What if the real gain wasn’t at the byte level?

I have always been fascinated by compression algorithms — I was 15 when I “invented” Run Length Encoding (before learning it had been discovered more than 20 years before I was born).
I marveled at the visual simplicity of Huffman coding, at the cleverness of Lempel-Ziv which dynamically builds its dictionary.

These algorithms are powerful, and it is no coincidence that they are continuously improved and combined to produce ever more powerful new algorithms: Brotli, zstd.

Sometimes an investigation tells a different story than the one you expected.

That’s what happened to me recently while investigating why a pod was ending up OOMKilled two to three times a day.

A quick look at the memory of the incriminated pod doesn’t show the typical rising curve of a memory leak. I’m missing data just before the OOM (because it’s always when your metrics system is migrating that this kind of incident happens), but with the day’s data, the cause seems to lie elsewhere.

Faced with an AI capable of compiling our intentions into working programs, I ask myself: does our craft reduce to assembling syntax, or does it hide a dimension that is by nature beyond computation?

I was 17 when I finally got my hands on “The Art of Computer Programming” by Donald Knuth. At the time, in 1989, reference books on programming were rare and the 4 volumes of TAOCP had the status of a “bible”; it remains for me a reference work that every computer scientist should read.

What is the average salary for Perl programmers in 2020?

If I have no definitive answer on this, the Business Insider has some insights:

HackerRank polled 116000 developers about their salaries and got interesting results:

• Perl is associated with an average global salary of $84,025.50 (54.2% higher than the global average salary)
• Scala is associated with an average global salary of $77,159.60
• Go is associated with an average global salary of $72,691.30
• Python is associated with an average global salary of $56,670.90
• JavaScript is associated with an average global salary of $55,690

Without more information about the polled panel it’s hard to state this results as “Truth” but they seems to confirm personal beliefs:

Today I’ll start a series of articles dedicated to Vim:

“Just enough Vim to be efficient”

The main idea should be obvious from the title. Learn the bare minimum to produce useful results (and hopefully motivate you to dig even further)

This article is dedicated to Vim macros, an often overlooked feature of Vim.

But let’s start from the beginning what is a macro? and why is it useful?

And if the answer to the first question is simple: A macro is just a recorded sequence of keys.

Why Perl in 2020?

“Nobody use it. It’s a dead language. It’s a technology of the past…” Are the kind of statement you’ll be likely to hear about Perl nowadays.

Nonetheless, I’ve landed one of the most exciting mission I’ve ever had because of Perl. I’ve met great people, because of Perl. I’ve solved issues in no time, because of Perl.

So, there’s no chance I’ll drop Perl any time soon.

How could you pretend to be Agile if you don’t even know Scrum rituals?

That’s more or less what I’ve been asked in a recent (failed) interview. That was more subtle of course, but after being corrected on Scrum terminology, failing to recognize the prevalence of the retrospective over the other rituals probably sealed the outcome of the interview.

I clearly didn’t convinced my interviewer. My last Scrum experience was ten years ago. And would probably be considered as “Faux Agile” in actual terminology. So he was probably allowed to assert that I wouldn’t be a good Scrum Master. But does that mean that I was not Agile?

Configure Vim from scratch

From time to time, I review my tools/processes to keep what’s useful, ditch what is no longer necessary or even convenient, and improve what can be improved. As a developer, I spend a lot of time using the Vim text editor, so in this article I’ll spend some time rewriting my .vimrc.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” ― Abraham Lincoln

This time I feel really qualified to write this article because believe me, I love Perl ! I think in Perl, I dream in Perl, and I really appreciate the whole Perl community. I’ve been in love with this language for more than a decade but I decided that I needed a change.

I’ve already said in a previous article why I chose to learn JavaScript this year (instead of getting involved in Perl 6 for example) but let me tell you why you might also enjoy learning JavaScript if you love Perl. Perl developers form a very unified community that all too often, resist outside influences, but learning a second language like JavaScript can really be a very enlightening experience.