I had a great time talking to Drew of filtra.io! We talked what KittyCAD does and why we're all-in on Rust. We also get into my past at Cloudflare and why there's so much Rust there. Check out the piece here.

I had a great time presenting at P99Conf! I watch their talks every year and I always learn a lot. I was really thrilled to present a talk at this year's conference. It's heavily based on my blog post Why use Rust on the backend?. If you missed the talk, you can watch the recording or view the slides here.

KittyCAD's second Rust Club video is up! My [first video][/winnow-basics] covered the Winnow library for parsing text. Today's video shows you a real-world parser example. I'm working on the KittyCAD language (KCL) for designing CAD models, and this reviews the tokenizer and parser I wrote recently.

Apologies for the low video quality, I didn't know we'd be releasing this to YouTube, so it's just using Zoom's "record screen" feature. Starting from episode 5 we used a better-quality recording system.

I work at KittyCAD, and every Monday I teach Rust to my coworkers for an hour. We always record them, so that over time we build up an archive of Rust learning videos. Recently I realized we should put some of them on the internet, because other programmers outside KittyCAD might find them helpful too!

This is our first episode, and it's about building parsers with Winnow, a new fork of Nom. I'm a big fan of Nom, and I've written about it a lot. I've been interested in Winnow since it was announced, so here's an hour-long explanation of how to use Winnow.

Apologies for the low video quality, I didn't know we'd be releasing this to YouTube, so it's just using Zoom's "record screen" feature. Future episodes should have higher video quality!

I got back from Rustconf 2023 last week, and I had a great time! I thought I'd write up my impressions of the conference, for anyone curious about what it's actually like.

I don't pair program very often, but sometimes when you're stuck on a really annoying problem, it can be helpful to have a coworker looking over your shoulder. My new job is fully-remote, so we occasionally screenshare when someone's stuck. One of my favourite things about pair programming is that I get to see the little idiosyncracies of everyone's workflow. For example, you notice which peers use vim for everything, and pick up on all their awesome little keybindings to jump around the document. Or you realize that one peer has installed a bunch of awesome VSCode extensions that you can steal.

Several coworkers have remarked that I use shell aliases way more often than them! For example, I mostly work with rust, so I used alias c="cargo" to tell my shell "when I type c, replace it with cargo". Then I use Cargo's built-in aliases, e.g. cargo check and cargo c are equivalent. So, when I want to run cargo check I just type c c and my shell expands it to cargo c and Cargo expands it to cargo check. My coworkers were very amused by this! I think a suite of nice, easy aliases can really save you time and avoid interrupting your flow state. I'm trying to use more aliases for common tasks, and here's how I've been doing it.

Multipart, or "form-encoded data", is something I see everywhere but never had to actually understand or use myself, because HTTP libraries handled it for me. Recently, though, I had to dive deeper into how multipart works, because it's pretty important at both Cloudflare and my new job at KittyCAD. Used correctly, multipart makes your file uploads faster and use less memory. I'm going to explain how it works, at a high level, so you'll recognize when you could use it to save time and memory in your HTTP servers/clients.

I read and liked Andrew Israel's I love building a startup in Rust. I wouldn't pick it again. It makes a lot of sense! He basically says that his startup prioritizes developer productivity over performance. Sensible choice for a start-up founder to make. If Rust is going to slow your developers down, and you don't need its benefits, then you should definitely consider using a different language.

On the other hand, I've been using Rust as high-level language at Cloudflare for a few years now. By "a high-level language" I mean one where performance doesn't really matter much. I've mostly been using it for API servers, where overall latency doesn't really matter too much. I'd be totally fine using a garbage collected language, or an interpreted language, because I don't need to eke out every last microsecond for blazing fast performance. I just want my server to stay up, do its job, and let me ship features quickly.

So why use Rust for a task like that? Well, although Rust has a reputation for being a low-level systems language, it actually does an admirable job of acting like a high-level language. So here's my list of reasons to consider using Rust, even for a project where performance isn't critical.

Hi all! Allen Wyma of Rustacean Station had me on the podcast to talk about Rust at Cloudflare. We cover why and how Cloudflare started using Rust, how my team specifically works with Rust, and how Cloudflare works. We also go on a big tangent about social security numbers. Give the episode a listen if you'd like.

Say you're running a long-lived program, like a server. Let's say the server needs to read some files from disk, like certificates or keys. Every so often, the certificates change, so your server has to reload them. How do you tell the server to reload those files? The traditional way is to use Unix signals. Your server listens for a particular signal, like SIGUSR1 (user-defined signal #1) or SIGHUP (hangup signal), and can execute whatever code you programmed in when the signal is received. So, your code waits for the appropriate signal, receives it, then reloads the certs.

This approach works fine, but it has some usability problems that came up at work. So, my coworkers have been thinking about better ways to do this. I wanted to blog about one such way, and see if anyone has better ideas.