From the Bookmarks: December 2022

December came and went before I knew it! And now here we are in 2023 all of a sudden.

Thankfully I still found some time to read some interesting articles. Here’s a few bookmarks from December:

Little Languages Are The Future Of Programming

“Little Languages Are The Future Of Programming” by Christoffer Ekerot highlights the importance of smaller, constrained languages that perform a small set of tasks well. The article makes an argument that although higher level languages are useful for many tasks, to solve a problem they require you to write an algorithm, whereas little languages (while providing less capabilities) worry about the algorithm(s) for you.

This article signposted me to Dhall which is a neat little language for defining maintainable configuration files. It has some clearly defined design principles which nicely constrain what you can and can’t expect from Dhall.

The GPT-3 Architecture, on a Napkin

“The GPT-3 Architecture, on a Napkin” by Daniel Dugas provides a detailed breakdown of the architecture of GPT-3 by OpenAI. This article is a great explainer for those with knowledge of machine learning fundementals. As the GPT models are currently enjoying the limelight, it was great to get a look under the surface with concise descriptions and some helpful diagrams.

The HTTP crash course nobody asked for

“The HTTP crash course nobody asked for” by Amos Wenger is a very thorough article that gets into the detail of HTTP. It charts a course through writing HTTP proxies in Rust, and does a great job of walking you through each step. Having previously dabbled with Rust, it was also a great excuse to delve back into that, as the examples don’t presume much beyond having Rust installed.

I’m nowhere near finished working through all of the examples myself but, even part way through, I can recommend this article. I also enjoyed the writing style of how the examples are explained, which gave me some inspiration for my recent article on API versioning.