The Beacon API is used to send an asynchronous and non-blocking request to a web server. The request does not expect a response. Unlike requests made using XMLHttpRequest or the Fetch API, the browser guarantees to initiate beacon requests before the page is unloaded and to run them to completion.

I started writing this post because, for whatever reason, I keep forgetting what the difference is between a ring and a group, which is funny to me because I never forget the difference between a semiring and a semigroup – although other people do, because it’s quite easy to forget! So, I wanted a fast reference to the kinds of algebraic structures that I am most often dealing with in one way or another, usually because I’m writing Haskell (which has some reliance on terminology and structure from abstract algebra and category theory) or I’m trying to read a book about category theory and they keep talking about “groups.” Wikipedia, of course, defines all these structures, and that’s fine, but what I need in those times is more of a refresher than an in-depth explanation.

I just learned that
you can use it to review a git commit like this and I thought that was really
cool.

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.

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.

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.

In this post, I talk about pleasant but seemingly minor features in personal sites

Comparison between types of API tokens.

There’s plenty of information out there on how to scale Django to handle numerous requests per second, but most of it…

Living specification of the IRC protocol. Does not include brand new behavior, just existing behavior present in IRC software and/or networks (new extensions are IRCv3's area).