• Learn Vim (the Smart Way): Yet another tutorial on using Vim effectively. The author highlights the use of fzf as a fuzzy finder, which further motivates taking advantage of Vim inner features.

Everyone programs differently. Upon introspection, you will find that there are one or two features from your favorite editor / IDE that you use all the time. Maybe it was fuzzy-search, jump-to-definition, or quick compilation. Whatever they may be, identify them quickly and learn how to implement those in Vim (chances are Vim can probably do them too). Your editing speed will receive a huge boost.

• It’s been a long time since I last read some obfuscated code, and it was always C code. This one does the job, and it is written in Haskell: Squeezing a sokoban game into 10 lines of code. See also How I would do FizzBuzz, by the author of the LSP ecosystem in Mathematica.

• poste.io offers SMTP + IMAP + POP3 + Antispam + Antivirus Web administration + Web email. I know it’s a hard job, and I won’t host my own mail server, even if Gmail sucks with randomly blacklisting my own email address with error code 550 5.7.26. Anyway, in case someone is looking for a quick way to handle his/her emails from a local computer.

• In Few lesser known tricks, quirks and features of C, I learned about a fun way to use named parameters in function call.

• Programming Odds & Ends: There’s a lot to learn and keep in mind when using R and/or Python (sadly, there’s no real benchmark with Pandas or datatable). And now I know there’s something new called the fastverse, which includes the data.table package. As the author suggests, “you may not [always] want an additional package dependency beyond what you’re using, and may need a base R approach.”. Keeping it small and low on external dependencies is always good.

• sqliteviz: Instant offline SQL-powered data visualisation in your browser. Looks great. Here’s what I came up in a few clicks with our ToothGrowth dataset from previous posts: