Hello, dear readers. March was a blur as I welcomed my third child, Maeve, into the world. She’s been as great a little baby and brings a sense of calm to our home. As the dust begins to settle and a normal-ish routine emerges, it’s time to get back at it. Let’s jump into some links.
1. AI can rewrite open source code—but can it rewrite the license, too? (11 mins)
If you hadn’t already seen this one floating around, get ready for some deep questions. The article centers around the controversy from the version 7.0 release of chardet. In the release, Dan Blanchard does a full rewrite of the project and changes the licensing. It’s a complicated issue with many moving parts, but this article offers a good overview. Read this post and form your own opinion!
2. Reinventing Python’s AsyncIO (14 mins)
Giovanni Barillari shares some critiques on Python’s asyncio and offers a novel solution. It’s called TonIO, a rust based runtime that boasts some impressive benchmarks. Unlike Python’s asyncio, TonIO will take your async code and run it multi-threaded. This is possible due to the recent advancements in Python’s free threading support. The project is still in the alpha stage, but I’m excited to see where it goes.
3. Command Line Interface Guidelines (60 mins)
Do you ever wonder how to design good command line tools? Written by a number of authors, this guide will answer all your questions. Think, The Twelve-Factor App, but written for the terminal. Some of the authors worked co-created docker compose so I’m sure they learned a few lessons. You can bet that I’ve taken a couple of notes for px’s design
4. The Duct Tape Programmer (8 mins)
I was a little surprised that I hadn’t shared this classic yet. Joel Spolsky, co-creator of Stack Overflow, talks about the coding style of Jamie Zawinski, famous for his role in creating Netscape Navigator. Aptly named the duct-tape programmer, Jamie’s focus is about getting things done. The idea of Worse is Better is now a prevalent notion in the field of Software that’s hard to ignore. I also agree with Joel that you should check out Coder’s At Work, it’s an interesting dive.
5. Home Assistant waters my plants! (7 mins)
Using Home Assistant to automate watering is right up my alley. Finnian Anderson breaks down his over-engineered solution for watering his garden. It even has pretty graphs and dashboards. Now, this is by no means cheap, but it’s pretty cool to see in action. These are the kinds of fun projects you can sink hours into and come out with some cool lessons
6. An interactive intro to quadtrees (13 mins)
Quadtrees are at the heart of how Google Maps works. They aren’t limited to Google Maps, the data structure is used in other applications as well. This post from growingSWE gives an interactive way of understanding how they work. It’s a great way to tie together the spatial view with the tree structure. And if you want to watch a television miniseries, you can check out The Billion Dollar Code about ART+COM sueing Google over it’s use of Quad Trees.