Programmer Weekly (Issue 214 July 18 2024)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 214

July 18, 2024

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 214 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

 

"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time." – Bertrand Meyer

Reading List

A visual walkthrough of the AlphaFold3 architecture, with more details and diagrams than you were probably looking for.

The article discusses the limitations and missing features of Cargo, Rust's package manager, particularly in complex, polyglot projects. It highlights issues with cache management, build scripts, conditional compilation, and cross-compilation, and proposes a more modular and experimental approach to address these challenges.

The past 18 months have seen major change reshape the tech industry. What does this mean for businesses, dev teams, and what will pragmatic software engineering approaches look like, in the future?

Best practices and principles to create accurate and reliable software based financial systems.

The article discusses the challenges and potential risks of using Rust's as keyword for type casting, particularly for programmers coming from higher-level languages. It recommends using TryFrom instead of as for safer type conversions, as it allows for explicit error handling and prevents unexpected behavior when dealing with numeric types.

Substrate is a crowdsourced project designed to enhance understanding, communication, and action in order to move humanity forward.

The article discusses the challenges of using SQLite in production environments, highlighting issues like configuration for multi-threaded access, network limitations, concurrency constraints, and the need for careful transaction management. While SQLite offers simplicity for single-machine applications, its limitations make it less suitable for scenarios requiring high concurrency, distributed databases, or complex migrations​.

The article defines extrinsic hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) as fabricated outputs not grounded in either the provided context or the LLM's training data. It explores two types of hallucinations: in-context (consistent with source content) and extrinsic (not grounded by pre-training data).

Watch and Listen

The ZigLang team have put an astonishing amount of effort into making Zig work an effective tool for compiling C across different architectures. Work that benefits the Zig language, but also has a chance to benefit languages like Python and Rust. Or indeed, any language that uses native C libraries somewhere in its stack. So this week we’re joined by Loris Cro of the Zig team to dive into how you make a reliable, cross-platform toolchain that can compile C anywhere it finds it.

Nick Cherry, a former Coinbase employee and React Native expert, discusses the performance challenges encountered with React Native at Coinbase and the solutions implemented to optimize it. He also shares his experience working on the mobile app for Farcaster/Warpcast, a decentralized web3 social network, detailing the development process, tools used, and challenges faced.

Many tech companies claim to follow agile methodologies but fail to truly adapt to change, leading to widespread discontent among software developers. True agility, which means easy adaptation to change, is rare, and frameworks like SAFe have further distorted the agile concept. As AI accelerates disruption, genuine agile development is more crucial than ever

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Magic CLI is a command line utility which uses LLMs to help you use the command line more efficiently.

Toit is a modern high-level language designed specifically for microcontrollers.

Korvus is a search SDK that unifies the entire RAG pipeline in a single database query. Built on top of Postgres with bindings for Python, JavaScript, Rust and C.

A hobby OS implemented in Nim.

Compete to write the fastest function implementations!

A lightweight library for portable low-level GPU computation using WebGPU. 

A modern supercompiler for call-by-value functional languages.

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