Articles
Articles are single-page pieces that give a whirlwind tour of a specific topic.
They’re different from series, which go very in-depth, taking many detours.
Summer fasterthanlime update
There are news!
TL;DR: If you’re a patron or sponsor, check your Profile page to get detailed explainers of every perk. You’ll need to log in. Duh.
Here are all the changes I’m implementing, summarized as a table:
| Before | After |
| 📚 Articles remain exclusive for 6 months | Early access (couple weeks) for Silver tier |
| 🎞️ No early access for video |
All color is best-effort
I do not come to you with answers today, but rather some observations and a lot of questions.
The weird glitch
Recently I was editing some video and I noticed this:
Not what the finger is pointing at — the dots.
Here are the separate layers this image is made up of: the background is a stock image I’ve licensed from Envato Elements:
Because I use it as a background image, I’ve cranked down the exposition in the Color tab:
Introducing facet: Reflection for Rust
I have long been at war against Rust compile times.
Part of the solution for me was to buy my way into Apple Silicon dreamland, where builds are, like… faster. I remember every time I SSH into an x86_64 server, even the nice 64-core ones.
And another part was, of course, to get dirty with Rust itself.
I wrote Why is my Rust build so slow?, which goes in-depth into rust build performance, down to rustc self-profiling even!
The virtue of unsynn
Addressing the rumors
There have been rumors going around, in the Reddit thread for facet, my take on reflection in Rust, which happened a bit too early, but here we are, cat’s out of the bag, let’s talk about it!
Rumors that I, podcaster/youtuber fasterthanlime, want to kill serde, serialization / deserialization framework loved by many and which contributed greatly to Rust’s success, and I just wanted to address those rumors and say that…
Open sourcing the home CMS
The promise of Rust
The part that makes Rust scary is the part that makes it unique.
And it’s also what I miss in other programming languages — let me explain!
Rust syntax starts simple.
This function prints a number:
fn show(n: i64) {
println!("n = {n}");
}
And this program calls that function — it looks like any C-family language so far, we got parentheses, we got curly brackets, we got, uhh…
That health is mental
Disclaimer:
Trigger warning: depression, talk of suicide.
It’s been a while since I wrote a mental health piece — but I think it’s important to occasionally stop, take a breather, and think about how we feel.
So.
deep breath
I’m okay, I think? Just a little restless.
A bit of personal context
For those keeping score, I went through major life events in 2023 — a divorce, a move, and the news that I might need a second round of jaw surgery.