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2024

  • 1 min read

How Not To Use Static Typing In Ruby

Link: How Not To Use Static Typing In Ruby: "Great advanced analysis of Ruby designs"

The linked article does a wonderful job exploring design choices in Ruby. It happens to focus on type checking and “fail early” vs “fail late”. But it’s most interesting to see the advanced and useful application of Ruby features and patterns. I

  • 1 min read

B-trees and database indexes — PlanetScale

Link: B-trees and database indexes — PlanetScale: "B-trees are used by many modern DBMSs. Learn how they work, how databases use them, and how your choice of primary key can affect index performance."

Linked is a neat article explaining a lot about b-trees. Especially notable are the excellent visualization and animations which gave me a new way to understand these incredibly important data structures.

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1 dataset, 100 matplotlib visualizations – Curbal

Link: 1 dataset, 100 matplotlib visualizations – Curbal: "The 1 dataset, 100 matplotlib visualizations, displays 100charts made with matplotlib. Just click on a thumbnail to get to the full code."

If you've used Matplotlib, you may have seen their galleries and various other galleries. Attached is what looks to me like a MEGA gallery by someone who has really good aesthetic sense. (Joke: "Almost as good as ChatGPT")

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The Thread API : Concurrent, colorless Ruby

Link: The Thread API : Concurrent, colorless Ruby: "👋🏼 This is part of series on concurrency, parallelism and asynchronous programming in Ruby. It’s a deep dive, so it’s divided into 12 main parts: Your Ruby programs are always multi-threaded: Part 1 Your Ruby programs are always multi-threaded: Part 2 Consistent, request-local state Ruby methods are colorless The Thread API: Concurrent, colorless Ruby Interrupting Threads: Concurrent, colorless Ruby Thread and its MaNy friends: Concurrent, colorless Ruby Fibers: Concurrent, colorless Ruby Processes, Ractors and alternative runtimes: Parallel Ruby Scaling concurrency: Streaming Ruby Abstracted, concurrent Ruby Closing thoughts, kicking the tires and tangents How I dive into CRuby concurrency You’re reading “The Thread API: Concurrent, colorless Ruby”."

Linked is a really excellent, comprehensive tour of the Thread class and feature of Ruby. If you're a ruby person, then this is as good as anything you will find.

  • 1 min read

Good Refactoring vs Bad Refactoring

Link: Good Refactoring vs Bad Refactoring: "I've hired a lot of developers over the years. More than a few of them have come in with a strong..."

Linked is a quite insightful article about good vs bad refactoring. What? Isn’t refactoring always “good”? There are lots of examples of bad ones here.

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Visual Data Structures Cheat-Sheet

Link: Visual Data Structures Cheat-Sheet: "A visual overview of some of the key data-structures used in the real world."

Linked is a very comprehensive collection of brief explanations of numerous computer science-y data structures. I put it that way because when I think of a data structure and designing a data structure it is to represent some domain data in a way that is most convenient for the algorithm or requirements.

The linked article gets into advanced data structures seem mostly about efficiently storing, accessing, searching and updating very large collections of information. I say very large because the structures and associated algorithms are nuanced and ingenious in order to achieve efficiency when subjected to very large collections. When you need one, you really need it and it can save your application. But you won’t need most of them every day. IMHO of course.

  • 1 min read

GitHub - sinaatalay/rendercv: A LaTeX CV/Resume Framework

Link: GitHub - sinaatalay/rendercv: A LaTeX CV/Resume Framework: "A LaTeX CV/Resume Framework. Contribute to sinaatalay/rendercv development by creating an account on GitHub."

Kinda cool. Linked is a simple tool which formats a cv in one of several styles. But the trick is that the input is a yaml file which contains all the content as a structured text file that you can edit with vscode and version track with GitHub. Nice!

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Leaving Neovim for Zed

Link: Leaving Neovim for Zed: "A journey through text editors and how I landed on Zed after years of Neovim"

Linked is an article about Zed, a new programmers editor, trying to take the place of vscode. I love articles like this because they follow the kind of crazed thought process that I often have: is there something better than what I am using now?

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Sonic Pi: Ruby as a Composition Tool

Link: Sonic Pi: Ruby as a Composition Tool: ""

Linked is a neat article about sonic pi, a less known music synthesizer software. It is so cool and interesting even if you’re not a musician or composer. It builds a world of musical abstractions allowing you to make very interesting music. What is news from this article is that the whole thing is built on top of Ruby, as a DSL!