Monthly Grinder
The months keep rolling, and so does the grinder towards personal and public betterment. …Now that’s a weird analogy if ever there was one. Anyway, there’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get to it!
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Iterators are a neat way to deal with lazy-evaluated collections, but JavaScript didn’t give you anything beyond the basics… until now! There’s a proposal to add built-in methods for map/filter and friends, saving you some minor implementation hassle.
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This is a cool tool to automatically generate automation scripts for your browser automation tools from a manual execution… automatically. Automate. AU-TO-MATE.
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I’ve been looking for a programming-related podcast that works well in audio format, and has good content as well. Ended up with Corecursive, and I’m pleased so far. A teaser from this episode: conventional wisdom says that IO is the bottleneck for parsing various text formats. If you look at the actual numbers, though, that’s not the case at all: the fastest existing JSON parser processed 3-400MB/s, where the disk throughput is 5GB/s. After tons of CPU usage optimization, simdjson was born, running at 4GB/s (still not IO-limited!).
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NanoID is an incremental improvement over UUID, serving the same role, but smaller in every way.
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I came across this short pamphlet describing some counterintuitive suggestions on making your code less fragile. It’s nutritious, vitamin-rich food for thought, go check it out!
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Apparently the yearly Jetbrains developer survey has a lifestyle category as well. Looks like I’m a 2%-er weirdo for starting my day in the early hours.
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Add another entry to the “things I’d rather not know” list: Gitlab CI env variables set to true/false must be quoted, because parsing is hard… And this is a 3-year-old bug. Seemingly undocumented, too.
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And while we’re at it, there’s an entire site dedicated to having software suck less. By their ranking systemd is the finest example of capital-S Suck. Amongst the dozens of issues, one stood out as particularly amusing: to reboot, you need to press Ctrl-Alt-Del eight times rapidly. Someone thought “seven is too few, nine is too many”. Eight it shall be… obviously.
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Demo of the month: refterm! There’s an amusing story behind this: a guy complains about the new Windows Terminal being slow. One of the reactions are “sure it could be improved, but that’d be a PhD research project, so basically it can’t be done”. This triggers a weekend project to show that even the simplest, unoptimized version can be literally 100x faster. Demos here and here. A spectacular illustration of computers being really fast, if you don’t fill them full of software that sucks.
That’s it for this time, see you next month!