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.

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.

Things we wish we didn't know

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.

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…

In modern Java, the visitor pattern is no longer needed. Using sealed types and switches with pattern matching achieves the same goals with less code and less complexity.

Aurora: An extensible, Python-based static site generator.

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 …

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.

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).

soju is a user-friendly IRC bouncer. soju connects to upstream IRC servers on behalf of the user to provide extra functionality. soju supports many features such as multiple users, numerous IRCv3 extensions, chat history playback and detached channels. It is well-suited for both small and large deployments.