The Infra Engineer’s Blind Spot—JOURNAL

Why I ended up down a rabbit hole instead of shipping.

Announcement: Speaking at EmberConf 2021 —ELSEWHERE

In which I’ll be speaking for 30 minutes at a JS conference… and will spend only about 5 of those minutes on JS.

Keep It Local—ELSEWHERE

Or: (part of) what “reasoning about your code” really means; being my EmberConf 2021 talk.

Reading “A Functional Programming Language with Versions”—LIBRARY

The first academic research I’m aware of which actually takes Semantic Versioning seriously!

Announcement: Speaking at TypeVille 2022 —ELSEWHERE

On the subject of “Types as Tools for Thought”

Rustacean Station: New Rustacean with Chris Krycho ↩︎—❈—ELSEWHERE

Chatting about Rust, LinkedIn, and WebAssembly—and my past, present, and possible future with podcasting!

A Pleasing Symmetry in Rust—JOURNAL

Appreciating how Rust enum variants are mirrors of its kinds of structs.

Some Thoughts on Zig—JOURNAL

A positive framing (of one part at least!) from someone who is distinctly not here for what the language is selling.

Reasoning About Reference Cycles—JOURNAL

Rust’s lifetime types are challenging, but they bring a capability I miss all the time in other languages.

Build Yourself Small Tools—JOURNAL

Je ne sais quoi—JOURNAL

Programming languages, cameras, computers, and other technologies—and feel.

Unsafe—JOURNAL

On a common meme: “Rust would not help because we would have to use a lot of unsafe”.

Software Unscripted: Type System Complexity ↩︎—❈—ELSEWHERE

Along with Rust, TypeScript, SemVer, open source ecosystems and maintenance, and more!

The Wizardry Frontier—JOURNAL

Against the idea that accessibility and reliability (or other such dichotomies) must remain at odds in programming languages.

Why Not Type-Based Overloading in Rust?—JOURNAL

Too much spooky action at a distance.

Async Rust Complexity—JOURNAL

One reason things “feel hard” in this part of the ecosystem.

The Cutting Edge of Versioning (LambdaConf 2024)—ELSEWHERE

Semantic Versioning, library & framework evolution, programming language design, type systems, and you.

Using cargo tree to Explain Dependencies—JOURNAL

Or, the equivalent of npm why, yarn why, pnpm why, etc. that you might be looking for.

Pest.rs’ Syntax Tree is Very Low-Level—JOURNAL

Which is fine, mostly, but it means you have to do two passes to get a typed AST!

Changelog Interviews #597: Major.Semver.Patch ↩︎—❈—ELSEWHERE

Teaming up with Predrag Gruevski to talk SemVer with Adam and Jerod.

Red Pen—JOURNAL

How (and why) I revise the “old-fashioned” way.

An Observation on Constructor Syntax—JOURNAL

From debating whether to implement them in my little programming language.

Fast Tools are Wonderful—JOURNAL

A real-world example: Markdown-, HTML-, Unicode-aware word counting.

count-md: a New Rust Tool and Library ↩︎—❈—ELSEWHERE

Counting words in a Markdown files in a way that actually makes sense.

Programming Language Learning: A Rant—JOURNAL

Or, what makes programming language learning materials so hard to do really well.

Rust test binary help output—NOTES

New Tool: jj-gpc—JOURNAL

Making nicer branch names on the fly.

The DefinitelyTyped dprint Setup—NOTES

Much, much simpler than I expected!

dprint—NOTES

A very fast auto-formatter!

PSA: Default to cargo install --locked —NOTES

There are reasons this is not the default, but you can make it your default.

On cargo install Not Defaulting to --locked—NOTES

A few details, as I best I know them, because a friend asked after reading my last post!

2024 State of Rust Survey↩︎—❈—NOTES

An opportunity to provide real and actionable information to the Rust project leadership. Take it!

cargo-semver-checks v0.38.0↩︎—❈—NOTES

More lints for the sake of fewer SemVer issues in Rust libraries!

Read the Code: Using Drop Safely in Rust—JOURNAL

A deep dive into Rust’s vec::Drain and its Drop implementation as an example of how ownership prevents subtle bugs—memory and otherwise!

To Throw or Not to Throw in TypeScript?—NOTES

Taking a bit of inspiration from Rust and ending up with much more reliable TypeScript.

Corrections: Using Drop Safely, Not For Safety—NOTES

My note about using Drop in Rust last week had a serious error!

Configure Zed to Use the Project’s rust-analyzer—NOTES

Because it is not nice for your editor tooling to stop working!

fish shell v4 beta 1—NOTES

A bunch of small nice improvements… and a rewrite in Rust!

rust-analyzer version via rust-toolchain.toml—NOTES

If you use an older toolchain, this will make for a better developer (and contributor!) experience.

2024 in Review—JOURNAL

A weird year—not a bad one, sometimes a great one, always a strange one.

JavaScript’s Promise.race and Promise.all Are Not “Fair”—NOTES

Just like life! And just like life, you just have to deal with it.

Improving jj-gcp with JSON Schema and schemars —NOTES

I don’t use this tool that often, but it’s good for it to work correctly when I do!

The Essence of Successful Abstractions—JOURNAL

Complexity has to live somewhere; but it does not have to live everywhere.

minijinja tip: What That Custom Function’s Type Error Means —NOTES

If the error message involves Function, the problem is really ViaDeserialize.

minijinja tip: Template Values Must Round Trip—NOTES

A general lesson about de/serialization applied in this specific context.

Axum Handler Errors Need to Implement IntoResponse—NOTES

This has some interesting implications for Result.

The Rust Programming Language, 2024 Edition—ELSEWHERE

That’s my name in the authors list! Whoa!

Cloudflare Worker Responses Require Manual Caching—NOTES

This was not intuitive or obvious, but at least it isn’t hard, either.

isolatedDeclarations and Zod —NOTES

One strategy for using TypeScript’s isolatedDeclarations flag with inference-driven libraries like Zod.