What Is Rust Doing Behind the Curtains?
Rust allows for a lot of syntactic sugar, that makes it a pleasure to write. It is sometimes hard, however, to look behind the curtain and see what the compiler is really doing with our code. More »
39 articles tagged with dev
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Excel Macros
I never was a big fan of internships, partially because all the exciting companies were far away from my little village in Bavaria and partially because I was too shy to apply. Only once I applied for an internship in Ireland as part of a school program. Our teacher assigned the jobs and so my friend got one at Apple and I ended up at a medium-sized IT distributor — let’s call them PcGo. More »
Switching from a German to a US Keyboard Layout - Is It Worth It?
For the first three decades of my life, I’ve exclusively used a German keyboard layout for programming. In 2018, I finally switched to a US layout. This post summarizes my thoughts around the topic. I was looking for a similar article before jumping the gun, but I couldn’t find one — so I wrote it. … More »
fastcat - A Faster `cat` Implementation Using Splice
Lots of people asked me to write another piece about the internals of well-known Unix commands. Well, actually, nobody asked me, but it makes for a good intro. I'm sure you’ve read the previous parts about `yes` and `ls` — they are epic. More »
That Octocat on the Wall
So I'm in a bit of a sentimental mood lately. Github got acquired by Microsoft. While I think the acquisition was well-deserved, I still wish it didn't happen. Let me explain. More »
Ten Years of Vim
When I opened Vim by accident for the first time, I thought it was broken. My keystrokes changed the screen in unpredictable ways, and I wanted to undo things and quit. Needless to say, it was an unpleasant experience. There was something about it though, that kept me coming back and it became my main editor. Fast forward ten years (!) and I still use Vim. Why is that? More »
Refactoring Go Code to Avoid File I/O in Unit Tests
At work today, I refactored some simple Go code to make it more testable. The idea was to avoid file handling in unit tests without mocking or using temporary files by separating data input/output and data manipulation. More »
A Tiny `ls` Clone Written in Rust
In my series of useless Unix tools rewritten in Rust, today I’m going to be covering one of my all-time favorites: ls. First off, let me say that you probably don’t want to use this code as a replacement for ls on your local machine (although you could!). As we will find out, ls is actually quite a … More »
Rust in 2018
I wrote about the future of Rust before and it seems like nobody stops me from doing it again! Quite the contrary: this time the Rust core team even asked for it. I’m a bit late to the party, but here are my 2 cents about the priorities for Rust in 2018. More »
Functional Programming for Mathematical Computing
Programming languages help us describe general solutions for problems; the result just happens to be executable by machines. Every programming language comes with a different set of strengths and weaknesses, one reason being that its syntax and semantics heavily influence the range of problems which… More »