When running Linux software and encountering a crash, and you make a bug report about it (thank you!), you may be asked for backtraces and debug symbols.

And if you're not developer you may wonder what in the heck are those?

I wanted to open up this topic a bit, but if you want more technical in-depth look into these things, internet is full of info. :)

This is more a guide for any common user who encounters this situation and what they can do to get these mystical backtraces and symbols and magic to the devs.

Backtrace

When developers ask for a backtrace, they're basically asking "what are the steps that caused this crash to happen?" Debugger software can show this really nicely, line by line. However without correct debug symbols, the backtrace can be meaningless.

But first, how do you get a backtrace of something?

On systems with systemd installed, you often have a terminal tool called coredumpctl. This tool can list many crashes you have had with software. When you see something say "segmentation fault, core dumped", this is the tool that can show you those core dumps.

So, here's a few ways to use it!

How to see all my crashes (coredumps)

Just type coredumpctl in terminal and a list opens. It shows you a lot of information and last the app name.

How to open a specific coredump in a debugger

First, check from the plain coredumpctl list the coredump you want to check out. Easiest way to deduce it is to check the date and time. After that, there's something called PID number, for example 12345. You can close the list by pressing q and then type coredumpctl debug 12345.

This will often open GDB, where you can type bt for it to start printing the backtrace. You can then copy that backtrace. But there's IMO easier way.

Can I just get the backtrace automatically in a file..?

If you only want the latest coredump of the app that crashed on you, then print the backtrace in a text file that you can just send to devs, here's a oneliner to run in terminal:

coredumpctl debug APP_NAME_HERE -A "-ex bt -ex quit" |& tee backtrace.txt

You can also use the PID shown earlier in place of the app name, if you want some specific coredump.

The above command will open the coredump in a debugger, then run bt command, then quit, and it will write it all down in a file called backtrace.txt that you can share with developers.

As always when using debugging and logging features, check the file for possible personal data! It's very unlikely to have anything personal data, BUT it's still a good practice to check it!

Here's a small snippet from a backtrace I have for Kate text editor:

#0  __pthread_kill_implementation (threadid=<optimized out>, signo=signo@entry=6, no_tid=no_tid@entry=0)
    at pthread_kill.c:44
...
#18 0x00007f5653fbcdb9 in parse_file
    (table=table@entry=0x19d5a60, file=file@entry=0x19c8590, file_name=file_name@entry=0x7f5618001590 "/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose") at ../src/compose/parser.c:749
#19 0x00007f5653fc5ce0 in xkb_compose_table_new_from_locale
    (ctx=0x1b0cc80, locale=0x18773d0 "en_IE.UTF-8", flags=<optimized out>) at ../src/compose/table.c:217
#20 0x00007f565138a506 in QtWaylandClient::QWaylandInputContext::ensureInitialized (this=0x36e63c0)
    at /usr/src/debug/qt6-qtwayland-6.6.0-1.fc39.x86_64/src/client/qwaylandinputcontext.cpp:228
#21 QtWaylandClient::QWaylandInputContext::ensureInitialized (this=0x36e63c0)
    at /usr/src/debug/qt6-qtwayland-6.6.0-1.fc39.x86_64/src/client/qwaylandinputcontext.cpp:214
#22 QtWaylandClient::QWaylandInputContext::filterEvent (this=0x36e63c0, event=0x7ffd27940c50)
    at /usr/src/debug/qt6-qtwayland-6.6.0-1.fc39.x86_64/src/client/qwaylandinputcontext.cpp:252
...

The first number is the step where we are. Step #0 is where the app crashes. The last step is where the application starts running. Keep in mind though that even the app crashes at #0 that may be just the computer handling the crash, instead of the actual culprit. The culprit for the crash can be anywhere in the backtrace. So you have to do some detective work if you want to figure it out. Often crashes happen when some code execution path goes in unexpected route, and the program is not prepared for that.

Remember that you will, however, need proper debug symbols for this to be useful! We'll check that out in the next chapter.

Debug symbols

Debug symbols are something that tells the developer using debugger software, like GDB, what is going on and where. Without debugging symbols the debugger can only show the developer more obfuscated data.

