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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Recently I came across a delightful article on idiomatic Ruby. I’m not a good Ruby developer by any means, but I realized, that a lot of the patterns are also quite common in Rust. What follows is a side-by-side comparison of idiomatic code in both languages. The Ruby code samples are from the origi… More »

In December 2015 I was looking for static analysis tools to integrate into trivago's CI process. The idea was to detect typical programming mistakes automatically. That's quite a common thing, and there are lots of helpful tools out there which fit the bill. So I looked for a list of tools... More »

October is the perfect time to contribute to Open Source — at least according to Github and DigitalOcean. Because that's when they organize Hacktoberfest, a global event where you get a free shirt and lots of street cred for creating pull requests. More »

What’s the simplest Unix command you know? There’s echo, which prints a string to stdout and true, which always terminates with an exit code of 0. Among the series of simple Unix commands, there’s also yes. If you execute it without arguments, you get an infinite stream of y’s, separated by a newlin… More »