Closed-form solutions to nonlinear PDEs

The traditional approach to teaching differential equations is to present a collection of techniques for finding closed-form solutions to ordinary differential equations (ODEs). These techniques seem completely unrelated [1] and have arcane names such as integrating factors, exact equations, variation of parameters, etc. Students may reasonably come away from an

Choosing a Computer Language for a Project

Julia. Scala. Lua. TypeScript. Haskell. Go. Dart. Various computer languages new and old are sometimes proposed as better alternatives to mainstream languages. But compared to mainstream choices like Python, C, C++ and Java (cf. Tiobe Index)—are they worth using? Certainly it depends a lot on the planned use: is it

Is GenAI the next dot-com bubble?

The home team talks about the current state of the software job market, the changing sentiments around AI job opportunities, the impact of big players like Facebook and OpenAI on the space, and the challenges for startups. Plus: The philosophical implications of LLMs and the friendship potential of corvids.

Creating Fluid Typography with the CSS clamp() Function

We dive into the intricacies of how to use the CSS clamp() function to scale the size of text across a range of device sizes. Continue reading Creating Fluid Typography with the CSS clamp() Function on SitePoint.

How to Build an HTML Recipe Page (with CSS Formatting)

Chris’ Corner: Server Side Reconnaissance

If you tend to follow React stuff, you might know that React has a new thing called “Server Components”. Mayank has an excellent blog post about them. It starts out with calling out the nice things about them, and then fairly calls out all sorts of not-so-good things about them.

Comparing Full Stack and Headless CMS Platforms

This article dives CMS, both full stack and headless, to help you understand which CMS is suitable to what conditions. Continue reading Comparing Full Stack and Headless CMS Platforms on SitePoint.

On greedy algorithms and rodeo clowns

This weekend I ran across a blog post The Rodeo Clown Theory of Personal Development. The title comes from a hypothetical example of a goal you don’t know how to achieve: becoming a rodeo clown. Let’s say you decide you want to be a rodeo clown. And let’s say you’re

Finding strings in binary files

There’s a little program called strings that searches for what appear to be strings inside binary file. I’ll refer to it as strings(1) to distinguish the program name from the common English word strings. [1] What does strings(1) consider to be a string? By default it is a sequence of

Extract text from a PDF

Arshad Khan left a comment on my post on the less and more utilities saying “on ubuntu if I do less on a pdf file, it shows me the text contents of the pdf.” Apparently this is an undocumented feature of GNU less. It works, but I don’t see anything