I find this easier to show with an example:

Without debug symbols, this is what the developer sees when reading the backtrace:

0x00007f7e9e29d4e8 in QCoreApplication::notifyInternal2(QObject*, QEvent*) () from /lib64/libQt5Core.so.5

Or even worse case scenario, where the debugger can't read what's going on but only can see the "mangled" names, it can look like this:

_ZN20QEventDispatcherGlib13processEventsE6QFlagsIN10QEventLoop17ProcessEventsFlagEE

Now, those are not very helpful. At least the first example tells what file the error is happening in, but it doesn't really tell where. And the second example is just very difficult to understand what's going on. You don't even see what file it is.

With correct debug symbols installed however, this is what the developer sees:

QCoreApplication::notifyInternal2(QObject*, QEvent*) (receiver=0x7fe88c001620, event=0x7fe888002c20) at kernel/qcoreapplication.cpp:1064

As you can see, it shows the file and line. This is super helpful since developers can just open the file in this location and start mulling it over. No need to guess what line it may have happened, it's right there!

So, where to get the debug symbols?

Every distro has it's own way, but KDE wiki has an excellent list of most common operating systems and how to get debug symbols for them: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Debugging/How_to_create_useful_crash_reports

As always, double check with your distros official documentation how to proceed. But the above link is a good starting point!

But basically, your package manager should have them. If not, you will have to build the app yourself with debug symbols enabled, which is definitely not ideal.. If the above list does not have your distro/OS, you may have to ask the maintainers of your distro/OS for help with getting the debug symbols installed.

Wait, which ones do I download?!

Usually the ones for the app that is crashing. Sometimes you may also need include the libraries the app is using.

There is no real direct answer this, but at the very least, get debug symbols for the app. If developers need more, they will ask you to install the other ones too.

You can uninstall the debug symbols after you're done, but that's up to you.

Thanks for reading!

I hope this has been useful! I especially hope the terminal "oneliner" command mentioned above for printing backtraces quickly into a file is useful for you!

Happy backtracing! :)

Improving the qcolor-from-literal Clazy check

For all of you who don’t know, Clazy is a clang compiler plugin that adds checks for Qt semantics. I have it as my default compiler, because it gives me useful hints when writing or working with preexisting code. Recently, I decided to give working on the project a try! One bigger contribution of mine was to the qcolor-from-literal check, which is a performance optimization. A QColor object has different constructors, this check is about the string constructor. It may accept standardized colors like “lightblue”, but also color patterns. Those can have different formats, but all provide an RGB value and optionally transparency. Having Qt parse this as a string causes performance overhead compared to alternatives.

Fixits for RGB/RGBA patterns

When using a color pattern like “#123” or “#112233”, you may simply replace the string parameter with an integer providing the same value. Rather than getting a generic warning about using this other constructor, a more specific warning with a replacement text (called fixit) is emitted.

testf4ile.cpp:92:16: warning: The QColor ctor taking RGB int value is cheaper than one taking string literals [-Wclazy-qcolor-from-literal]
        QColor("#123");
               ^~~~~~
               0x112233
testfile.cpp:93:16: warning: The QColor ctor taking RGB int value is cheaper than one taking string literals [-Wclazy-qcolor-from-lite
        QColor("#112233");
               ^~~~~~~~~
               0x112233

In case a transparency parameter is specified, the fixit and message are adjusted:

testfile.cpp:92:16: warning: The QColor ctor taking ints is cheaper than one taking string literals [-Wclazy-qcolor-from-literal]
        QColor("#9931363b");
               ^~~~~~~~~~~
               0x31, 0x36, 0x3b, 0x99

Warnings for invalid color patterns

Next to providing fixits for more optimized code, the check now verifies that the provided pattern is valid regarding the length and contained characters. Without this addition, an invalid pattern would be silently ignored or cause an improper fixit to be suggested.

.../qcolor-from-literal/main.cpp:21:28: warning: Pattern length does not match any supported one by QColor, check the documentation [-Wclazy-qcolor-from-literal]
    QColor invalidPattern1("#0000011112222");
                           ^
.../qcolor-from-literal/main.cpp:22:28: warning: QColor pattern may only contain hexadecimal digits [-Wclazy-qcolor-from-literal]
    QColor invalidPattern2("#G00011112222");

Fixing a misleading warning for more precise patterns

In case a “#RRRGGGBBB” or “#RRRRGGGGBBBB” pattern is used, the message would previously suggest using the constructor taking ints. This would however result in an invalid QColor, because the range from 0-255 is exceeded. QRgba64 should be used instead, which provides higher precision.

