36 / Why not Rust?

Published on December 19, 2021

Hey everyone, thanks for your feedback on the changes last week, I did some more tweaking this week.

This is the last issue of Tech's Weekly for this year, I'll be back on Jan 2. Happy holidays! 🎅

Tweet of the Week

Omicron presents a tremendous challenge: do you go out and risk getting covid or stay on the internet and risk hearing people talk about NFTs — @jasonschreier

Favourites

How not to learn Rust (dystroy.org)
Denys Séguret has a list of 11 mistakes people do when learning Rust. I definitely did some of them and I wish I had something like this to guide me.
I was stuck on a side project for 5 years. Here’s how I finished it. (cassandraxia.com)
Cassandra Xia tells the story of their "shed", a side project that consumed a big chunk of your life that you no longer enjoys. They also have a few points to watch out for and make "cake" instead.
Web3 is Bullshit (stephendiehl.com)
Stephen Diehl takes a look at the problems of the so-called Web3 including compute, bandwidth and storage:

That anyone could consider this to be the computational backbone to the new global internet is beyond laughable.

Culture

Marketing Is Scary for a Solo Developer (raumet.com)
Rauno Metsa about the importance and impact of marketing for solo developers and the fear of exposure.
The internet (and many large companies) are dependent on software maintained by people in their spare time, for free. This may not be sustainable (andrewducker.dreamwidth.org)
Simon Tatham (the creator of PuTTY) about the relationship between corporations and open-source maintainers and how he deals with this kind of pressure.
'Reverse' Code Review (jacobian.org)
Another post in the Work Sample Tests series by Jacob Kaplan-Moss discusses reverse code review, where the candidate reviews your code and in which cases this approach is useful.
On commercial forks FOSS projects (drewdevault.com)
Drew DeVault about the illegal fork of OBS Studio (which is GPL-licensed) into TikTok streaming software (which is closed-source) and the general relationship of free software and corporations.

Software Engineering

Introduction to WebAssembly components (radu-matei.com)
Radu introduces the recent component proposal for WASM and provides a hands-on example with Rust and C++.
Why Not Rust? (matklad.github.io)
Aleksey Kladov has collected a few reasons to not choose Rust for a project.
Test Your Product on a Crappy Laptop (css-tricks.com)
If you're building consumer software, Eric Bailey argues you should test it on a "craptop" to make sure it's accessible to these devices instead of testing on your high-end dev machine.

Tools

New tool: Mess with DNS! (jvns.ca)
Half introduction, half behind-the-scenes of the new tool by Julia Evans, Mess with DNS, which helps newcomers discover the pitfalls and quirks of DNS resolution and caching.
Introducing Zed—A lightning-fast, collaborative code editor written in Rust. (zed.dev)
A team of people previously working at Atom or Tree-sitter are building a native, efficient code editor with real-time collaboration and I'm hyped.
Announcing Tokio Console 0.1 (tokio.rs)
Eliza Weisman announces the latest Tokio project: A tool to gain insight into the inner workings of async Rust code (think top but for your application). It even detects warnings and possible bugs!
Web3 is going just great (web3isgoinggreat.com)
If you still think the so-called Web3 is a good idea, check out this timeline-of-horrors by Molly White. And if you want a quick laugh, someone already complained that they copied a JPEG.

Cutting Room Floor

My 2021 review (blog.dornea.nu)
Victor Dorneanu reviews the books they read, the habits they developed and the tools they used for productivity.
Holiday Book Recommendations for Engineering Managers, Software Engineers and Product Managers (blog.pragmaticengineer.com)
A list of over 100 books with quotes and recommendations, collected by Gergely Orosz.