Better Programming Monthy Reads — Issue #94

Hey everyone,

Hope your August is off to a good start. Last month, we saw the overhaul of the Medium Partner Program, which included stronger incentives for quality-focused writing, the sunset of the referral program, the removal of the 100-follower requirement as a prerequisite, and more. Medium’s Buster Benson wrote a blog post detailing all the upcoming changes for authors.

Without further ado, here’s some of the best stuff published on Better Programming, sprinkled with helpful resources we discovered across Medium.

• There’s more to caring than working long hours by mokagio: “What I’m really trying to convey is the difference between caring by diving headfirst into a problem and caring by taking a step back to think things through.”
• Łukasz Korecki on debugging life as an engineering manager with ADHD: “Out of a sense of survival, I built self-reinforcing systems and feedback loops. Alerts, reminders, four-way syncing calendars, and testing a ton of productivity apps. I had effectively outsourced a lot of my executive function to be able to do what neurotypical folks just do on a daily basis, without much effort.”
• Matt Kornfield talks about the importance of code style in take-home interviews: “What you produce in a vacuum is reflective of how you build and your level of effort.”
• Bawenang Rukmoko Pardian Putra’s response to Clean Code, Horrible Performance: “Being pragmatic and flexible is the key. We must mind both the performance and cleanliness of our code.”
• Nina Pakshina discusses managing the garbage collector in Go, optimizing application memory consumption, and protecting against out-of-memory errors.
• Phlippie Bosman shows how to verify collections in Swift with sized index sets: “I’ll implement a rather slippery concept in Swift: index sets with exact sizes. Why? Partly to stretch my Swift muscles a bit. And partly because the use case presented here actually came up (more or less in this shape) as part of my work, and I found it to be an interesting little puzzle.”
• Marcel Kulina demonstrates an enum-based approach to utilize the SwiftUI NavigationStack in a modular, expandable way.
• Mike Cvet on the value of code: “Code by itself has little intrinsic value. Relying on a metric just because it’s easily measurable is a distraction from the real evaluation: Are we getting done what needs to get done to succeed?”
• Maarten Steenhagen on setting up your own Raspberry Pi Mastodon Instance and having a backup strategy.
• Justin Loroy builds a trashtalk Wordle with ChatGPT using LLM decorator and function calling: “Just imagine how fun (and annoying) it could be to get judged on our Wordle strategy!”

• Teemu Kanstrén tries StarChat 16B LLM on a Desktop PC
• Ifeora Okechukwu on defensive programming and the use of TypeScript: “A responsible use of TypeScript requires that additional guarantees are provided for and which will be utilised at runtime. The bare minimum of just defining and using types and subtypes isn’t enough.”
• Farewell, Ramda. Pavel Marianov: “Ultimately, our aim is to write code that’s both effective and clear, rather than just employing sophisticated tools for their own sake.”
• Michal Koczkodon takes us on a nostalgic journey back to the 90s, demonstrating how to utilize the tools of that era effectively, and crafts a website that could’ve been created in 1999.
• Fabien Trestour experiments with bringing Rust and JavaScript together in a codebase.
• Teddy Rendahl’s musing about Pythonic design patterns in Rust: “As a career Python programmer, I had a specific style I wanted to use even after switching languages, still having the urge to define “pythonic” APIs. However, after about a year now of writing Rust code, I’ve re-examined how I want to use these patterns in a statically typed and very opinionated language like Rust.”

More from Better Programming

• Dotan Nahum surveys the tools available to help you build an LLM-based app in Rust.
• Amy’s first thoughts on Next.js 13: “It feels to me like the static-first model of this Next version is fundamentally in conflict with its introduction of React Server components.”
• Mohammad Azam’s Ultimate Guide to Building SwiftData Applications
• Sergei Savvov demonstrates a fascinating method of creating virtual replicas with a fine-tuned LLM (reminiscent of Black Mirror?)
• Mandi Gunningham’s journey from entry level to engineering manager: “Advocating for yourself at every stage in your career is crucial. Your manager wants the best for you, but not all managers are talent scouts. Ask for the work you want and look elsewhere if you don’t get it at one company. Your career should be your priority.”

Happy reading, writing, and coding,

Anupam and the Better Programming team

Better Programming Monthy Reads — Issue #94 was originally published in Better Programming on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.