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2024

A few words on Ruby's type annotations state

Link: A few words on Ruby's type annotations state: "…that were written in a military training camp and accidentally grew to 5k words"

Linked is a deep article about type hints in Ruby. When I say deep, I mean it! Requires an in depth understanding to appreciate or follow. And it illustrates how incredibly tough it is to add a major new low level feature to Ruby or any other mature language.

Annotated area charts with plotnine | Nicola Rennie

Link: Annotated area charts with plotnine | Nicola Rennie: "The plotnine visualisation library brings the Grammar of Graphics to Python. This blog post walks through the process of creating a customised, annotated area chart of coal production data."

Linked is an article about plotline, a python graphing package that I was not familiar with. Along the way the example shows how to take your raw data and extract from it the various series you will need building the graph. Excellent examples. But I wonder what gap this new package was filling among the multiple existing, popular and excellent graphing packages.

Exercise: Minesweeper in 100 lines of clean Ruby

Link: Exercise: Minesweeper in 100 lines of clean Ruby: "Ruby is such an expressive language. You can often do surprisingly much with just a few lines of code. It’s why I find it so satisfying to think about how to accomplish the same thing in fewer lines of Ruby1. If we accept the claim that that number of bugs correlates with number of lines of code this is not just a fun exercise. There’s real business value in accomplishing a feature with less lines of code. ↩"

Reading well written, idiomatic code is the best way to improve your code. Linked is a nice example.

Mastering Ruby Code Navigation: Major Ruby LSP Enhancements in the First Half of 2024

Link: Mastering Ruby Code Navigation: Major Ruby LSP Enhancements in the First Half of 2024: "In the first half of 2024, Ruby LSP has seen significant enhancements, particularly in the area of code navigation, thanks to the advancement of its indexer. In this post, we’ll dive into the major code navigation enhancements that have been made to Ruby LSP. We’ll also touch on some experimental features that are on the horizon."

Linked is a comprehensive explanation of the Ruby LSP. RUBY,I had to look up what the P stood for. Actually the correct usage is either “LSP server” because LSP stands for “Language server protocol”… or just language server. Maybe the name LSP is morphing from a pure acronym to just the name of the feature, detached from the initials. Yes programmers are so pedantic, don’t you agree?

Understanding Hash Value Omission in Ruby

Link: Understanding Hash Value Omission in Ruby: "Learn about hash value omission in Ruby, their benefits, examples, and implementation guidelines for more concise code"

Linked is an article about a feature in Ruby that I didn’t know about. I still think Ruby is superior to python in many ways. Unfortunately circumstances and “the world” and “time” has gotten me leaning more and more into python. Still when I next need to create a web based app, I can’t see using Django over rails.

The biggest-ever global outage: lessons for software engineers

Link: The biggest-ever global outage: lessons for software engineers: "Cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike shipped a routine rule definition change to all customers, and chaos followed as 8.5M machines crashed, worldwide. There are plenty of learnings for developers."

Linked is a great analysis of what might have gone wrong to cause the crowdstrike global outage of windows computers. Also software engineering and operations techniques and principles which could have avoided the terrible event.

Hypernatural

Link: Hypernatural: "Amazing ai generated videos"

Linked is a service that generates quite respectable short promotional videos. I tried it on the syllabus to my course and it created something fairly amazing. I mean it’s still obviously ai generated. After your amazement subsides you may still not want to use it but it’s worth checking out. Maybe if you have to generate many short videos. It’s definitely worth checking out.

LLM: A CLI utility and Python library for interacting with Large Language Models

Link: LLM: A CLI utility and Python library for interacting with Large Language Models: "A CLI utility and Python library for interacting with Large Language Models, both via remote APIs and models that can be installed and run on your own machine."

Follow the link below: I’ve been looking for a nicely packaged way to try llms locally, that is without using a cloud based service and without uploading my pi to another company. This tool is a good solution to the problem.

An Introduction to Auth0 for Ruby on Rails | AppSignal Blog

Link: An Introduction to Auth0 for Ruby on Rails | AppSignal Blog: "This article will cover the setup and use of Auth0 in a Ruby on Rails application."

The attached article is a nice introduction to the auth0 service and tooling. Definity worth considering for your app. Authentication is a tricky thing to implement, and that’s before worrying about perfect security. The one thing that I am a little shaky on is relying on a paid service for authentication. What if I lose connectivity to the service or my credit card expires?

Basics - Rye

Link: Basics - Rye: "An Experimental Package Management Solution for Python"

See attached info about RYE. Ok so I complain that python has so many different package managers, virtual environment mechanisms, dependency managers, and so on. Much to my chagrin, I recently read something saying, “whatever you do, don’t use poetry”.

Rye But, but, but… rye looks really nice from the linked description. I’m just a little hesitant to lock myself to rye and find myself in 6 months having to do something totally different.

By the way I happen to be a happy user of rbenv (@ Ruby environment manager) so my default is pyenv, which works the same way exactly. Not sure if they are from the same person, but they are basically identical.