Category: Article
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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 –…
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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…
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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?…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 Kung 