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.
Beware the Google Password Manager
Hey internet! So, someone broke into some of my accounts.
I’m taking entire responsibility for this - there’s the part where I fucked up, and if I didn’t fuck up, then none of this would’ve happened.
But there’s also the part where a series of design decisions from various vendors combined into the perfect storm for me.
And we’re going to talk about both! Separately! And calmly.
Image decay as a service
Since I write a lot of articles about Rust, I tend to get a lot
of questions about specific crates: “Amos, what do you think of oauth2-simd?
Is it better than openid-sse4? I think the latter has a lot of boilerplate.”
And most of the time, I’m not sure what to responds. There’s a lot of crates out there. I could probably review one crate a day until I retire!
Abstracting away correctness
I’ve been banging the same drum for years: APIs must be carefully designed.
This statement doesn’t resonate the same way with everyone. In order to really understand what I mean by “careful API design”, one has to have experienced both ends of the spectrum.
But there is a silver lining - once you have experienced “good design”, it’s really hard to go back to the other kind. Even after acknowledging that “good design” inevitably comes at a cost, whether it’s cognitive load, compile times, making hiring more challenging, etc.
A new website for 2020
Hi everyone. Has it been two months since I last posted something? Yes it has!
That seems like a nice round duration, so let’s break the silence with a few announcements.
I have a new website
If everything goes well, you’re on it right now.
Does it feel okay? Take a minute to accustom yourself to your new surroundings. Identify potential sources of fresh water. Gather some supplies with which to fashion a makeshift shelter.
I want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride
My honeymoon with the Go language is extremely over.
This article is going to have a different tone from what I’ve been posting the past year - it’s a proper rant. And I always feel bad writing those, because, inevitably, it discusses things a lot of people have been working very hard on.
In spite of that, here we are.
Having invested thousands of hours into the language, and implemented several critical (to my employer) pieces of infrastructure with it, I wish I hadn’t.
Working with strings in Rust
There’s a question that always comes up when people pick up the
Rust programming language: why are there two
string types? Why is there String, and &str?
My Declarative Memory Management article answers the question partially, but there is a lot more to say about it, so let’s run a few experiments and see if we can conjure up a thorough defense of Rust’s approach over, say, C’s.
A half-hour to learn Rust
In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it.
But how can you read a lot of it if you don’t know what it means?
In this article, instead of focusing on one or two concepts, I’ll try to go through as many Rust snippets as I can, and explain what the keywords and symbols they contain mean.
Ready? Go!
Variable bindings
The many rewrites of the itch.io desktop app
I started working on the itch.io desktop app over 4 years ago.
It has arguably been my main project ever since, along with companion projects like butler, capsule and many smaller libraries.
I’m fuzzy on the initial history, but I remember the codebase went through a lot of changes. As early as 2014, the whole codebase was ported from vanilla JavaScript to TypeScript. In 2016, I released a timeline of all the changes. In 2018, I released a postmortem for v25 (which I then deleted).