20 random bookmarks

2025-08-25

130.

Everything I know about good API design

www.seangoedecke.com/good-api-design

2025-08-21

129.

A Brief Guide to A Few Algebraic Structures

argumatronic.com/posts/2019-06-21-algebra-cheatsheet.html

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.

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.

2025-05-23

111.

share_target - Web application manifest

developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Manifest/Reference/share_target

The share_target manifest member allows installed Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to be registered as a share target in the system's share dialog.

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.

2025-01-17

98.

Earthstar

earthstar-project.org

Storage for private, distributed, offline-first applications. Earthstar is a specification and JavaScript library for building connected applications owned and run by their users.

2025-01-09

97.

if got, want: A Simple Way to Write Better Go Tests

mtlynch.io/if-got-want-improve-go-tests

2024-09-02

70.

Parsing awk is tricky

www.raygard.net/awkdoc/pages/awk_parsing_is_tricky.html

A somewhat compact implementation of the awk programming language

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 …

2024-07-03

59.

Announcing wcurl: a curl wrapper to download files

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

2024-06-27

56.

plainweb

www.plainweb.dev

plainweb is a framework using HTMX, SQLite and TypeScript for less complexity and more joy.

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.

2024-06-18

39.

Understanding a Python closure oddity

utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/python/UnderstandingClosureOddity

2024-06-17

37.

Sqlc: 2024 check in — brandur.org

brandur.org/fragments/sqlc-2024

2024-06-14

34.

Nix as a WebAssembly build tool

determinate.systems/posts/nix-wasm
33.

A useful shell prompt

blog.meain.io/2022/my-shell-prompt

Featureful zsh prompt.

2024-06-13

26.

The magic of dependency resolution

ochagavia.nl/blog/the-magic-of-dependency-resolution
22.

API Tokens: A Tedious Survey

fly.io/blog/api-tokens-a-tedious-survey

Comparison between types of API tokens.

2024-06-11

10.

Self-serve dashboards

briefer.cloud/blog/posts/self-serve-bi-myth

Sales pitches are the only place where “self-serve dashboards" work. In the real world, it's a different story.

Why "business" people don't use metabase/power-bi.

2024-06-09

1.

The Hare programming language

harelang.org

Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime. It is well-suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high performance tasks.