Tag: programming
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Tests are an observability concern
The first thing I do when I encounter a strange code base is run the test suite. I do this because I can get an idea of: I’ve heard a lot about the benefits of test suites, even in the context of articles that are against TDD (test-driven development). For instance: And conversely, the negatives:…
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Implementing the Raft Consensus Algorithm with David Beazley
I survived David Beazley’s weeklong course on the Raft consensus algorithm that powers technologies like Kubernetes, MongoDB, and Neo4j. Image from https://raft.github.io/ The Raft Consensus Algorithm is a way for a gaggle of computers to agree on a sequence of events, or a “log” of events. Raft is useful for things like databases – once…
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A random assortment of Rust notes
I thought I’d jot down some notes about using Rust that wouldn’t have made it as their own blog posts: You can’t use anonymous functions for control flow In Ruby, you can return from almost anywhere in a function: Unfortunately, it also returns nonsense if the inputs break the invariant that an even number exists…
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One of my favorite Rust features (doc comments!)
I realized that one of my favorite Rust features doesn’t have a blog post highlighting it [0], so I thought I’d talk a bit about documentation comments and doc tests in Rust. I’ll give you a quick example. Let’s say you have some code: There’s a cargo command to generate documentation from that code: Which…
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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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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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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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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…
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Ruby has economy-class functions
Ruby has economy-class functions, not first-class functions. And that’s okay! It’s a great language anyway.