Posts from 2019 - Wilfred miniblog

Jun 30, 2019

Percy is a neat product for CI of visual changes: https://percy.io/ It reminds me of Wraith: https://github.com/BBC-News/wraith but neatly packaged as a service to run against pull requests.

All-in-one visual testing and review platform | Percy

GitHub - BBC-News/wraith

Contribute to BBC-News/wraith development by creating an account on GitHub.

Jun 30, 2019

Systems Software Research is Irrelevant by Rob Pike (2000) https://web.archive.org/web/20060420001914/http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch.html Discusses how hard it is to build novel systems today.

Systems Software Research is Irrelevant

Jun 29, 2019

Would it be possible to quantify perceived coolness of different programming languages? My only idea so far is look at how many HN stories mention each language, relative to their usage levels (according to the SO survey).

Jun 29, 2019

A transcript from a deeply insightful @strangeloop_stl 2018 talk: comparing software design to programs that generate programs. Deductive synthesis can give us insights on choosing abstractions, and counter-example guided synthesis is much like TDD!

My Strange Loop talk: You are a Program Synthesizer (video + transcript) | Path-Sensitive

Jun 29, 2019

Defining extensible macros, and a helpful approach of classifying syntax into distinct categories:

Not everything is an expression

Jun 28, 2019

Red Hat/Fedora is the biggest supporter of https://x.org/, and they expect it to move to maintenance-only soon: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly

X.Org

Jun 28, 2019

Users are increasingly cynical of "only N still available" messages trying to persuade you to buy:

Consumers Are Becoming Wise to Your Nudge - Behavioral Scientist

New research indicates that consumers are catching on and may be annoyed by certain nudges, potentially limiting their effectiveness.

Jun 28, 2019

Even the makers of Flash argue against splash pages on websites!

Uproar over Anti-Flash Intro Survey Results | MarketingSherpa

No summary available.

Jun 28, 2019

I love it when a years-old patch eventually gets applied upstream: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=24645 It gives me hope that sending patches is almost always worthwhile! (These days I have commit access to Emacs too.)

#24645 - [PATCH] hexl-mode does not fontify buffer - GNU bug report logs

Jun 28, 2019

Really cute introduction to Smalltalk programming from 1983. It starts with an explanation of mice and "scroll menus" (scroll bars), then shows cross-referencing code, lints, autofixes, and inspecting instances of newly defined objects! https://youtu.be/JLPiMl8XUKU

Jun 27, 2019

YouTube adds more transparency and options to the recommendations it offers:

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

Jun 26, 2019

If a user types hUNTER2 and your service corrects it to Hunter2, have you reduced security? How much will it help? This fun paper explores this Q, finding you can preserve security and fix 10% of logins: pASSWORD tYPOS and How to Correct Them Securely https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2016/papers/0824a799.pdf

Jun 26, 2019

An introduction to the world's largest CRM, the importance of allowing users to build custom logic, and a discussion of providing a programmable AWS Lambda style platform: https://tryretool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/

Jun 26, 2019

Playing with perf today! It's really interesting to see low-level details of where compute time is going. Branch prediction works well most of the time! (At least for this workload.) Based on https://jvns.ca/blog/2014/05/13/profiling-with-perf/ and

I can spy on my CPU cycles with perf!

Profiling in rust application

As always in performance analysis, the answer depends on what exactly you want to know (for example, exact "number of calls to a function" is a very expensive quantity to measure, so most profilers prefer to give you an approximate "percent of time spent in the function" instead). But in my opinion, the best "default choice" these days is a hardware-assisted sampling profiler. These tools are either operating system or hardware-specific, here are some references that you can look up: Linux: p...

Jun 25, 2019

Playing with perf today! It's really interesting to see low-level details of where compute time is going. Branch prediction works well most of the time! (At least for this workload.) Based on https://jvns.ca/blog/2014/05/13/profiling-with-perf/ and

I can spy on my CPU cycles with perf!

Profiling in rust application

As always in performance analysis, the answer depends on what exactly you want to know (for example, exact "number of calls to a function" is a very expensive quantity to measure, so most profilers prefer to give you an approximate "percent of time spent in the function" instead). But in my opinion, the best "default choice" these days is a hardware-assisted sampling profiler. These tools are either operating system or hardware-specific, here are some references that you can look up: Linux: p...

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