Linked is another bit of esoteric practical research by Julia Evans, this time about pipes in the Unix shell. Useful bit of esoterica.

Linked is an article about the “turtle” Python package. It’s a simple and elegant API for creating simple visual animations, simulations and/or games. I had never come across it before and it looks like a good addition to my toolkit.

Attached is an article that is guaranteed to be clickbait for my people. Certainly for me! I use both Ruby and Python. Lately more python because the stuff I am working on uses Python. And let’s face it Python is, generally speaking, a more mainstream language. I don’t find the arguments made in the attached article especially compelling. I would say that Ruby and Python are more similar than different but in the end, for many reasons, I would use Ruby if I had a choice.

Attached is yet another article that tries to clarify the options for python package management. The problem is that this space is dynamic and overpopulated, so any article quickly becomes out of dare.

Linked is a nice little article exploring closures in Python.

Linked is a nice collection of tips and libraries. They are useful really for any kind of automation. I still avoid shell scripting because it is confusing to me to do anything more than trivial things. E

The linked article compares two techniques both of which allow you to avoid the dreaded REACT

The linked article talks about strings and symbols in Ruby. When I teach software engineering with Ruby I often struggle to really explain symbols, why they exist and how to use them. While they are cool for certain very specific purposes, I think if we were going to try to make the language smaller, I would suggest removing that feature!

That’s p-oh-lish not powe-lish! Linked article has some cool examples of user interface polish and where and when it is important.

Linked is a useful tool to level up on your python.

The link is to a paper of mine that was/will be published as a chapter in this volume

The linked article critiques the role of doctorates (PhDs) in higher ed and society as a whole. Key quote: “Imagine if we recruited professors not just for their academic credentials but for their real-world achievements. People who’ve actually built things that work, could revolutionize how we teach software engineering or entrepreneurship.” . Duh.

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

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.

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")

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.

Linked is an article about #dokku which is software that lets you run the equivalent (more or less) of #heroku on your own server, including a server instance from a service like #digitalocean. Very nice. Good offering to remember!dokku

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.

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.

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!