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A new record prime number has been found! The 52nd Mersenne prime was found this week: 2^136,279,841-1 is a prime, more 41 million digits long. I played a very small part in finding the 39th Mersenne back in the early 2000s, so this is exciting news. Also an interview with Luke Durant, the man who found it.

For more than 70 years computer scientists have studied sorting algorithms. Amazingly, we're still finding ways to make them faster and more memory efficient. Python recently replaced its legendary TimSort, and today Rust 1.81 released with two new adaptive sorting algorithms featuring serious performance improvements.

The well known saying about eating and having cake makes a lot more sense if you reverse the subjects, ie. "You can't eat your cake and have it too". Did you know that until recently you could be sued for singing the Happy Birthday song?

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Doctests & Metaclasses & Multiprocessing, Oh My!

I've been programming in Python for more than a decade, but it's only now that I have had to bring out the big guns: writing a metaclass.

Tidy Caseless Ordering in Django

Sorting by name in Django is a common admin annoyance. By default upper-case names come before lower-case ones because of their raw ASCII encodings. This isn't fun to try and explain to clients. For years I've ordered my models using a forced lower-case slug, but sometimes you need the big guns: database functions. Let's use that powerful ordering, while keeping our code nice and neat.