Programmer Weekly (Issue 242 February 13 2025)

Author

Rahul Chaudhary
February 13, 2025

Welcome to issue 242 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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Quote of the Week

"The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures." - Frederick P. Brooks

Reading List

Methods and Strategies for Building and Refining Reasoning Models.

Author's journey implementing a new dithering algorithm in the Racket programming language.

This post details the author's challenging journey to compile Perl to WebAssembly (WASM) for client-side file metadata extraction, ultimately creating "zeroperl," a sandboxed Perl environment. The author overcame numerous hurdles, including build system complexities, Emscripten limitations, and WASI incompatibility with exception handling, resulting in a functional but currently impractical 9.1MB build.

An interactive guide on making animations on the GPU.

This post details exploiting a heap overflow in Llama.cpp's RPC component to achieve remote code execution, overcoming unique heap management challenges. The author spent weeks researching Llama.cpp's memory implementation and developing a novel exploitation strategy due to its custom security mitigations.

This article argues that simulation is an underutilized but valuable tool for DevOps engineers to understand and improve distributed systems, especially in the face of increasing complexity. It outlines the benefits of simulation for postmortem analysis, regression testing, capacity planning, and feature design, while addressing common obstacles to its adoption and introducing SimKube as a Kubernetes simulation tool.

This article identifies emerging patterns in building GenAI products, such as Evals for non-deterministic systems and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance Large Language Models with up-to-date information. It emphasizes that these patterns are early attempts to understand the challenges in moving GenAI from proof-of-concept to production.

Watch, Listen

This video by Andrej Karpathy provides a comprehensive deep dive into Large Language Models (LLMs), covering their training, architecture, and practical applications. Karpathy, a former OpenAI and Tesla AI leader, aims to empower viewers with a deeper understanding of LLMs and how to effectively utilize them in their work.

This video provides a step-by-step guide on building an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) using open-source tools, covering essential components like APIs, state management, workflows, RBAC, and optional UIs. It aims to equip viewers with the knowledge to streamline application deployment and observation processes within their organizations.

This video introduces Trustfall, a Rust library that acts as a universal query engine, allowing you to query disparate data sources like REST APIs, databases, and filesystems. The video explores how Trustfall models these data sources, optimizes queries across multiple systems, and makes it easy to extend for new data sources.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Build seriously fast, lightweight and end-to-end typesafe Next.js apps

A high-performance Brainf**k JIT and AOT compiler built on top of C# type system.

Visual tool to explore SQLite databases page-by-page, the way they're stored on disk and the way SQLite sees them.

FlashSpace is a blazingly fast virtual workspace manager for macOS.

TigerBeetle is a financial transactions database designed for mission critical safety and performance to power the next 30 years of OLTP.

WezTerm Icon A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer.

Real-time system audio whisper and translation.

A minimalist bash tool that makes directory navigation just a little bit faster.

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