Happy new year! I just posted my 2024 year-in-review post over on the other part of this site. It was fun to sum up the year, and I’m excited to see where 2025 takes me! On to the links:

From the webring

• Tips for New Open Source Maintainers (Robert Lord): A post written in 2014 by a former coworker that found its way to the lobste.rs front page this past week. Like Daniel Doubrovkine’s post I shared last week, I really wish I had read this a few years ago.

Programming

• Collection of insane and fun facts about SQLite (v): I learned a lot of things about how SQLite is made — it’s definitely not the “standard” profitability path for tech.
• Django in 2024 (Timo Zimmermann): I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Django. I enjoyed reading about Timo’s best practices, and will definitely take a deeper look at Django Ninja sometime.
• Should Programming Languages be Safe or Powerful? (Ashton Wiersdorf): The article is certainly Lisp-pilled, but had some interesting insight about how “power” in PL can be along different dimensions (manipulating memory, modeling state) and how expressiveness relates to power and safety. It would have been interesting to show an example of a language that the author didn’t consider powerful as a counterexample.

AI

• Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 (Simon Willison): Simon’s coverage of the development of LLMs over the past few years has struck the balance of optimisim and technical depth without ever diving into the hype/grifter industrial complex. This was a long but great summary of LLM developments over the past year.