Wilfred Hughes @wilfredh@mastodon.social

I'm a fan of simple issue trackers. A description, comments, and maybe a small integration with something.

Given this, perhaps it makes sense to build your own? You get a bespoke solution, and focusing on your main project prevents feature creep.

Apparently Google runs a registrar that consumers can use! https://domains.google/

I'm not sure what's in it for Google (surely it's fairly small market?) but it seems pretty slick.

Graphical editor for ASCII art: https://monodraw.helftone.com/

It actually makes sense to me as a concept! It's not an intuitive product need, but it totally makes sense. I like the 'palette' of symbols available.

Really neat test suite that aggressively tests the corner cases for JSON implementations: https://github.com/nst/JSONTestSuite

What's old is new again: a hit counter for GitHub repos! http://hits.dwyl.io/

Reflections on two years of writing Rust: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2020/10/11/rust-after-the-honeymoon/

Excellent discussion of translation units, definition order, and the design tradeoffs in C++ language proposals: https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/translation_units/

I'm really glad that iOS and Android compete with each other: they're both better as a result.

That said, the switching costs are significant. Most people I know are firmly in one camp.

Beyond structural editing: semantic editing! https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/towards-tactics/index.html

(Uses Coq-style tactics.)

Microcaching, an interesting idea where you cache fast-changing content for a few seconds to reduce backend load: https://www.nginx.com/blog/benefits-of-microcaching-nginx/

We pack 5 introduces a slew of new static analysis features, including /*#__pure__*/

https://webpack.js.org/blog/2020-10-10-webpack-5-release/

(Every sufficiently advanced dev tool contains an ad-hoc, informally specified compiler?)

TIL Clojure has #_ which discards the next expression: https://betweentwoparens.com/rich-comment-blocks

It's handy for commenting things out written debugging.

An amazing project to use Squeak Smalltalk as a phone operating system, and comparing modern phones to the OpenMoko: https://eighty-twenty.org/tag/squeak-phone/

Sometimes I get nervous about installing packages, as they can run arbitrary code on install. It makes me want more sandboxing, like deno.

I'm not sure sandboxing install scripts is terribly helpful though. Sooner or later you're going to run the package itself.

Computing trust for npm packages by running a pagerank algorithm on who depends on what!

https://www.btao.org/2020/10/02/npm-trust.html

I've seen markdown projects leverage link syntax for custom extensions, e.g. [click me](button://).

Markdown also supports embedded HTML. Perhaps you could add custom tags for extensions?

Zig is adding a self-hosting compiler that can do incremental compilation by patching the final binary from a previous compile! https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-new-relationship-llvm/

Language communities seem to manage without major name clashes. I've seen complaints of "default package hubris", but people come up with fun, recognisable names regardless!

I've seen req, reqwest etc for HTTP requests. Similarly I've seen simplejson, cjson for JSON.

I'm sympathetic to the view that package namespaces are best avoided (e.g. https://samsieber.tech/posts/2020/09/registry-structure-influence/ ).

If I release a package wilfred/foo, that makes it harder for it to become a community project later.

I'm really impressed that Zig supports Windows! It's so common for smaller programming languages to settle for just *nix.

https://ziglang.org/#Zig-competes-with-C-instead-of-depending-on-it