I hope you find this new or rather improved feature of Clazy useful! I utilized the fixits in Kirigami, see https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/-/commit/8e4a5fb30cc014cfc7abd9c58bf3b5f27f468168. Doing the change manually in Kirigami would have been way faster, but less fun. Also, we wouldn’t have ended up with better tooling :)

Why KMines? #

Minesweeper is a tragically underrated puzzle game. While I recall examining the mysterious array of gray squares as a child, it wasn’t until adulthood that I took the time to learn the rules of the game. Despite my late start, however, I still count minesweeper as a classic. These days, good minesweeper clones are hard to come by. I settled on GNOME’s Mines for a while, but as the look of GTK applications on my QT-based KDE Plasma Desktop sets my teeth on edge, I ditched it for KMines in short order. While I enjoyed the game, I found the themes shipped with KMines a bit dated, so I thought I’d make my own.

The Drama #

I didn’t quite know what I was getting into when I started working on my themes. I had expected there’d be a simple way to add themes through the KMines settings menu, or by dropping an SVG somewhere in your file-system. If only it were so simple. Adding a theme to KMines requires setting up a full-on KDE development environment, re-compiling KMines from source each time you want to test it, and then, of course, submitting a merge request to the git repository. Thanks to the help of some very patient souls in various KDE Matrix channels, I was able to work through all of this, but I found the process so tricky that I submited a second merge request, this time to the repository for develop.kde.org, for a page documenting the process. Now I realise that some developers out there are going to read through this and wonder if I was dropped on my head as an infant, but in my defense, when it comes to software development, I’m a humble designer and Jamstack web developer. This is all very new to me, and I was expecting a much more streamlined process for what I saw as simple visual tweaks.

Why High Contrast #

When submitting my initial design, a KDE contributor who had been helping me via Matrix pointed out that they found the theme difficult to parse visually as the contrast was quite low. I hadn’t considered contrast ratios here, my thinking being that I didn’t need to; I was just making one theme among many, after all, and users could choose any theme that worked best for them. After some consideration, however, it dawned on me that my theme would likely be the only modern-looking theme in the release, so it would be ideal if it were as accessible as possible. With this in mind, thanks to the feedback of one helpful individual, instead of one pretty but low contrast theme, I decided to make two modern high contrast themes, one light and one dark, targeting the WCAG AAA standard for contrast.

Coming in Plasma 6! #

With thanks to those KDE contributors who helped make it happen, the merge request containing these two themes scraped by the skin of its teeth past the closing door of a feature-freeze and will be available with Plasma 6 this February!

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-03.

Cat and Girl - 4000 of My Closest Friends

Tags: tech, copyright, law, art, ethics

How does it feel to just want to put something creative out there without being exploited? Very touching comic on the topic.

https://catandgirl.com/4000-of-my-closest-friends/

AI: the not-so-good parts - Xe Iaso

Tags: tech, ai, ethics

As an industry we definitely should think more often about the consequences of our actions. The incentives are indeed pushing us to go faster without much critical thinking.

https://xeiaso.net/talks/2024/prepare-unforeseen-consequences/

OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare”

Tags: tech, gpt, war, ethics, business

Unsurprising move, they claim it’s for the betterment of mankind but in practice it’s mostly about capturing as much market share as possible.

https://theintercept.com/2024/01/12/open-ai-military-ban-chatgpt/

AI poisoning could turn open models into destructive “sleeper agents,” says Anthropic

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, security, supply-chain

The tone pointing at “open models” is wrong but the research is interesting. It still proves models can be poisoned (open or not) so traceability and secured supply-chains will become very important when using large language models.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/01/ai-poisoning-could-turn-open-models-into-destructive-sleeper-agents-says-anthropic/

Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL?

Tags: tech, foss, law

Very interesting ruling, this opens the door to more parties being able to sue to enforce the GPL not just the authors.

https://blog.tidelift.com/will-the-new-judicial-ruling-in-the-vizio-lawsuit-strengthen-the-gpl

Unity’s Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC - mfkl

Tags: tech, vlc, 3d, foss, business

This is a stupid move on Unity’s part… they’re built on LGPL but ban others in their store to have LGPL dependencies. Shame on them. Good move from Videolabs though, wish them lots of success.

https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html

Pluralistic: The Cult of Mac

Tags: tech, apple, interoperability, security

Apple keep indeed attracting a bunch of cultists… and this allows them to keep abusing their other customers.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies – The Markup

Tags: tech, facebook, attention-economy, surveillance

Some more insights on the extent of the companies snitching to Facebook.

