20 random bookmarks

2025-08-25

130.

Everything I know about good API design

www.seangoedecke.com/good-api-design

2025-06-26

124.

The plan-execute pattern

mmapped.blog/posts/29-plan-execute.html

I feel uneasy about design patterns.
On the one hand, my university class on design patterns revived my interest in programming.
On the other hand, I find most patterns in the Gang of Four book to be irrelevant to my daily work;
they solve problems that a choice of programming language or paradigm creates.

My litmus test of a good design pattern is its cross-disciplinary applicability.
I’m more likely to accept an idea that pops up in fields beyond software engineering.
And the most convincing patterns are the ones that help me in everyday life.

This article describes a universal pattern that billions of people rely on daily, but software engineers rarely discuss—the plan-execute pattern.

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.

2025-06-16

118.

CSS Classes considered harmful

www.keithcirkel.co.uk/css-classes-considered-harmful

The solution to all of these problems

I humbly put forward that modern web development provides us all the utilities to move away from class names and implement something much more robust, with some fairly straightforward changes:

Attributes

Attributes allow us to parameterise a component using a key-value representation, very similar to Map<string, T>. Browsers come with a wealth of selector functions to parse the values of an attribute.

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.

2025-05-15

109.

Speculation in JavaScriptCore

webkit.org/blog/10308/speculation-in-javascriptcore

This post is all about speculative compilation, or just speculation for short, in the context of the JavaScriptCore virtual machine.

2024-12-17

92.

Building GBA Games in Rust

shanesnover.com/2024/02/07/intro-to-rust-on-gba.html

2024-10-24

85.

Rust Prism

registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/rust-prism

2024-10-04

80.

Snappy UI Optimization with useDeferredValue

www.joshwcomeau.com/react/use-deferred-value

useDeferredValue is one of the most underrated React hooks. It allows us to dramatically improve the performance of our applications in certain contexts. I recently used it to solve a gnarly performance problem on this blog, and in this tutorial, I'll show you how! ⚡

2024-06-26

53.

A reckless introduction to Hindley-Milner type inference

reasonableapproximation.net/2019/05/05/hindley-milner.html

2024-06-24

51.

Deriving Dependently-Typed OOP from First Principles -- Extended Version with Additional Appendices

arxiv.org/abs/2403.06707

The expression problem describes how most types can easily be extended with new ways to produce the type or new ways to consume the type, but not both. When abstract syntax trees are defined as an algebraic data type, for example, they can easily be extended with new consumers, such as print or eval, but adding a new constructor requires the modification of all existing pattern matches. The expression problem is one way to elucidate the difference between functional or data-oriented programs (easily extendable by new consumers) and object-oriented programs (easily extendable by new producers). This difference between programs which are extensible by new producers or new consumers also exists for dependently typed programming, but with one core difference: Dependently-typed programming almost exclusively follows the functional programming model and not the object-oriented model, which leaves an interesting space in the programming language landscape unexplored. In this paper, we explore the field of dependently-typed object-oriented programming by deriving it from first principles using the principle of duality. That is, we do not extend an existing object-oriented formalism with dependent types in an ad-hoc fashion, but instead start from a familiar data-oriented language and derive its dual fragment by the systematic use of defunctionalization and refunctionalization. Our central contribution is a dependently typed calculus which contains two dual language fragments. We provide type- and semantics-preserving transformations between these two language fragments: defunctionalization and refunctionalization. We have implemented this language and these transformations and use this implementation to explain the various ways in which constructions in dependently typed programming can be explained as special instances of the phenomenon of duality.

2024-06-17

37.

Sqlc: 2024 check in — brandur.org

brandur.org/fragments/sqlc-2024

2024-06-14

30.

litterbox - IRC logger

git.causal.agency/litterbox/about

2024-06-13

27.

Category Theory for Programmers: The Preface

bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-programmers-the-preface
19.

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

nullprogram.com/blog/2023/10/05

2024-06-11

11.

Optimizing Font Files for the Modern Web

documentation.platformos.com/best-practices/performance/optimizing-font-files
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.

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.

2024-06-10

5.

Modern IRC Client Protocol

modern.ircdocs.horse

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).