https://tamir.dev/ Recent content on Tamir Bahar https://tamir.dev/images/profilepic.jpg https://tamir.dev/images/profilepic.jpg Hugo -- gohugo.io Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/2026-04-python-sam/ Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/2026-04-python-sam/ There’s a pattern I often see in Python code that feels woefully un-Pythonic. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 class ConcreteBuilder(AbstractBuilder): def __init__(self, context): self._context = context def build(self): return do_something_with_context(context) def uses_builder(builder: AbstractBuilder): builder.build() It’s effectively defining a function the long way. The cause for this, of course, is “abstraction”. This might make sense in Java or C#, where you cannot define free-standing functions, but in Python it makes no sense. https://tamir.dev/posts/2026-04-easy-eyes/ Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/2026-04-easy-eyes/ A few weeks ago I saw some people chatting about the benefits of 20-20-20 timers. The idea is that to reduce eye strain (as we tend to stare at screens all day…) you set a timer so that every 20 minutes you spend 20 seconds looking at something that’s 20 feet away. So I looked for an existing timer, and there are quite a lot of them, but they all have their issues. https://tamir.dev/posts/2026-04-signing-out-for-now/ Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/2026-04-signing-out-for-now/ I’m signing out from Mastodon. I love the platform, and I’ve had many good interactions on it. But it no longer feels like a safe space for me. There is only so much that content filters can do to fend off hostility. And while that hostility is not directed at me, and the views behind it may sometimes align with my own, it is still smothering. We could all do with a bit more nuance and empathy. https://tamir.dev/posts/graphviz-embed-html/ Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/graphviz-embed-html/ Embedding HTML in Graphviz graphs https://tamir.dev/posts/ai-vibe-check-2025/ Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/ai-vibe-check-2025/ Thoughts and feelings after reviewing a fully LLM-made PR https://tamir.dev/posts/new-tools-remote-git/ Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/new-tools-remote-git/ A few cool CLI tools I started using https://tamir.dev/posts/graphviz-dot-svg-transforms/ Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/graphviz-dot-svg-transforms/ Adventures in manipulating Graphviz SVG outputs. https://tamir.dev/posts/hello-cfgbot/ Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/hello-cfgbot/ A few days ago I created CFGBot - a small Bluesky bot that publishes hourly control-flow-graphs. While technically simple, this bot is something I wanted to create for a few years now. Originally, I wanted to write one that publishes IDA Pro graphs of random functions in system binaries. But due to logistical issues (how to run a bot that uses software I’m only allowed to run on my own PC) and my concerns about copyright (can I freely post the disassembly of copyrighted software? https://tamir.dev/posts/invisible-codegen-go/ Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/invisible-codegen-go/ Go, sorting, and hiding code-generation. https://tamir.dev/posts/python-beautiful-sorting/ Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/python-beautiful-sorting/ Python has what is probably the most elegant way of sorting a collection of objects by their attribute values: 1 sorted(people, key=attrgetter("age", "name")) Let’s break it down. sorted() We start with the sorted() function. It returns a new sorted list from the items in its first argument. 1 2 >>> sorted([3, 1, 2]) [1, 2, 3] sorted() also takes an optional key function. key, when provided, is used to extract a comparison key from the items being sorted. https://tamir.dev/posts/cfg-visualization-legend/ Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/cfg-visualization-legend/ Overview of the visualization used in function-graph-overview https://tamir.dev/posts/thoughts-about-security-patch-levels/ Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/thoughts-about-security-patch-levels/ Some thoughts about the issues with version numbers, supporting multiple versions, and the usefullness of Patch Levels. https://tamir.dev/posts/home-cooked-software/ Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/home-cooked-software/ Writing small, friendly software https://tamir.dev/posts/go-tag-interfaces-venomous-dogs/ Sun, 29 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/go-tag-interfaces-venomous-dogs/ Avoiding venomous dogs using nominal subtyping. https://tamir.dev/posts/cpppy/ Sun, 22 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/cpppy/ A writeup of my 2021 talk Implementing C++ Semantics in Python https://tamir.dev/posts/resource-management-02/ Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/resource-management-02/ Looking into the release of Mutexes in GC languages