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2024/01/17/each-facebook-user-is-monitored-by-thousands-of-companies-study-indicates

Meta/Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse Data Dialogue Meeting yesterday

Tags: tech, fediverse, facebook

Interesting notes, there seems to be good faith on the Meta side for now… but this leaves more questions than answers still.

https://reb00ted.org/tech/20231208-meta-threads-data-dialogue/

Where is all of the fediverse?

Tags: tech, fediverse, self-hosting, infrastructure

Interesting stats, not that easy to gather. This gives a good overview of where the fediverse instances are hosted though.

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/who-hosts-the-fediverse-instances

Making my website faster - Cliffle

Tags: tech, web, fonts, css, optimization

Nice set of tricks to optimize load and render time of webpages.

https://cliffle.com/blog/making-website-faster/

LeftoverLocals: Listening to LLM responses through leaked GPU local memory | Trail of Bits Blog

Tags: tech, gpu, machine-learning, security

Interesting vulnerability, not all vendors are impacted though. GPU memory leaks can have unforeseen impacts.

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2024/01/16/leftoverlocals-listening-to-llm-responses-through-leaked-gpu-local-memory/

Speedbump: TCP proxy for simulating variable, yet predictable network latency

Tags: tech, networking, tools

Looks like an interesting tool to simulate difficult network conditions.

https://github.com/kffl/speedbump

Willow Specifications

Tags: tech, protocols, data, networking, p2p

Looks like an interesting protocol for resilient peer to peer data stores. Let’s see how it spreads.

https://willowprotocol.org/

Beware of misleading GPU vs CPU benchmarks

Tags: tech, cpu, gpu, computation, economics

A good reminder that even though GPU tend to be faster, the added complexity and price might not be worth it in the end.

https://pythonspeed.com/articles/gpu-vs-cpu/

Using pre-commit hooks makes software development life easier

Tags: tech, git, craftsmanship, tools

Can definitely recommend. The pre-commit project also make managing those a breeze.

https://itnext.io/using-pre-commit-hooks-makes-software-development-life-easier-ef962827aa96

Using “will” and “should” in technical writing | James’ Coffee Blog

Tags: tech, documentation, writing

Pick your words wisely. If it does happen every time use “will”.

https://jamesg.blog/2024/01/17/will-should/

Everyday storytelling for engineers. The CAO Method.

Tags: tech, engineering, communication

Nice suggestion for talking about your work in various type of situations. Definitely worth trying to frame it like this.

https://tonyfreed.substack.com/p/everyday-storytelling-for-engineers

Does Working from Home Boost Productivity Growth? | San Francisco Fed

Tags: tech, remote-working, economics

Interesting report. Apparently so far a more widespread use of remote work doesn’t seem to boost of hinder productivity growth at large scale.

https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2024/january/does-working-from-home-boost-productivity-growth/

The warrior culture of ancient Sparta did some weird things to their society.

Tags: history, politics

Or why nationalism and war mongering are unwelcome dead ends. I never understood this fascination for Sparta by some people… if you look at what it was without some misplaced romanticism, it definitely looked like an horrible and paranoid environment to live in.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/01/sparta-300-warriors-history-slavery.html

Bye for now!

Ruqola 2.1 Beta (2.0.81) is available for packaging and testing.

Ruqola is a chat app for Rocket.chat. This beta release will build with the current release candidate of KDE Frameworks 6 and KTextAddons allowing distros to start to move away from Qt 5.

URL: https://download.kde.org/unstable/ruqola/
SHA256: 2c4135c08acc31f846561b488aa24f1558d7533b502f9ba305be579d43f81b73

Signed by E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell jr@jriddell.org
https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg

Disclaimer: I am not one of KDE's masterminds or spokespersons. I am a mere bystander with few unimportant commits. I follow KDE's ecosystem and other developments in the free software world. In the following, I share some thoughts and my personal opinion.

Talks about new programming languages

We already have a new programming language!

Problems with C++ remain

What can be done?

Discuss our future

It’s a pleasure to be on the OpenUK New Year’s Honours list for 2024. There’s some impressive names on there such as Richard Hughes of Packagekit and other projects at Red Hat, Colin Watson who was at Ubuntu with me and I see is now freelance, Mike McQuaid was previously of KDE but is now trying a startup with Mac packager Workbrew for Homebrew.

OpenUK run various activities for open tech in UK countries and KDE currently needs some more helpers for a stall at their State of Open Con in London on Feb 6 and 7 February, if you can help do get in touch.

KDE’s 6th releases will happen next month bringing with it the refresh of code and people that a new major version number can bring, I think KDE’s software in the coming year will continue to impress.

My life fell apart after some family loss last year so I’ve run away to the end of the world at Finesterre in Galicia in Spain for now, let me know if you’re in the area.

Lithuania and Latvia

Caused by a small discussion about how it is difficult to get from Berlin to Riga by train, and in direct consequence a quick look at how the official app for trains in Latvia finds its connections, I added support for it in KDE Itinerary. KDE Itinerary is KDE’s travel planning app.

After I understood how it works, adding support for new data sources seemed pretty doable, so I directly moved on to do the same for trains in Lithuania as well.

As a result of this, it is now possible to travel from Berlin to Riga with Itinerary and continue further with the local trains there:

The connection is still far from good, but fear I can’t fix that in software.

What still does not work, is directly searching from Berlin to Riga, as that depends on having a single data source that has data on the entire route to find it. So it is necessary to split the route and search for the parts yourself.

Why you can’t always find a route even though there is one

The main data source for Itinerary in Europe is the API of the “Deutsche Bahn”, the main railway operator in Germany. Its API also has data for neighbouring countries, and even beyond that. According to Jon Worth their data comes from UIC Merits, which is a common system that railway operators can submit their routes to. However that probably comes with high costs, so many smaller operators like the ones in Latvia and Lithuania don’t do that. For that reason there is no such single data source that can route for example from Berlin to Riga.

What most of the operators in Europe do however, is publish schedule data in a common format (GTFS). What is missing so far, is a single service that can route on all of the available data and has an API that we can use. Setting something like this up would require a bit of community and hosting resources, but I am hopeful that we can have something like this in the future.

In the meantime, it already helps to fill in the missing countries one by one, so at least local users can already find their routes in Itinerary, and for Interrail and other cross border travel, people can at least patch routes together.

More countries

The next country I worked on was Montenegro. The reason for that is that it is close to the area that the DB API can still give results for, and also still has useful train services. Getting their API to work well was a bit more difficult though, as it doesn’t provide some of the information that Itinerary usually depends on. For example coordinates for stations. Those are needed to select where to search for trains going from a station. Luckily, exporting the list of stations and their coordinates from OpenStreetMap was relatively easy and provided me with all the data I needed.

Thanks to that Itinerary can now even show the route on a map properly.

Now only the API for Serbia is missing to actually connect to the part of the network DB knows about.

The new backends are not yet included in any release, but you can already find them in the nightly builds. Be aware that the nightly builds have switched to Qt6 and KF6 faily recently, which means there are still a few rough edges and small bugs in the UI.

On Linux, you can use the nightly flatpak:

flatpak install https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/itinerary-nightly/org.kde.itinerary.flatpakref

On Android, the usual KDE Nightly F-Droid repository has up to date builds.

After a few days of work the Fedora KDE SIG is proud to announce the availability of KDE 6th Megarelease Release Candidate 1 on Fedora Rawhide!

For those who like bleeding edge, feel free to try it!

We are very excited and looking forward to Fedora 40 + KDE 6 + Wayland only

Note: right now the update is sitting on testing. If you don’t want to wait a few hours until it reaches stable…

You can access it via a dnf repository like:

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
debuglevel=1
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
reposdir=/dev/null
retries=20
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=0
assumeyes=1
keepcache=1
install_weak_deps=0
strict=1

# repos

[build]
name=build
baseurl=https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/repos/f40-build-side-81132/5738561/x86_64

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-02.

Where have all the websites gone?

Tags: tech, web, blog, culture

This is in part why I started my web review… maybe I should start a kind of blogroll, or maybe have links to websites I like straight on my front page.

https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/where-have-all-the-websites-gone/

This holographic camera turns any window into an invisible camera | Digital Camera World

Tags: tech, surveillance

What could possibly go wrong? Panopticon 2.0 here we come.

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/this-holographic-camera-turns-any-window-into-an-invisible-camera

Outlook is Microsoft’s new data collection service | Proton

Tags: tech, microsoft, windows, email, surveillance

Looks like Microsoft is really catching up fast for its surveillance apparatus to be on par with Google and Meta.

https://proton.me/blog/outlook-is-microsofts-new-data-collection-service

Meta ignores the users’ right to easily withdraw consent

Tags: tech, law, facebook, surveillance, attention-economy

Very welcome complaont, Meta is trying to workaround the GDPR to increase paid accounts. Can only hope they get fined and that this shady practice disappear (they’re not the only ones doing this).

https://noyb.eu/en/meta-ignores-users-right-easily-withdraw-consent

How I pwned half of America’s fast food chains, simultaneously

Tags: tech, security

A not so gentle reminder that you shouldn’t get sloppy in the security practices of your services.

https://mrbruh.com/chattr/

Automate your outgoing webmentions

Tags: tech, self-hosting, blog, webmention

Looks like a nice way to ease the use of webmentions. Also comes with a command line option not relying on third party hosted service apparently.

https://webmention.app/

SSH based comment system

Tags: tech, ssh, blog

Very funny hack for a blog comment system.

https://blog.haschek.at/2023/ssh-based-comment-system.html

SSH-Snake: Automatic traversal of networks using SSH private keys

Tags: tech, ssh, security, tools

Fascinating script which jumps over SSH servers in several hops and replicates itself without a file upload.

https://joshua.hu/ssh-snake-ssh-network-traversal-discover-ssh-private-keys-network-graph

The browsers biggest TLS mistake

Tags: tech, browser, tls, security

Some of that certificate chain validation is troublesome… in Chrome based browsers it’s even truly insane.

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/browsers-biggest-tls-mistake

Messengers performance - Grafana

Tags: tech, messaging, battery, android

If you’re wondering where your battery power goes… this is a nice list of measures for various clients on Android. It looks like XMPP is still hard to beat.

https://decentim.grafana.net/public-dashboards/92602d3a4aa842ce97812d310077691d?orgId=1

Visualizing ext4

Tags: tech, filesystem

Fascinating exploration of the patterns visible inside ext4 filesystems.

https://buredoranna.github.io/linux/ext4/2020/01/09/ext4-viz.html

A tool for exploring each layer in a docker image

Tags: tech, docker, tools

Looks like an interesting tool if you’re dealing with docker image. This kind of analysis is definitely missing from docker itself.

https://github.com/wagoodman/dive

Vcc - the Vulkan Clang Compiler

Tags: tech, shader, vulkan, c++

Interesting proof of concept to compile C++ into shaders. This reminds CUDA a bit without being tied to a given GPU brand.

https://shady-gang.github.io/vcc/

Statically enforcing frozen data classes in Python | Redowan’s Reflections

Tags: tech, python, type-systems

Interesting trick even though I always cringe at such difference of behavior between runtime and “compile” time.

https://rednafi.com/python/statically_enforcing_frozen_dataclasses/

Python 3.13 gets a JIT

Tags: tech, python, jit, optimization

Want to better understand the JIT approach introduced in Python 3.13, this is a good little article. This JIT is a first step towards more optimizations.

https://tonybaloney.github.io/posts/python-gets-a-jit.html

Do we think of git commits as diffs, snapshots, and/or histories?

Tags: tech, git, version-control, teaching

So, which team are you on when you think about commits in Git?

https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/01/05/do-we-think-of-git-commits-as-diffs–snapshots–or-histories/

Tidy First? | Henrik Warne’s blog

Tags: tech, refactoring, craftsmanship, book

Review of the newest book from Kent Beck, I’ll probably check it out and read it.

https://henrikwarne.com/2024/01/10/tidy-first/?

Are any of your features the steak on the menu? | nicole@web

Tags: tech, product-management

Interesting metaphor regarding that feature you have because it is expected but otherwise doesn’t quote work.

https://ntietz.com/blog/the-steak-on-the-menu/

How to make your team read your mind - by Anton Zaides

Tags: tech, management

Interesting approach for a manager to give transparency and to clarify expectations.

https://zaidesanton.substack.com/p/how-to-make-your-team-read-your-mind

My Diverse Hiring Playbook - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: tech, hr, hiring

Good list of tips and ideas. This is not necessarily as easy as it sounds. The lack of good metrics doesn’t help (totally understandable though, privacy first).

https://jacobian.org/2024/jan/4/diverse-hiring-playbook/

Bye for now!