miniblog.

GitHub is making multi-user private repositories free, and halving the prices of enterprise accounts! Perhaps their costs are decreasing, or they have more competitors?

Running an HTTPS website with Let's Encrypt is increasingly becoming a built-in server feature. For example, Traefik (a reverse proxy for web services) has this functionality in its default feature set!

reCAPTCHA is going to start charging a fee for use!

Quantifying rate of language change in Rust! https://words.steveklabnik.com/how-often-does-rust-change Putting numbers on this is hard, but produces some interesting methodologies.

It's striking how many Docker features get ported when people build alternatives. It's a great day of easing migration. Podman deliberately mimics Docker's CLI and can even run Docker images!

When I look at incredible code completion tools like TabNine (using deep learning), I'm not surprised that JetBrains is focusing more on ML techniques in their IDEs! https://www.tabnine.com/blog/deep/ https://www.infoworld.com/article/3518429/jetbrains-taps-machine-learning-for-full-line-code-completion.html

Smart devices that have continued despite the original company ceasing: https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-03-undead-gadgets.html The secret seems to be a great developer ecosystem, a cute form factor, or a cult following.

A bunch of diagnostics polish in clang 10: https://releases.llvm.org/10.0.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNotes.html One particularly cute addition: spotting that 2 ^ 10 is the user confusing exponentiation with xor!

Upscaling textures on SNES emulators to improve graphics on today's displays: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/hd-emulation-mod-makes-mode-7-snes-games-look-like-new/ Really neat approach. I've seen emulators do clever 2D smoothing, but this feels closer to 'original intent'.

A defence of microservices, from a successful mobile-first UK bank:

pdqsort ("pattern defeating quicksort") is an incredibly fast sort that even outperforms timsort and std::sort in C++!

Thoughtful criticism of postgresql and its weaknesses (mostly in clustering): https://medium.com/@rbranson/10-things-i-hate-about-postgresql-20dbab8c2791

A recurrent neural network for improving voice quality on an unreliable connection! https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in-duo-with.html There's something magical about advances in encoders. Unlike hardware changes, you never know when/if techniques will get better.

Standardising Python build information and tooling configuration with pyproject.toml. It's great to see Python moving away from executable package descriptions which had bootstrap issues! https://snarky.ca/what-the-heck-is-pyproject-toml/

Some excellent new error diagnostics from gcc with -fanalyze: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/03/26/static-analysis-in-gcc-10/ The multi-function analysis reminds me of Infer, and the cute nested ASCII display resembles rustc.