Brian Kung

Asian American dad, husband, and programmer

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  • Public school is a bad deal for us

    Actually, that really understates the problem – we feel that living in the USA is a bad deal for families in general, but for now I’ll focus specifically on public school and daycare. My wife and I were taking a stroll around the neighborhood with our three kids during the week when I realized –…

    Brian

    2023-03-04
    Article
    children, education, Personal
  • Professional Rustacean, 3 months in

    Hi! 👋 I did end up landing that Rust job I was looking for, and I’ve been wrestling with the Rust programming language now for a good couple of months – not quite 3, if I’m to be honest, but who’s counting. To be honest, I’m a little bit ambivalent. I think it’s a great…

    Brian

    2023-02-17
    Article
    programming, rust, work
  • AI morality

    I cobbled this together from a few comments I’d made on Facebook – please forgive the lack of coherency. Is it moral to ask AI art program to create something “in the style of” a living artist? Is it moral to ask an AI art program to create something in between styles of two artists?…

    Brian

    2022-12-07
    Article, Rant
    ai, art, computers, data, ethics, intellectual property, labor, legal
  • Fun with Gleam

    This’ll be a short blog post, but Gleam (v0.25.0) is an Erlang OTP language, akin to Elixir (in fact, recently added full compatibility with Elixir packages). It’s been fun so far. I think the error messages are great and the functional style language is a lot of fun to wrap my brain around. I have…

    Brian

    2022-12-03
    Article
    erlang, gleam, programming
  • On interviewing

    Many people (millennials, at least) have been trained to kiss ass when we’re interviewing, to basically “fake it til you make it.” This can take several forms: Many of these behaviors actually hurt candidates during interviews, especially marginalized candidates and young people early in their careers. These are behaviors that reduce the signal around whether…

    Brian

    2022-11-14
    Article
    career, work
  • Getting into tech

    When I graduated from college with a degree in East Asian Languages and Culture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011 (one year late), I had no idea what I was going to do. To compare with my fellow EALC majors, one had started a restaurant, one got into horseback riding, and another…

    Brian

    2022-10-25
    Article, Personal
    programming, work
  • Contributing to the Vector Remap Language

    I’ve been looking for a job doing Rust development and one of the places I applied to was Vector, a DataDog acquisition in the observability space. Observability is one of those terms I had yet to encounter seriously before starting this search, so for the uninitiated: …observability is the ability to measure a system’s current…

    Brian

    2022-08-18
    Article
    datadog, observability, open source, rust, vector
  • Oxidization: Nested hashes

    This might be an idiosyncrasy of mine, but I tend to use hashes a lot in Ruby. For instance, recently I was working on a code challenge involving ordering food. There were different categories of courses (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and different categories of foods (main dish, side dish, etc.), and you need both in…

    Brian

    2022-07-10
    Article
    oxidization, ruby, rust
  • Rust advocacy at a medium-sized startup

    At Hologram, I loved getting to sign into work Slack and share knowledge with fellow software engineers of all experience levels. There were about 40 engineers in a company closing in on 200 employees. Meanwhile, the biggest change in my career as a software engineer recently has been learning Rust, which I’ve been calling a…

    Brian

    2022-06-14
    Article
    advocacy, golang, programming, rust
  • Why PHP is not for me

    So most recently I was employed at Hologram and was therefore too busy to write. Not anymore – I was one of the employees laid off from Hologram recently. While at Hologram, I worked mostly in PHP, which was something I actually dreaded coming into the job, but ended up not minding as much as…

    Brian

    2022-06-11
    Article, Rant
    php, programming
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