20 random bookmarks

2025-10-24

137.

How to Run 1:1s as an Engineering Manager

justoffbyone.com

2025-06-26

123.

Box combinators

mmapped.blog/posts/41-box-combinators.html

In functional programming,
combinator libraries refer to a design style that emphasizes bottom-up program construction.
Such libraries define a few core data types
and provide constructors—functions that create initial objects—and combinators—functions that build larger objects from smaller pieces.

Combinators enable the programmer to use intuitive visual and spatial reasoning
that’s vastly more powerful than linear language processing.
As a result, solving problems with combinators feels like playing with lego pieces.

2025-06-18

120.

zb beta released

www.zombiezen.com/blog/2025/06/zb-beta-release

zb is a tool for reproducibly building software, similar to Bazel.
(See the comparison page if you’re curious to know the differences.)
When a software build process is reproducible,
it will produce the exact same output
when given the same inputs.
Reproducibility is a desirable property for a software build process to have:
it simplifies debugging,
it enables build speed-ups,
and it is essential for digital supply chain security.
However, reproducibility is a difficult goal to achieve.

2025-06-17

119.

Debugging tricks for IntelliJ

andreabergia.com/blog/2025/06/debugging-tricks-for-intellij

I have been using IntelliJ Idea at work for a decade or so by now, and it’s been a reliable companion. JetBrains IDEs have a bit of a reputation for being slow, but their feature set is incredible: powerful refactoring tools, a great VCS UI (though I like magit even more!), a huge number of supported frameworks, integration with just about any testing library for any language, code coverage tools, powerful debuggers, etc.

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.

2025-03-18

102.

CASCII - ASCII Diagram Builder

cascii.app

A well-equipped ASCII diagram builders freely available on the internet.
It stresses portability, simplicity, and immediateness.

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.

2024-11-07

87.

Proposal for a Django project template

david.guillot.me/en/posts/tech/proposal-for-a-django-project-template

My take on what could be a project template for Django advanced usage, with modern tooling (for Python and UI dependencies, as well as configuration/environment management), but not too opinionated.

2024-08-08

63.

More than 200 orphaned Debian packages moved to git, 216 to go

www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/More_than_200_orphaned_Debian_packages_moved_to_git__216_to_go.html

2024-06-26

54.

You probably wrote half a monad by accident

gieseanw.wordpress.com/2024/06/25/you-probably-wrote-half-a-monad-by-accident

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.

2024-06-20

47.

Go's 'range over function' iterators and avoiding iteration errors

utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/GoIteratorsAndAvoidingMistakes

2024-06-17

35.

OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon

hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/openbsd-the-computer-appliance-maker-s-secret-weapon

Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, and maybe a well-guarded id_ed25519.pub in case you end up in hot water during the (long - very long, stable cash flow for generations long) maintenance contract, and you’re in the ballpark.

2024-06-13

26.

The magic of dependency resolution

ochagavia.nl/blog/the-magic-of-dependency-resolution
23.

Macaroons Escalated Quickly

fly.io/blog/macaroons-escalated-quickly
19.

A simple, arena-backed, generic dynamic array for C

nullprogram.com/blog/2023/10/05

2024-06-12

13.

My experience crafting an interpreter with Rust

ceronman.com/2021/07/22/my-experience-crafting-an-interpreter-with-rust

Last year I finally decided to learn some Rust. The official book by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols is excellent, but even after reading it and working on some small code exercises, I felt that I …

2024-06-11

8.

gamja: Simple IRC web client

sr.ht/~emersion/gamja
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.