Various links and things that I’ve found interesting this week.

  • Julia Evans wrote a great post on escape codes and the standards, or lack of standards, or lack of well-working standards in the area, especially regarding the terminfo database. I’ve been feeling this problem lately as I moved to ghostty as my terminal emulator of choice, and haven’t yet set it up properly on my remote hosts. (This is how you do that. I just haven’t.) The rant Julia links to is on point, but stops short on suggesting how we should do this instead.
  • Rust 2024 edition was released as stable with version 1.85.0. I should update my little Rust programs.
  • The Typescript compiler is getting rewritten in Go to make it faster. Very cool. I was a bit surprised at the choice of Go. A lot of frontend tooling have turned to Rust for this kind of task lately, and this is also a language that Microsoft has been investing in. But this explanation makes a lot of sense.
  • I came over this post on the Saga pattern and was thinking (again) that you’re really kind of screwed if you’ve put yourself in a position where this complexity is needed. In reality, many microservice systems seem to ignore the data consistency issue altogether.
  • Alex Kladov wrote a post called MacOS for KDE users on his matklad blog. I’m not sure what KDE has to do with anything, I’m a GNOME person myself (or well, I was when I was a desktop Linux user), but I use many of the same things myself to manage my system, like Brewfiles and hammerspoon. Also got a few new tips.
  • Apparently there is an experimental spring-grpc project, might be relevant for work.
  • Nice tutorial on the new Gatherers API for Java Streams. I should read it more carefully. Mostly I want to use it to refactor some of my old Advent of Code solutions. In other words, important programming.
  • I like Kent C. Dodds approach to defining principles for your work as a software engineer. It reminds me of Spencer Greenberg’s Valuism concept.
  • State of the Configuration Cache in Gradle. Interesting read.
  • I listened to this podcast episode on Clearer Thinking, named “Physical limits and the long-term future”, with the ever interesting Anders Sandberg. It was fun. I am not very good at physics, but I recently ordered a bunch of books that I hope to read.
  • Speaking of Swedes that think about the long-term future (there are a few of them), the ongoing conversation between Olle Häggström and the economist Andreas Bergh is interesting.