20 random bookmarks

2025-07-31

127.

A dive into open chat protocols

wiki.alopex.li/ADiveIntoOpenChat

2025-06-12

116.

Always do Extra

www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2021/always-do-extra.php

Extra is different than More. Extra is finishing those two screens, but then researching a new library for form validation that might reduce the boilerplate code. Or it's learning ways to protect against common security vulnerabilities from data entry. These little off-ramps from the main highway of Normal Work could be dead-ends and not have any practical value to the project. But they might also be important contributions. And that's the thing with Extra. While the tangible value to the project is uncertain (it could be nothing this time or it could be something), the value to you is real.

2025-05-30

115.

The PGP Problem

www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem

Why do people keep telling me to use PGP? The answer is that they shouldn’t be telling you that, because PGP is bad and needs to go away.

2025-05-23

112.

Async from scratch 1: What's in a Future, anyway? | natkr's ramblings

natkr.com/2025-04-10-async-from-scratch-1

There are a lot of guides about how to use async Rust from a "user's
perspective", but I think it's also worth understanding how it
works, what those async blocks actually mean.

110.

honk

humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk

Take control of your honks and join the federation.
An ActivityPub server with minimal setup and support costs.
Spend more time using the software and less time operating it.

2025-05-15

108.

Writing that changed how I think about PL

bernsteinbear.com/blog/pl-writing

Every so often I come across a paper, blog post, or (occasionally) video that completely changes how I think about a topic in programming languages and compilers. For some of these posts, I can’t even remember how I thought about the idea before reading it—it was that impactful.

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.

2024-10-16

83.

Damas-Hindley-Milner inference two ways

bernsteinbear.com/blog/type-inference

2024-10-10

82.

'Do' More With 'Run'

maxgreenwald.me/blog/do-more-with-run

I recently wrote about Async Pool, one of my favorite JavaScript / TypeScript helpers, and today I want to share an even simpler yet extremely useful utility

2024-09-18

76.

Typescript is surprisingly ok for compilers

matklad.github.io/2023/08/17/typescript-is-surprisingly-ok-for-compilers.html

2024-09-16

73.

Technical Writing One introduction

developers.google.com/tech-writing/one

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.

2024-06-24

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.

2024-06-21

49.

On testing Go code using the standard library | Henrique Vicente

henvic.dev/posts/testing-go

Most programming language ecosystems provide assert functions in their testing libraries but not Go's. Go's standard testing package follows a more direct and to-the-point approach.

2024-06-18

40.

Understanding SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: A Simple Guide

github.com/nicanorflavier/spf-dkim-dmarc-simplified

2024-06-17

36.

How I learned Haskell in just 15 years - duckrabbit solutions

duckrabbit.tech/articles/learning-haskell.html

2024-06-14

30.

litterbox - IRC logger

git.causal.agency/litterbox/about

2024-06-13

23.

Macaroons Escalated Quickly

fly.io/blog/macaroons-escalated-quickly

2024-06-11

8.

gamja: Simple IRC web client

sr.ht/~emersion/gamja
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.