I hope everyone’s had a good month! I might need to figure out another time to write these posts if my weekends start getting busy again. I watched Severance S2E10 last night, and my I’ll keep my spoiler free review to just numbers: 9.5/10.
From the Webring
- The Secret Ingredient? (Alex Kaplan): I’d bet most of us drink coffee every day without thinking much about what goes into a cup. I learned a ton from this post and really enjoyed the different threads Alex followed along the way.
What I’m Watching
- Severance S2E10: Cold Harbor (Dan Erickson, Ben Stiller): My numbers-only, spoiler-free review is 9.5/10. I really love the “protagonists are figuring out the rules of this world along with the viewers” type of show, but LOST and Westworld are examples of how these shows can jump the shark and start taking themselves too seriously. I’m glad that Severance delivered a season finale that delivered on the show’s themes, answering some questions while avoiding the impulse to subvert everyone’s expectations at every turn.
The Rest of It
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Upgrading Semgrep from OCaml 4 to OCaml 5: Major version upgrades are hard. Maintainers often think every regression feels like the complaint in xkcd 1172: Workflow, but it’s important to communicate tradeoffs and work to make upgrades as seamless as possible.
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Decorator JITs - Python as a DSL (Eli Bendersky): Abstract syntax trees get me more excited than a cup of coffee, and this was a great read with illustrative examples about how Python’s flexibility can make some things feel like magic.
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TeX and Typst: Layout Models (Laurenz Mädje): Knuth’s TeX has stood the test of time, but Typst is an ambitious and exciting project to reinvent the one of the “wheels” of applied computer science for the 21st century. I learned a lot reading about the different tradeoffs and design decisions Laurenz made in designing Typst.
I know this isn’t the first use-case, but I’m interested in how Typst can evolve to replace Markdown for my own use. I’d love to have a lightweight but still expressive typesetting language that I could use on my blog and in presentations.
MAKE-ing
- Building a smartwatch from scratch (Andrew Childs): Ten years after I built my own digital watch, I still love reading about other people’s watch builds.