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Software Development

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Mike Bayer, the author of SQLAlchemy, talking about it at PyCon 2012.

SQLAlchemy 2.0: typing moves into the ORM mapping

26 January 2023

With 2.0 the declarative layer derives columns from PEP 484 annotations and the select() API becomes the single form for Core and ORM. What actually changes for anyone maintaining a Python application.

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Hugging Face logo: a yellow hugging-face emoji with open hands next to the 'Hugging Face' wordmark.

Transformers 4.0: fast tokenizers become the default

12 January 2021

Version 4.0 of Hugging Face's transformers library (30 November 2020) makes Rust tokenizers and return_dict the default, reorganises the package and splits out sentencepiece. Migration notes and consequences for the shared-model ecosystem.

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Browser screenshot of the default Django 3.0 welcome page: a green rocket and the message 'The install worked successfully!'.

Django 3.0 and ASGI: what actually changes inside the request

15 April 2020

Django 3.0 runs under ASGI, yet views, middleware and the ORM stay synchronous. What the new asynchronous handler really enables, and what it defers to the DEP 0009 roadmap.

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Official NestJS logo: a stylized shield-shaped magenta-red mark on a transparent background.

NestJS: Angular's decorators on the Node backend

15 March 2018

NestJS, a Node.js framework in TypeScript with decorators, dependency injection and modules borrowed from Angular. What the 4.x line offers, and where the cost of the abstraction sits.

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Mark Zuckerberg, in a dark t-shirt, speaks on the lit stage of Facebook's F8 2015 conference in front of a large screen.

React Native: how the bridge between JavaScript and native widgets works

15 April 2015

On 26 March 2015 Facebook published the iOS version of React Native on GitHub. Technical notes on native rendering, the asynchronous bridge, and the limits known so far.

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Babel wordmark logo: the word 'babel' in golden yellow on a transparent background.

Babel 5.0: the transpiler becomes a plugin pipeline

31 March 2015

With version 5.0 (31 March 2015) the 6to5 transpiler, renamed Babel, opens a plugin API and adopts the TC39 process stages. Technical notes on the AST architecture and the chosen defaults.

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Dependency graph diagram: four labelled boxes (GTK, GLIB, ATK and OpenGL) connected by directed arrows showing which library depends on which.

Webpack 1.0: the bundle as a dependency graph

21 February 2014

On 19 February 2014 webpack reached version 1.0. Its graph, loaders and code splitting address problems left open by browserify and RequireJS.

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Mitchell Hashimoto, the author of Vagrant, speaking at a microphone during a talk at the RuPy 2012 conference.

Vagrant: the development environment as a versioned file

14 March 2013

Vagrant describes a development virtual machine in a Ruby Vagrantfile and recreates it with vagrant up. The 1.1.0 release, out today, decouples the workflow from the VirtualBox backend through its provider system.

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Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, speaking while seated at Google I/O 2008; a bearded man with glasses in a light shirt.

PyCon Due Italia and the move to Python 3.0

9 May 2008

The day before the second PyCon Italia, Python 2.6a3 and 3.0a5 ship: notes on migrating the language and on the state of the WSGI web ecosystem.

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Michael Stonebraker, the computer scientist behind Ingres and Postgres, in a red polo shirt.

PostgreSQL 8.3: full-text search moves into the engine

15 March 2008

PostgreSQL 8.3, released on 4 February 2008, brings full-text search and HOT updates into the core. A technical note on MVCC, GIN/GiST indexes, and what it means for a database to absorb functions previously left to external modules.

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Several Sony AIBO ERS-7 robot dogs arranged on a green field playing football during a robotics competition.

What AKIRA, the MindRACES framework, leaves behind

1 June 2007

As the FP6 MindRACES project closes, a technical look at the open-source AKIRA framework: a daemon pandemonium, an energy model and schemas for anticipatory agents.

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Black-and-white group photo with rectangular bounding boxes drawn around each face by the OpenCV face detector.

Pattern recognition for industrial inspection with open-source tools

1 October 2006

With OpenCV 1.0 and LIBSVM the defect-detection pipeline on a production line becomes reproducible outside the lab: features, classifiers, and the point where precision is actually lost.

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Linus Torvalds, a man wearing glasses and a light shirt, photographed at a Linux conference in 2003.

How git stores history: content-addressed objects

15 May 2005

git keeps a project's history as a graph of immutable objects, each named by its own SHA-1. What that changes for integrity, branches and distributed work, and where the weak point sits.

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The classic Subversion logo: the lowercase 'subversion' wordmark.

Subversion 1.0: the repository as a sequence of trees

27 February 2004

Subversion 1.0 (23 February 2004) treats a commit as a transaction and versions directories. Technical notes on the Berkeley DB backend, the mod_dav_svn transport over WebDAV/DeltaV, and branches built as copies.

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Flow diagram: an XML document and an XSLT stylesheet feed an XSLT processor that produces an output document.

A declarative schema as the single source for database and interfaces

14 September 2000

Describe the tables once, in a metadata file, and generate the DDL, queries and forms from there: what holds and what stays manual.

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Zeev Suraski, one of PHP's principal authors, speaking at a 2005 conference.

PHP 4 and the process-per-request model

12 June 2000

The new Zend Engine separates parsing from execution: what actually changes in server-side work, and what it leaves uncovered.

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