Hi, I'm Tomasz

PEP 723 standardises new inline metadata for scripts. It’s most useful when writing stand-alone scripts as the dependencies can be managed within the script itself without having to setup a complete project and create pyproject.toml file.

Have you ever used member functions with reference qualifiers? This a feature introduced in C++11, being an essential part of move semantics.

The topic of dependencies management is coming back and again. nix and nixpkgs being a rich repository, provides a convenient way to manage both project dependencies and related tooling in a reproducible way. This is something I’m finding more and more useful as a fundamental development tool. nix is quite complex and some exploration is needed to wrap your head around it. In this post, I’m going through most basic use cases as well as describe some basics of nix language itself - mainly for my own reference but hopefully useful to others as well.

I bet that whenever you think of a simple database, you think of sqlite. There’s nothing wrong with that but the filesystem itself can be an even simpler substitute.

The more opportunity I have to work with lua, the bigger fan of it I become. It’s a great, well designed language which is very easy to embed.

I’ve been recently working on a small utility for myself. There’s always a problem of handling configuration in such projects. Usually, I’m going for a simple json or yaml or toml file which acts purely as key-value store but this time around I wanted to try something different.

I was recently browsing the kernel code in attempts to understand some of the weird kernel errors I see in dmesg on one of my machines.

I was a bit surprised to see an interesting syntax I have never seen before. In the following code:

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static int ucsi_run_command(struct ucsi *ucsi, u64 command, u32 *cci,
			    void *data, size_t size, bool conn_ack)
{
    ...
	/*
	 * Don't ACK connection change if there was an error.
	 */
	ret = ucsi_acknowledge(ucsi, err ? false : conn_ack);
	if (ret)
		return ret;

	return err ?: UCSI_CCI_LENGTH(*cci);
}

(Excerpt from ucsi usb code)

Being a bit bored and having a some extra time during Christmas motivated me to learn zig. As usual, when learning a new language, you experiment a bit, write some small test programs to discover the syntax and idiomatic ways to solve problems and learn the standard library. One of the fundamental things that you’ll eventually find the need for, sooner or later, is defining abstractions and interfaces, and I was a bit shocked to discover that zig simply doesn’t support that!