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This article is based on historical research and on simply reading the Vim user manual cover to cover. Hopefully these notes will help you (re?)discover core functionality of the editor, so you can abandon pre-packaged vimrc files and use plugins more thoughtfully.
The internet is full of dogmatic commandments for choosing and using keys in relational databases. At times it verges on a holy war: should you use natural or artificial keys? Auto-incrementing integers, UUIDs?
Mention concurrency and you’re bound to get two kinds of unsolicited advice: first that it’s a nightmarish problem which will melt your brain, and second that there’s a magical programming language or niche paradigm which will make all your problems disappear.
Some applications, such as todo lists, need to maintain a user-defined order of items. The challenge is that the order is arbitrary and can change when the user rearranges items:
For the past few months I’ve been compiling a list of books for a deep dive into interesting technical topics. My theory is that working on projects based on these topics will be like strong individual threads I can weave into epic hacks. This list is basically a curriculum for decades of learning about the wonders of…
In this article we’ll go on a journey from 4-bit microcontrollers to room-sized mainframes and learn how porting C to each of them helped people separate the essence of the language from the environment of its birth. I’ve found technical manuals and videos for this article to help bring each computer to life.
Joey Hess inspires me. He lives in a cabin and programs Haskell on a drastically under-powered netbook. He harvests all his electricity from the sun with a homemade electrical system. Joey has designed his computing life to be highly distributed like the git version control he loves. His internet connection is…
You may have seen isolation levels in the documentation for your database, felt mildly uneasy, and went on with life. Few day-to-day examples of using transactions really mention isolation. Most use the database’s default isolation level and hope for the best. It’s a fundamental topic to understand however and you’ll…
Following Google’s lead many companies have instituted “20% time” for their employees. This is one day per week in which employees can work on projects of their own choosing. The practice keeps developers motivated and sharp, produces tools to solve company problems, and in the best case creates open source which…
After diving into the C language through K&R, and then studying portability (see C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines ), my next challenge was to take a systematic look at the standard library. To do this I worked through P. J. Plauger’s book The Standard C Library (ISBN 978-0131315099) where he examines an…
Most programming languages evolved awkwardly during the transition from ASCII to 16-bit UCS-2 to full Unicode. They contain internationalization features that often aren’t portable or don’t suffice.
QuickCheck is the grandfather of property-based testing libraries. Despite being imitated in over thirty languages, the original implementation remains pre-eminent due to the type system and consistent logic of the Haskell language in which it is written.
In this article we’ll learn how to build shared libraries and install them properly on several platforms. For guidance, we’ll examine the goals and history of dynamic linking on UNIX-based operating systems.
If you would follow the road to linear algebra here are some trustworthy signposts.
GDB is an old and ubiquitous debugger for Linux and BSD systems that has extensive language, processor, and binary format support. Its interface is a little cryptic, but learning GDB pays off.