Hi, I'm Tomasz

Shell history is essential but sometimes undesired and has to be disabled. This is often the case when working with API keys, passwords or any type of credentials. I often find myself using API keys like that when working on a new script or doing some simple API tests with curl.

Bash, allows disabling history using:

set +o history

but this is not very convenient as the history is disabled in the running session as well so, jumping back is no longer possible.

Quite often I find myself landing on gcc’s attributes documentation page. Not sure how that happens but this is always a gold mine. I’ve recently discovered __attribute__((cleanup(func))), which allows attaching functions to variables. These functions are executed when the variable goes out of scope. Sounds familiar?

I’ve recently discovered a paper¹ about Robin Hood hashing and decided to perform some simple experiments and check how a trivial, custom implementation of a hash table employing this algorithm stacks against unordered_map.

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.