Hello again! It’s been too long since I’ve published a newsletter. Routines are hard to build, but I do still want to try to make writing a weekly habit of mine.

Luckily I haven’t been publishing because I’ve been keeping busy offline, so I can’t complain too much. But anyways, on to the weekly!

From the webring

• September, 2022 (Aryav Pal): Some poetry to start off this weekend: I find Aryav’s writing somehow both vivid and vague in a way that lets you fill in the space between the lines with your own imagery and memories.

Programming for its own sake

• Programming Jigs (Hillel Wayne): As someone who hasn’t used a table saw since high school, I still often feel drawn to the woodworking/programming analogy. Another great essay from Hillel on the craft of programming and what we can learn from other disciplines.
• Fifty Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio: I’d heard of SDR before but I never really considered how many different broadcasts are traveling through the air all the time, all around us.

Databases

• DuckDB as the New jq (Paul Gross): SQL might not be the most beautiful language but its ubiquity lends itself to versatililty. Sometimes fluency in a technology is reason enough to make larger use of it, especially for building jigs like Hilel wrote about above.

Systems

• When allocators are hoarding your prescious memory (Algolia Engineering): I ran into this issue at work this week, and it kind of melted my brain learning that free() doesn’t actually free memory back to the kernel, at least with the default implementation of malloc/free on Linux. I might try to write my own blog post about this if I can figure out how to make a minimal reproduction.
• Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know (Sam Rose): Computers are fast, but not infinitely so. Caring about these kinds of bottlenecks and numbers is, for me, one of the things that separates programming from software engineering.