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.
A terminal case of Linux
Has this ever happened to you?
You want to look at a JSON file in your terminal, so you pipe it into jq so you can look at it with colors and stuff.
That’s a useless use of cat.
…oh hey cool bear. No warm-up today huh.
Sure, fine, okay, I’ll read the darn man page for jq… okay it takes
a “filter” and then some files. And the filter we want is.. . which, just
like files, means “the current thing”:
Understanding Rust futures by going way too deep
So! Rust futures! Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Until it’s not. So let’s do the easy thing, and then instead of waiting for the hard thing to sneak up on us, we’ll go for it intentionally.
That’s all-around solid life advice.
Choo choo here comes the easy part 🚂💨
We make a new project:
$ cargo new waytoodeep
Created binary (application) `waytoodeep` package
What's in the box?
Here’s a sentence I find myself saying several times a week:
…or we could just box it.
There’s two remarkable things about this sentence.
The first, is that the advice is very rarely heeded, and instead, whoever I just said it to disappears for two days, emerging victorious, basking in the knowledge that, YES, the compiler could inline that, if it wanted to.
Pin and suffering
I’d like to think that my understanding of “async Rust” has increased over the past year or so. I’m 100% onboard with the basic principle: I would like to handle thousands of concurrent tasks using a handful of threads. That sounds great!
And to become proficient with async Rust, I’ve accepted a lot of things. There are blue functions and red functions, and red (async) functions are contagious.
2020 Retrospective
Against all odds, it looks like the year 2020 will actually come to an end - in less than a day now. I know! Hard to believe for me too.
A lot of things have happened for me personally, and professionally. It’s been a big year in many ways, and I feel like, to get some closure, I need to highlight some of them.
From “looking at graphs” to “driving to the hospital”
Aiming for correctness with types
The Nature weekly journal of science was first published in 1869. And after one and a half century, it has finally completed one cycle of carcinization, by publishing an article about the Rust programming language.
It’s a really good article.
What I liked about this article is that it didn’t just talk about performance, or even just memory safety - it also talked about correctness.
What's in a Rainbow table?
In Veronica Mars and password hashes, from my new Tech As Seen On TV series, we’ve explored “cracking passwords” using brute-force methods, and then using rainbow tables, which was much, much faster.
But how do rainbow tables actually work? Let’s start at the beginning.
What’s a password hash?
A very simple design for an authentication system is to store passwords in
clear text, say, in a file named password.txt:
So you want to live-reload Rust
Good morning! It is still 2020, and the world is literally on fire, so I guess we could all use a distraction.
This article continues the tradition of me getting shamelessly nerd-sniped - once by Pascal about small strings, then again by a twitch viewer about Rust enum sizes.
This time, Ana was handing out free nerdsnipes, so I got in line, and mine was: