20 random bookmarks

2025-10-24

137.

How to Run 1:1s as an Engineering Manager

justoffbyone.com

2025-08-29

131.

You no longer need JavaScript

lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js

An overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome.

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.

2025-08-12

128.

missing.css

missing.style

2025-07-31

127.

A dive into open chat protocols

wiki.alopex.li/ADiveIntoOpenChat

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

121.

You can use `fzf` to review git commits

jvns.ca/til/fzf-preview-git-commits

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

2025-06-12

116.

Always do Extra

www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2021/always-do-extra.php

Extra is different than More. Extra is finishing those two screens, but then researching a new library for form validation that might reduce the boilerplate code. Or it's learning ways to protect against common security vulnerabilities from data entry. These little off-ramps from the main highway of Normal Work could be dead-ends and not have any practical value to the project. But they might also be important contributions. And that's the thing with Extra. While the tangible value to the project is uncertain (it could be nothing this time or it could be something), the value to you is real.

2024-09-16

73.

Technical Writing One introduction

developers.google.com/tech-writing/one

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

2024-07-05

60.

JavaScript-Free Sidenotes in Hugo

danilafe.com/blog/sidenotes

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.

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.

2024-06-20

46.

Why does SQLite (in production) have such a bad rep?

avi.im/blag/2024/sqlite-bad-rep

2024-06-14

33.

A useful shell prompt

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

Featureful zsh prompt.

29.

pounce - IRC bouncer

git.causal.agency/pounce/about

2024-06-13

21.

Building Go programs with Nix Flakes

xeiaso.net//blog/nix-flakes-go-programs
18.

An easy-to-implement, arena-friendly hash map

nullprogram.com/blog/2023/09/30
14.

Optimal SQLite settings for Django

gcollazo.com/optimal-sqlite-settings-for-django

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

2024-06-11

9.

Exploring Gleam, a type-safe language on the BEAM!

christopher.engineering/en/blog/gleam-overview

From Erlang, to Elixir and now, GLEAM!?