Steve Sanderson is experimenting again, and when Steve plays with his toys, I pay attention. In a new video on his YouTube channel, Steve introduces an experimental new .NET package that allows the creation of isolated instances of the .NET runtime that will safely run code in a sandbox. Watch it, and get your mind blown away by the possibilities this could open up. Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow me on Mastodon »
I know this is coming in a bit late; apologies, but… We’re doing a Web Performance meetup at DevRomagna today. Andrea ‘Verlok’ Verlicchi, a Google Developer Expert specialing in web performance, will share his extensive experience in web performance and provide practical, high-impact, and easily applicable tips on improving performance in 2023. Info and signup here. Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow me on Mastodon »
John Carmack, while advising on the advent of AI and its influence on the Software Engineering profession: Software is just a tool to help accomplish something for people – many programmers never understood that. Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don’t over-focus on the specifics of the tools. I have often fallen into the over-focusing trap in my career. The whole thread is well worth reading: »
Quoting the last paragraph from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. »
Zerocalcare is an Italian cartoonist whose strips, especially in the form of illustrated books, have surged to an iconic level in the last decade. His drawing is excellent, but it is with his writing that, I think, he conquered fame. His stories are fun to read and yet profound and vibrant, all at the same time. Also, he often touches on themes nobody else covers, at least not in the comics world. »
Today I released Eve v2.1, which comes with official Flask 2.2+ support and the ability to modify the pagination limit on a per-resource basis thanks to the new pagination_limit setting. You can find the release on PyPI, while the changelog is available here—special thanks to Pieter De Clercq and smeng9 for the help with this release. Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow me on Mastodon »
On Thursday, I will be speaking in Milan at WebDay 2023. Mine is a hands-on session on building a reliable and continuous end-to-end testing environment for web apps using Microsoft Playwright. If you attended my introductory Playwright session at WPC last year, Thursday’s session would be the ideal follow-up to that one, as I only briefly touched on CI deployments there. Drawing from my experience doing the whole thing in production, I’ll essentially be live testing a Blazor app, then take the entire thing to remote CI via GitHub Actions. »
I’ve recently moved away from my custom Neovim configuration to embrace LazyVim. LazyVim is a Neovim setup with sane default settings for options, autocmds, and keymaps. It boldly aims to transform Neovim into a full-fledged IDE that is easy to extend and customize. It comes with a wealth of plugins pre-configured and ready to use, and it is also blazing fast. Elijah Manor has a fantastic introductory video on YouTube; I suggest you take the time to look at it. »
Regarding space-related topics and scientific research, Casey Handmer’s blog is one of my references. So when Casey started his Mars Trilogy Technical Commentary and I learned about Kim Stanley Robinson’s masterpiece, I was instantly intrigued. In Casey’s opinion, KSR’s Mars Trilogy is “one of the finest works of literature ever composed.” It took a couple of weeks of futile resistance before I gave in and ordered the first book in the series, Red Mars, a 420 pages tome that attempts to depict a scientifically credible human colonization of Mars1. »
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On February 13, 2023, about ten days ago, Leiji Matsumoto left this world. A phenomenal Japanese manga artist, he created several space operas that influenced me as a kid. Matsumoto directed Space Battleship Yamato1, wrote and illustrated Galaxy Express 9992, and then released the magnificent Space Pirate Captain Harlock. Regarding visual operas, I suspect my fascination with space, astronomy and all things science has much more to do with these three than with the Star Wars movies that came later, or Star Trek. »
Today I learned about psql-tips.org by Lætitia Avrot, an excellent repository of psql (the CLI tool, not the database itself) tips. I like how one randomized tip is playfully served on the home page while the complete list is always at hand. Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow me on Mastodon »
Brian Rinaldi has an insightful post on his blog about the current state of developer conferences, where ‘current state’ means post-COVID pandemic. Brian is well-positioned to reason about this space as a long-time conference organizer. I appreciate that he also takes the time to explain how the developer conference business works. The core of his blog is about post-pandemic conference attendance, which has plunged. independent, in-person developer conferences are hurting. »
Sanguina Ancora (Still Bleeding) is not a biography but a passionate and informative tribute to Dostoevsky. The nonlinear, not literary style works and the continuous back and forth between Dostoevsky’s epic and the author’s own experiences as a scholar and Russian literature enthusiast is probably a good idea as it helps stress the actualness of Dostoevsky’s opus. However, the continuous jumping in and out of the Russian’s life, though sympathetic at first, gets tedious over time. »
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow me on Mastodon »
Jim Nielsen: That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. More here. Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow me on Mastodon »
We’re doing a DevRomagna meetup this month, and I think it will be a super-interesting one. It’s titled Heading to Go: A Look at Building a Video Encoder and the presenter will be Daniel Enrico Botta, a C# software engineer who recently switched to Go for his video encoding projects. Here’s the abstract: This talk will discuss the experience of moving from C# to Go for a video coding project. »
Brad Mehldau plays Lennon/McCartney’s I Am the Walrus, from his upcoming album, Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles. Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow me on Mastodon »
In a C# library I’ve been working on, I wanted to use C# 9.0’s init keyword. Quoting the documentation: The init keyword defines an accessor method in a property or indexer. An init-only setter assigns a value to the property or the indexer element only during object construction. This enforces immutability so that once the object is initialized, it can’t be changed again. Consider the following class: public class Person { public string FirstName { get; init; } } You can initialize it like this: »
I was reading iA’s grumpy writing about GPT (with which I sympathize) when my attention was captured by the image they added to their post. It was so fascinating that I had to research it. As it turns out, this is the Flammarion engraving, a famous wood engraving by an unknown artist, so named because its first documented appearance is in Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (“The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology”). »