Damian’s notes

As a programmer, I am often required to tell higher-ups that their suggestion of first-name, last-name fields is not a good way to store names of arbitrary humans. Patrick McKenzie (patio11) wrote a useful essay elaborating on this called Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, which I think is good and useful—though not to be taken without some interpretation.

Please do not title your own listicle Falsehoods Programmers Believe About X. Reserve that prefix for this essay and invent your own snappy title.

Parsing MIDI messages in Rust (Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya). The venerable MIDI protocol is a beautifully simple way to control muscial instruments. This article breaks down what MIDI is, why it’s cool, and how you might go about processing MIDI content in the programming language Rust.

The long history of dates and times means programming involving timestamps, events, and especially schedules is fraught with complications that non-programmers will not be aware of. Zach Holman wrote a pretty comprehensive and surprisingly pretty introduction to the nightmare that is dates and times in code in 2018.

There are eight different flavours of UUID and here is a short post on when you might use some of them. I like using v5 UUIDs for things that have a natural unique identifier (in some scope) but some protocol requires the entities to also have a UUID.

A zine describing how modern computers represent integers and floating point numbers internally—the latest in the series by Julia Evans of friendly introductions to programming concepts as little zines you can print out yourself or buy ready-printed (though shipping will be expensive if you’re outside the USA).

I rather wish every logging framework had at the top of its web site landing page a prominent link to the effect "Are you working on a project that already has SomethingLog4J logging? Maybe you want a _recipe for adjusting logging levels of a particular class_!"

Almost always I do not want the 10-page tutorial that starts with explaining the concepts of loggers, appenders, etc.,— I just want to be told where to find and how to tweak the config of an existing system.

Oddly named package for producing a diagram of your Django project's object model

Carry-propagation is expensive in modern CPUs because it reduces parallel processing, so adding 256-bit integers by switching to base-2**51 and deferring carry propagation until the end can counterintuitively be faster.

Simon Willison’s approach to creating template repositories in GitHub, with a Cookiecutter step to set the name of the components in the source code automatically when someone uses the template.