Programmer Weekly (Issue 174 September 28 2023)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 174

September 28, 2023

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 174 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

 

"A common fallacy is to assume authors of incomprehensible code will be able to express themselves clearly in comments." – Kevlin Henney

Reading List

In this article, we’ll talk about building up a tiny (micro) Linux “distribution” from scratch. We will build the Linux kernel on our own, and write some software to package our micro-distro.

A little-discussed method enables inserting rows with bound data into SQLite faster than any existing technique. This novel method is then discovered to have a drawback that makes it generally unusable. The rest of this article explores how to get the best insert performance out of SQLite generally; what's in your control, and what isn't. 

Lessons on influence, managing up, and working with difficult coworkers from 8-year tech lead & Staff Engineer, Ron DeVera.

This article is an attempt to explain what is a shell and what it does. The goal is for you to build a useful mental model of what's going on under the hood when you open a terminal, paste some command, and hope that it doesn't erase all your terrible, embarrasing, hidden sci-fi poems.

This document describes the “PQXDH” (or “Post-Quantum Extended Diffie-Hellman”) key agreement protocol. PQXDH establishes a shared secret key between two parties who mutually authenticate each other based on public keys. PQXDH provides post-quantum forward secrecy and a form of cryptographic deniability but still relies on the hardness of the discrete log problem for mutual authentication in this revision of the protocol.

This post discusses the potential for significant improvements in GitHub Actions, highlighting areas where enhancements could greatly enhance the developer experience.

This article provides an overview of probabilistic data structures in Redis and demonstrates their use in Go (though the concepts apply universally).

This post looks at how various databases execute expressions in their query language. Most surveyed databases use a tree-walking interpreter. A few use stack- or register-based virtual machines. A couple have just-in-time compilers. And, tangentially, a few do vectorized interpretation.

This post explores the inner workings of Git repositories, shedding light on where files are stored within the repository structure. It provides insights into the Git object model and how it manages file versions.

Watch and Listen

Learn Mojo in this full tutorial. The Mojo programming language combines the usability of Python with the performance of C. It's basically an enhanced version of Python specifically designed for Artificial Intelligence developers.

Lukas Fittl of pganalyze discusses the performance of Postgres, one of the world’s most popular database systems. SE Radio host Philip Winston speaks with Fittl about database indexing, queries, maintenance, scaling, and stored procedures. They also discuss some features of pganalyze, such as the index and vacuum advisors.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

What if your calendar had a brain? Chat with and teach your calendar to solve your time problems.

OpenTofu lets you declaratively manage your cloud infrastructure.

Open source Windows programming framework for Lua.

Imba is a Web programming language that's fast in two ways: Imba's time-saving syntax with built-in tags and styles results in less typing and switching files so you can build things fast. Imba's groundbreaking memoized DOM is an order of magnitude faster than virtual DOM libraries, so you can build fast things.

Gitness is an Open Source developer platform with Source Control management, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

A lightweight, framework-agnostic database migration tool.

Create repos and commits with AI.

A minimal Java web framework built from scratch.

Our Other Newsletters

- A free weekly newsletter featuring the best hand curated news, articles, tools and libraries, new releases, jobs etc related to Python.

- A free weekly newsletter for entrepreneurs featuring best curated content, must read articles, how to guides, tips and tricks, resources, events and more.