Category: Article
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
How and why our kids are learning Chinese
“Are you teaching your kids Chinese?” and “how are you teaching your kids Chinese?” are two questions we get a lot from Chinese American parents. One question I wish more parents asked us is “why?” When I was picking a major course of study in college, I consistently gravitated towards East Asian Languages and Culture…
-
Ruby has economy-class functions
Ruby has economy-class functions, not first-class functions. And that’s okay! It’s a great language anyway.
-
Writing a Rust gem from scratch
This is a followup to the last post. Instead of using the template rust_ruby_example gem, we’ll make one from scratch. Make sure to go back over the “Using a rubygems fork” section because we’ll be using it heavily during this post, as well!
-
Sneak preview: Writing Ruby gem native extensions in Rust
In December 2021, Ian Ker-Seymer (@ianks) submitted a pull request to add a CargoBuilder class for handling Rust code in gems, enabling native extensions in Rust! I was so excited, I had to try it out, even though it hadn’t been merged yet. A lot of maintainers are showing interest and pitching in, so I…