Tag: programming
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Only software engineering can save us from vibe coding.
I saw a “stop learning to code, vibe coding is here now” post and I had to write a response: While it’s true that AI has commoditized the act of stringing characters together into code, it hasn’t commoditized software engineering. In fact, it’s made software engineering more important and more accessible. The difference between coding…
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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…