically inferring borrow annotations. We implemented all these techniques in a new compiler for an eager and purely functional programming language with support for multi-threading. Our preliminary experimental results demonstrate our approach is competitive and often outperforms state-of-the-art compilers.

2024-06-20

46.

Why does SQLite (in production) have such a bad rep?

avi.im/blag/2024/sqlite-bad-rep

2024-06-19

45.

Avoiding complexity with systemd

mgdm.net/weblog/systemd

Using systemd to avoid having to write some risky code

2024-06-17

37.

Sqlc: 2024 check in — brandur.org

brandur.org/fragments/sqlc-2024

2024-06-13

23.

Macaroons Escalated Quickly

fly.io/blog/macaroons-escalated-quickly
15.

OpenBSD extreme privacy setup

dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-06-08-openbsd-privacy-setup.html

In this article, you will learn how to install and configure OpenBSD to reduce its network activity over clearnet

2024-06-12

12.

I really like the RP2040

dgroshev.com/blog/rp2040

2024-06-11

7.

NetBSD 10 on a Pinebook Pro laptop

www.idatum.net/netbsd-10-on-a-pinebook-pro-laptop.html

I've been running NetBSD on a RockPro64 since NetBSD 10-BETA, and I'm still happy with it now with NetBSD 10-RELEASE. I'm always looking for hardware to hack NetBSD though, and I recently watched a FOSDEM 2024 video: NetBSD 10: Thirty years, still going strong!. The Pinebook Pro laptop was mentioned at one point, which has the same RockChip SoC as the RockPro64. That reminded me I'd been wanting to give this inexpensive ARM 64 laptop a try.

6.

Go evolves in the wrong direction

valyala.medium.com/go-evolves-in-the-wrong-direction-7dfda8a1a620

Go programming language is known to be easy to use. Thanks to its well-thought syntax, features and tooling, Go allows writing easy-to-read…

Hard disagree on this one, but still interesting.