When not faced with external constraints, good software craftspeople will evolve their software ‘inward’, ad infinitum. They are excellent coders. It’s a joy to watch them work. They know about the intricacies of the domain, they know the infrastructure and have in memory the pains of rushed quick fixes and other tech debt. Left to their own devices, they will clean up, rethink existing approaches, experiment with new architecture. The project can be improved, and they know just how to do it.
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md-babel is a cross-platform (Linux, macOS) command line utility that enables text editors to execute code blocks and then show the result. https://md-babel.org/ “Enables text editors to” actually means you can use it from VSCode or Emacs or Neovim. Others to come.
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Not all Swift code can directly be made available to C – or rather via C to other ecosystems that allow FFI (foreign function interfaces) from C libraries. The key is twofold: The following is based on this Gist by Julian Kirsch : https://gist.github.com/HiImJulien/c79f07a8a619431b88ea33cca51de787
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org-mode files can be used for any kind of outline, including makeshift calendars and makeshift address books. To make this work with org-capture to insert a new thing into such files, which always just appends, you can auto-sort a file e.g. before saving. That guarantees that the file is in a consistent state (sorted alphabetically) without you having to be clever about finding the corrent insertion point.
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So I’ve used restclient.el in the past to embed HTTP requests in readmes and other kinds of documentation to test login flows and APIs as I’ve been writing the corresponding servers. But chances are you can’t use that package since you don’t use Emacs.
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Andy Bell: “I’m getting fed up of making the rich, richer”: I’ve forever been obsessed with sharing knowledge. It’s why I’ve blogged so relentlessly over the years because I feel a constant debt to a community that shared so much when I started out.
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Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina opens with this powerful, infinitely quotable statement: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It’s not a universal truth, it may not even be empirically stable observation, but it sure feels relatable. We can learn from this, reasoning by analogy.
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So I was happy spending a couple of days working on a Markdown pipeline. One that would allow me to process Markdown files, perform automated tasks, then produce 2 results: The swift-markdown package wraps the cmark CommonMark parser and offers a really nice to use API. Also Marin told me on every other occasion that I should try it, it’s good :)
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