random numbers, dependencies, and Zed

31 Jan 2024

Random number generator in your head

This article walks through how to generate 2 digit “pretty random” numbers quickly and in your head. The author does over the history of the method, why it works, and alternatives to it.

In a nutshell:

1. Pick a seed
2. Add the 10s digit to 6 times the 1s digit

It’s a pretty math-y article but the explanations of how it works is cool. The only downside is that they explore the algorithm using demo snippets of code in a language called Raku, which I have never heard of and had a hard time reading.

Article: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/randomness

Understanding dependencies

This website helps create a dependency tree for a given package, and checks for things like security vulnerabilities and licenses. It supports npm, go, maven, pypi, nuget and cargo, and regenerates the entire dependency structure once per day. I have been using it when reviewing merge requests. Sometimes the developer who’s code I’m reviewing added some new package I’ve never heard of, and I’ll often skim the docs to ensure the package inclusion makes sense, but this is a great tool to quickly check for what else lurks in the packages dependencies.

There is also a free API for the data that the website is serving but I haven’t used it yet (and probably won’t, the website is slick).

Link: https://www.deps.dev

Zed

Everyone has their favourite IDE and I’ve tried many of them over the years. I’ve been using VSCode for a few years now and while good it’s definitely not a speed demon. Up next on my try-maybe-plate is Zed, authored by the creators of Atom and Electron.js. The Atom and Electron combo melded into VSCode, and the authors have now written Zed to try and speed things up. Zed is based on a GPU UI framework written in Rust they wrote for this purpose.

Their other major selling point is having very fast co-coding baked in. I look forward to trying it but will have to wait for sometone else to install it first!

Lastly, it was recently open sourced.

Link: https://zed.dev