miniblog.

Spent some interesting time reading about the Secure Scuttlebutt protocol. The idea of syncing all the posts of a person or server ('pub') by gossip reminds me of FireChat, but I wonder how it scales.

Bootstrapping a compiler is rather like yoghurt:

Moving from JS to statically typed Flow or TypeScript prevented 15% of bugs found in trunk: https://earlbarr.com/publications/typestudy.pdf Interesting paper. Whilst I think this number might be used to justify both static and dynamic types, I'll take anything lightweight that reduces my bug count!

Surprised to learn that the majority of Amazon's income comes from AWS! https://www.lightreading.com/enterprise-cloud/infrastructure-and-platform/aws-drives-more-than-half-of-amazons-operating-income/d/d-id/749196

The future of Yarn: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/6953 Breaking up into libraries to enable reuse, and porting to Typescript!

"Tokenization and parsing are some of the most expensive operations in compiling C++. In my own tests, parsing can consume up to 30% of compilation time for files with a large preprocessed output" https://vector-of-bool.github.io/2019/01/27/modules-doa.html Wowza! I thought this was a problem unique to JS.

Computer Science is increasing in popularity in universities: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/technology/computer-science-courses-college.html At least in the UK, popularity plummeted for years after the dot com bubble. I wonder if we're at all time highs or not.

The downsides of writing a large project in Typescript: https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-typescript-tax-132ff4cb175b I don't share all the author's views, but makes interesting comments on what percentage bugs get caught by the typechecker, and type declaration verbosity/placement challenges.

Rust has a very reassuring compile process. After I've made the compiler completely happy, I have an unusually high level of confidence in my code. (It might not be doing the right thing, but it's robust and pleasant to refactor!)

@rocx @cstanhope A great example where the full page is being used to show more content! Examples from other languages: PHP: http://php.net/manual/en/function.count.php Clojure (unofficial): https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/count C++ (admittedly this has two functions):

Cute project of stock illustrated people, particularly useful for websites: https://www.humaaans.com/

Useful metrics, vanity metrics, and organisation alignment:

Fortnite as a communal hangout area, a 'third place': https://char.gd/blog/2018/fortnite-is-the-new-hangout-spot https://medium.com/s/greatescape/fortnite-is-so-much-more-than-a-game-3ca829f389f4 It's also really impressive to build a successful app across PC, consoles and Android, with everyone playing together!

Intentional variable shadowing, sorting floats, and other reflections on writing Rust: https://rcoh.me/posts/thoughts-on-rust-a-few-thousand-lines-in/

Fabulous introduction to the Emacs C interface: