pico.css#
TIL about pico.css - the minimalistic and zero-friction CSS framework for semantic HTML.
It has everything I need to quickly build a data-first site without sacrificing the UX. And I already know it’s going to integrate beautifully with Phoenix LiveView 😈
The origins of big- and little-endian terms#
TIL that the “big-endian” and “little-endian” terms come from Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726), where they represent proponents of the two opposing ways of breaking eggs.
erlang:term_to_binary/1 compatibility#
TIL that Erlang guarantees for the :erlang.term_to_binary/1 format to be compatible
accross the span of at least two releases - it is surely going to be possible to
decode terms encoded in R18 in R20, but not necessarily in R21.
Its seems to be common knowledge for some, but I couldn’t find any hard sources for this, the closest thing is this SO answer with messed up links. Do let me know if that’s not correct.
Yarnbombing#
TIL about yarnbombing, also known as “guerrilla knitting”.
As far as I’m concerned, the names alone make it awesome.
ncdu#
TIL about the ncdu tool - the NCurses Disk Usage cli program. It’s like
(Win|k)DirStat, only much lighter and more convenient. I’ve been looking for
it all my life!
Erlang Dirty Schedulers#
TIL about Erlang Dirty Schedulers. They seem to be pretty cool if you need to write NIFs.
WTFPL#
TIL that the Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License has not been approved by the OSI board, not because it was vulgar, but because it wasn’t a license - it was a dedication to the public domain.
Also, if you do want to put your work in public domain, you’re probably better off using the CC0 license.
A 65 byte binary is large#
I knew that in Erlang/Elixir each of the processes has its own heap and sending messages between processes copies the terms sent, which is why sending large amounts of data might be inefficient. I also knew that “large binaries (strings)” live in a shared heap and processes operate on references to them, so sending those around is cheap.
TIL that any binary longer than 64 bytes is considered a large binary, which was probably a deliberate design choice.
Elixir tuples’ AST#
TIL that the AST of Elixir tuples isn’t entirely consistent - the 2-tuples are literals:
assert {:{}, _line, []} = Code.string_to_quoted!("{}")
assert {:{}, _line, [1]} = Code.string_to_quoted!("{1}")
assert {1, 2} = Code.string_to_quoted!("{1, 2}")
assert {:{}, _line, [1, 2, 3]} = Code.string_to_quoted!("{1, 2, 3}")
assert {:{}, _line, [1, 2, 3, 4]} = Code.string_to_quoted!("{1, 2, 3, 4}")
assert {:{}, _line, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]} = Code.string_to_quoted!("{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}")Apparently it is this way to make Keywords literals as well.
