LINKDING

The post has aged like good cheese: since 2015 we've moved on from callback syntax to async/await, but the debate about advantages and disadvantages of futures and microthreads remains open and this is a fantastic, clear way to picture it (even if opinionated in one direction).

I haven't implemented bidirectional BFS but now I kind of want to, I didn't realize how much improvement it can be. Also the trick with starting the next step from the "narrower side" makes a lot of intuitive sense.

The reference I didn't know I needed! Even though I'd typically use converters, the compatibility chart is extremely helpful to have.

I had no idea that the famous quote "free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny" is attributed to a fictional character from a classic computer game! Many more gems are to be found here.

Just bumped into this problem, very positively surprised how helpful an answer I was able to find!

I was surprised to see such a throwback to the classic PHP article. I can see a value in this article because it brings attention to a lot of gotchas and inconsistencies in the language that we should be aware of; I especially appreciate a good summary of inconsistencies around zero values. However there's a different point to be made here: Golang feels like a successful language to me. It has a purpose and fits this purpose really well. There's a lot of amazing pieces of software that I use regularly that Golang made possible. Maybe this means we should appreciate Go not as a "overall well designed language" but as a language that successfully solved a problem back when a compiled language with great tooling, concurrency and modules wasn't so readily accessible? This reminds me of how PHP successfully solved another important problem, despite its language design problems.

Surprised to see Go use more memory than Java in some benchmarks!

The thing that surprised me most about this article is how much ongoing effort there is to "upgrade" C++ to match the modern set of expectations, and how much friction it seems to face. I wasn't familiar with the historical events like the big ABI vote, so lots of learning here.

This article is like a box of chocolates! There's some quality-of-life tips, some best practices tips and some performance tips. I wish I knew earlier about \pset null '[NULL]'...

Great piece about leaving "breadcrumbs" that will help you revisit your past creations. A fantastic zero-effort alternative to writing a blog post about everything :-)

In which we learn about which place has a 45-minute UTC offset, which one has half-hour DST change, and how the DST rules are spelled out in databases.

This made me switch to wired open-back headphones... and made me oddly aware how it's not possible to talk over each other in Google Meet.

Very inspiring! Whenever I think about organizing things, I tend to start with picking a tool or a system or the means of automation. I suppose that's because I enjoy designing processes? Yet here's a process of managing personal knowledge that by design doesn't involve any automation, which makes it simple to set up and resilient.

Eli's articles continue to be extremely helpful for me trying to wrap my head around concurrency.

Message boards are THE blueprint for me for how an online community "should look like". I spend way too much time daydreaming about forums coming back! And from this article it looks like they... didn't really go anywhere?

Not sure if I'm going to actually use this list for anything, but I'm keeping it.

Strong message that TDD is just good engineering, and it's supposed to be done not for some abstract reasons, but because it pays for itself.

Never realized how much subtlety there is in calculating, say, 95-th percentile of some value given a running stream of values. Datadog's approach makes a lot of sense and I love that they described it in a paper and shared a few open source implementations like this one.

Relatable! Print out a Bingo card before reading.

Found this one via xkcd 2748. Kind of puts in context why the Moon suddenly feels so small whenever you try to take a photo.

I keep revisiting this one as my go-to description of transaction-staged jobs.

I still don't have a full intuitive understanding of all the 17 plane symmetry groups. It's relieving to see that finding the simplest schematics to illustrate each symmetry group is considered an important problem!

An interesting description of the Expression Problem - a concept I haven't even heard earlier.

I bumped into this one when trying to figure out how an API client could look like in Go if the response is an OpenAPI variant type. I find it very relatable because ever since Python 3.12 I started overusing match/case and ended up rewriting some places to OO style with interfaces.

A nice walkthrough of all the differences between enums as in "overlapping memory" - known from C - and enums as in "variant types" implemented in rust.

JWZ perceives Mozilla's duty to be "building THE reference implementation web browser" (sic). This aligns with me, I have the same expectation - web browsers are too important to be monopolised; there needs to be more than one implementation in active use.

Tilesets are a big source of inspiration for me given how they can "bring to life" a simple 2D array of numbers and make it look like a "place". Combine that with a tileset editor and you can literally paint locations!

Guy Walker's website is my favourite resource about various approaches of tiling. It is currently offline but luckily there's a mirror available courtesy of Boris the Brave.

When I was younger I was always wondering "why don't people just keep all the law on Github?"