miniblog.

I'm playing with GatsbyJS today. It's a really interesting design approach: it's a static site generator, but it uses a GraphQL server during development so you can pull data from lots of different sources.

Blogged: The Siren Song of Little Languages

Wish, a huge online retail app targeting affordable products, and the problems of scale:

The limitations of Twitter's design today, and how it's hard to structure conversations:

I'm really impressed with the TabNine completion engine's design. By building on top of the language server protocol, it can offer its completion tricks to any programming language! https://tabnine.com/semantic

.mdx files are a mix of markdown and JSX, used for writing content heavy websites like blogs: https://reacttraining.com/blog/gatsby-mdx-blog/ Interesting file format that I haven't seen before.

On the difficulty of making money from FOSS, and how having a widely popular project does not mean it has commercial value:

LLVM 8 is out, with improved RISC-V support!

I'm all in favour of simple websites without unnecessary JS, but I find a large comment section skews my sense of article length. If I'm reading a medium length post, the scrollbar can be very misleading if there are many comments.

Amazing writeup of how a series of exploits were chained together to root a mac, starting from a Safari JS JIT bug.

Unicode 12.0 has Egyptian hieroglyph formatting, exotic chess pieces, and a bunch of new emoji! https://blog.unicode.org/2019/03/announcing-unicode-standard-version-120.html

Regex search of gigabyte scale code repositories: https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep Similar to Etsy's Hound, which is also excellent.

Today I learnt that gcc can mean 'Google Closure Compiler'. It's a sophisticated compiler, but I suppose its use cases are sufficiently non-overlapping with C compilers to avoid confusion. Surprised me though.

GitHub provides a REST API for rendering markdown! https://developer.github.com/v3/markdown/ It's handy for quick throwaway projects, but I'm struggling to think of where I'd use it otherwise.

It's amazing how many different research papers are used in LLVM, and they're often cited in the source code!