A Byte of Coding Issue 405

Hey-yo,

Hope you all had a nice weekend. I had a no-screen Saturday, which was nice, but for Sunday I wanted to dedicate some time to updating the abyteofcoding.com website (it doesn’t currently have the latest issues and search is nonexistent). I ended up having to fix some data models for findenergy.com, related to monthly electricity rate pricing (extrapolating rates based on historical annual-only data). The latter ended yesterday in a moment of “ugh, why didn’t I just do it this other way?”. I’m not sure if those moments are becoming more or less frequent. Hopefully next weekend I can make the updates I want to make.

Anway, here’s the issue.

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Using Rust Macros for Custom VTables

Published: 16 May 2024

Tags: rust

Armin Ronacher discusses using Rust macros to create custom virtual tables (vtables) for dynamic objects in the MiniJinja template engine. He explains the challenges and solutions for implementing dynamic object management in Rust.

Some highlights:

• MiniJinja engine leverages type_erase! macro for dynamic object representation.

• The macro creates a custom DynObject smart pointer, allowing dynamic method invocation.

• Demonstrates how to use Rust’s Arc and unsafe code to manage memory and refcounting effectively.

Data Fetching Patterns in Single-Page Applications

Published: 15 May 2024

Tags: react, webdev, front-end

Juntao Qiu outlines effective data fetching patterns for Single-Page Applications (SPAs) to enhance performance and user experience. He discusses various strategies such as Asynchronous State Handler, Parallel Data Fetching, and Code Splitting.

Some highlights:

• Asynchronous State Handler: Decouples data fetching from UI to streamline application architecture.

• Parallel Data Fetching: Reduces wait time by loading multiple data sets simultaneously.

• Code Splitting and Prefetching: Improves performance by loading only necessary code and data preemptively.

A guide to organization modeling

Published: 16 February 2024

Tags: sponsored, auth, architecture

WorkOS has published a guide that “surfaces complexities and implementation details” for supporting user-team-organization relationships in B2B auth.

Some highlights:

• “if you ever want to sell to an enterprise your backend needs to be ready to support complex models of users and teams”

• looks at the different ways you can implement the database tables for modeling the organization

• most of the complexity comes from users that need to be a part of multiple organizations

A surprising retrospective task estimation dataset

Published: 19 May 2024

Tags: project management

Derek Jones presents an analysis of a dataset concerning task estimation in software projects. The study reveals unexpected insights into how estimations have been historically inaccurate and the variability of these estimates over time (sHoCkEr).

Some highlights:

• The dataset includes 10,100 unique task estimates spanning ten years.

• Analysis shows a significant discrepancy between estimated and actual task completion times.

• Factors such as developer experience and project complexity influence estimation accuracy.