https://tamir.dev/posts/resource-management-01/ Sat, 05 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/resource-management-01/ An overview of different resource management models https://tamir.dev/posts/context-managers-in-go/ Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/context-managers-in-go/ Go's new proposed range over func grammar allows for Python-style context-managers. https://tamir.dev/posts/binary-re-feature-overview/ Thu, 06 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/binary-re-feature-overview/ The benefits of binary-reverse-engineering tooling. Migrated from Twitter thread. https://tamir.dev/posts/sets-of-floats/ Thu, 06 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/sets-of-floats/ Sets of floats are weird, especially when NaNs are involved. https://tamir.dev/posts/github-discussions/ Thu, 08 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/github-discussions/ POC of discussing posts on github https://tamir.dev/posts/snake-eyes-cpp-scoped-enums/ Mon, 24 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/snake-eyes-cpp-scoped-enums/ Implementing C++ Scoped Enums in Python https://tamir.dev/posts/adding-wikilink-support-to-mdformat/ Fri, 14 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/adding-wikilink-support-to-mdformat/ Extending mdformat to not destroy wikilinks. https://tamir.dev/posts/python-tools-and-libs/ Fri, 10 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/python-tools-and-libs/ Python tools & libraries that I use and would recommend https://tamir.dev/posts/significant-whitespace/ Sat, 14 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/significant-whitespace/ All whitespace is significant. It might not always matter to your computer, or compiler, or piece of code. But to you, a human reading the code, it is significant. I often here people complaining about significant whitespace. They say it makes no sense, that it makes working with the code harder. That whitespace, specifically in code, should not be significant. But the unavoidable truth is that whitespace is always significant, regardless of the language you use. https://tamir.dev/posts/karate-kid/ Mon, 26 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/karate-kid/ The true mystery of The Karate Kid (1984) https://tamir.dev/blogvent/2022-12-08/ Thu, 08 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/blogvent/2022-12-08/ This Sunday, during the monthly meeting of the Israeli WG21 National Body discussion forum1, we discussed a paper by Yehezkel Bernat. The paper discusses a specific issue with C++ ranges and iterators. It demonstrates it with the following code sample: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 #include <ranges> #include <iostream> namespace rv = std::views; int main() { for (auto i : rv::iota(0) | rv::filter([](auto i) { return i < 11; }) | rv::take(11)) std::cout << i << '\n'; } The code in the example does the following: https://tamir.dev/blogvent/2022-12-02/ Fri, 02 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/blogvent/2022-12-02/ I always knew image alt-text existed. I knew about it from learning HTML - it’s the text that shows when the image doesn’t load. And it’s also on XKCD as the extra pun (TIL that’s actually title= and not alt=). It’s only recently, when Twitter added image descriptions1 and my feed started talking about them, that I realized how important they are for accessibility. Since then, I’ve been making an effort to describe the images in all my tweets to the best of my ability. https://tamir.dev/blogvent/2022-12-01/ Thu, 01 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/blogvent/2022-12-01/ When I started my professional career I was not doing software engineering, but rather reverse-engineering. Taking a compiled binary, disassembling it, and trying to understand what it does. My job was essentially reading code, with the stated goal in my job description was “vulnerability research”. Since then, I moved to the other side, and am now doing “forward engineering”. While it is very tempting to say that as programmers (or developers, or software engineers, or whichever term you’re comfortable with) we only write code, we know that this is not true. https://tamir.dev/posts/blogvent-calendar-2022/ Wed, 30 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/blogvent-calendar-2022/ One post every day in December. https://tamir.dev/posts/more-memory-profiling-in-python/ Fri, 02 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/more-memory-profiling-in-python/ More lessons learned memory-optimizing Python code. https://tamir.dev/posts/gitlab-ci-tricks/ Wed, 10 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/gitlab-ci-tricks/ A collection of useful hacks for the GitLab CI https://tamir.dev/posts/finding-a-memory-leak-in-my-python-code/ Sat, 30 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/finding-a-memory-leak-in-my-python-code/ Last week I had to fix a memory leak in a Python program for the first time. A long running process started eating too much RAM (only ~20GB to much) and the friendly OOM Killer had to step in and terminate this. Since this kept happening, I had to go ahead and fix the issue. Step 1 - Reproduction As with every bug, before you can reliably fix it, you must reproduce it. https://tamir.dev/posts/til-python-attribute-lookup-order-is-tricky/ Wed, 03 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/til-python-attribute-lookup-order-is-tricky/ This post is brought to you in the spirit of converting tweetstorms to blogposts. to the tweetstorm Surprise! 🎁 In Python, if property access raises AttributeError, and the class implemented getattr, it will get called with the property name. This results in some very cryptic errors. If you run the following code (repl): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 class Thing: name = "Thing" class NameProvider: def __init__(self, name): self. https://tamir.dev/posts/snake-eyes-extension-methods/ Fri, 06 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/snake-eyes-extension-methods/ Implementing Extension-Methods in Python https://tamir.dev/posts/snake-eyes-scopes-and-iife/ Fri, 27 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/snake-eyes-scopes-and-iife/ Where we steal good concepts from other languages to create questionable Python code https://tamir.dev/posts/recognizing-ducks/ Sat, 13 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/recognizing-ducks/ An overview of type-checking techniques in Python https://tamir.dev/posts/working-across-timezones/ Sat, 09 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/working-across-timezones/ Internationalization is a difficult problem is software-engineering. Usually that statement would refer to the technical aspects of providing a good user experience for your customers. Today, however, I am referring to the social aspects. Just as it has become common-place to have your users spread across the globe, so it has with developers. It is not uncommon to work with teams in another country, or even to have a specific team-member working from a remote location. https://tamir.dev/posts/adventures-in-rust/ Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/adventures-in-rust/ A tale of my time in Rust-land https://tamir.dev/posts/types-of-loops/ Sat, 27 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/types-of-loops/ Minor brain-dump of experiences from teaching programmers from complete scratch. https://tamir.dev/posts/a-functional-style-state-machine-in-cpp-part-2/ Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/a-functional-style-state-machine-in-cpp-part-2/ First, an apology. The first part of this post was published on May 26. It is now September. I had most of the code for this part done by then. But finalizing the code took some more effort. Once that was done, explaining took a while. There were quite a few things I had to learn myself first. So now, months later, I present this humble offering to the Gods of C++ and template meta-programming. https://tamir.dev/posts/that-overloaded-trick-overloading-lambdas-in-cpp17/ Tue, 15 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/that-overloaded-trick-overloading-lambdas-in-cpp17/ C++17 has granted us with std::variant. Simply put, it is a type-safe union. To access the value it stores, you can either request a specific type (using std::get or something similar) or “visit” the variant, automatically handling only the data-type that is actually there. Visiting is done using std::visit, and is fairly straight forward. Compilation, Execution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 #include <variant> #include <cstdio> #include <vector> using var_t = std::variant<int, const char*>; // (1) struct Print { // (2) void operator() (int i) { printf("%d\n", i); } void operator () (const char* str) { puts(str); } }; int main() { std::vector<var_t> vars = {1, 2, "Hello, World! https://tamir.dev/posts/a-functional-style-state-machine-in-cpp/ Fri, 26 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/a-functional-style-state-machine-in-cpp/ It turns out that C++'s type-system does not allow for recursive types. This is annoying. There is no reason why a function should not be able to return itself. https://tamir.dev/posts/the-windows-cli-sucks-and-thats-good/ Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/the-windows-cli-sucks-and-thats-good/ TL;DR Windows’ shell sucks so people write tools. Tools are fun to use. Linux’s shell is amazing so people write terrible bash scripts and makefiles. Be sensible. Use Python. Use C. The rest of the post is me ranting, letting off some steam. Have fun, and don’t take it too seriously. 🐢 A Story of Shells 🐢 1 2 3 my_var=$(application arg0 arg1) for /f %%i in ('application arg0 arg1') do set my_var=%%i 🪟 Windows 🪟 I’ve been a Windows user for a very long time. https://tamir.dev/posts/dont-amend-fix/ Fri, 10 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://tamir.dev/posts/dont-amend-fix/ A fun alternative to `git commit --amend`